Arnold Zwicky's Blog

(About art rather than language.)

From the NYT on 4/10/13 (and on pretty much every other news outlet), a report of a spectacular gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC: “A Billion-Dollar Gift Gives the Met a New Perspective (Cubist)” by Carol Vogel:

In one of the most significant gifts in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard A. Lauder has promised the institution his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures.

The trove of signature works, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. It puts Mr. Lauder, who for years has been one of the city’s most influential art patrons, in a class with cornerstone contributors to the museum like Michael C. Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Robert Lehman.

(Money figures prominently in these reports. The art market is extraordinarily strange.)

On Cubism, from Vogel’s article:

The term Cubism first appeared in a review of a 1908 exhibition at Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler’s Paris gallery, which featured early Cubist works. What began as a collaboration between Picasso and Braque, Cubism became a pioneering movement that redefined concepts of space and time, high and low. Those artists, along with Fernand Léger and Juan Gris, took shapes that were familiar and turned them upside down, dismantling the traditional perspective.

… Some of the paintings and sculptures in Mr. Lauder’s collection were particularly radical for their time, like Picasso’s “Woman in an Armchair (Eva),” the artist’s 1913-14 image of his mistress Eva Gouel, in which he translated the female body into his own Cubist language.

Femme assise dans un fauteuil (Eva)

Two more from the Lauder collection:

Georges Braque, Le Violon (Mozart/Kubelick) (The Violin [Mozart/Kubelick]), 1912

Fernand Léger, Le fumeur (The Smoker), 1914

The Lauder gift turns the Met from a museum with hardly any Cubist paintings to one with a world-class collection.

This entry was posted on April 12, 2013 at 7:24 am and is filed under Art/lit/music/film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.