04.10.13
In a single move, Leonard Lauder has helped a New York museum become a leader in Cubism. The chairman emeritus of The Estee Lauder Companies will give The Metropolitan Museum of Art his collection of 78 works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, believed to be one of the foremost collections of Cubism in the world.
The Met announced the donation, described as a billion-dollar gift by The New York TImes, after the museum board approved it at a meeting on Tuesday.
In addition, the museum will set up a new research center for modern art, supported by a $22 million endowment funded by grants from museum trustees and supporters, including Lauder.
Met director Thomas Campbell described the gift, one of the most significant ever to the Met, as "truly transformational" for the museum, which is encyclopedic but not as rich in Cubist artworks as, say, the Museum of Modern Art.
"Now, Cubism will be represented with some of its greatest masterpieces, demonstrating both its role as the groundbreaking movement of the 20th century and the foundation for an artistic dialogue that continues today," Campbell said in a statement.
Lauder, 80, explained why he picked the Met.
"I feel that it's essential that Cubism — and the art that follows it, for that matter— be seen and studied within the collections of one of the greatest encyclopedic museums in the world," he said in a statement.
The collection will go on view at an exhibit to open in the fall of 2014, the museum said. Acquired over 37 years, it consists of 33 works by Picasso, 17 by Braque, 14 by Gris and 14 by Leger, all of them the founding artists of Cubism.
Led by Picasso and Braque, Cubism was the most influential art movement of the 20th century, the museum said, sweeping away traditional illusionism in painting, revolutionizing the way people see the world, and paving the way for the pure abstraction that dominated Western art for the next 50 years.
Lauder's family, besides giving the name to a massive cosmetics empire, is renowned for its art collecting and devotion to New York's world-class museums. His younger brother, Ronald Lauder, built the Neue Galerie, a museum devoted to early 20th-century German and Austrian art, on Fifth Avenue. In 2006, he paid a record $135 million for a dazzling 1907 portrait by Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which now has pride of place in the museum.