To walk through the Met’s current exhibition of early Cubist paintings by Picasso, Braque, Gris and Léger, recently gifted to the museum by cosmetics mogul and avid art collector, Leonard A. Lauder, is to serve as witness to the formation of modernist painting. Everything we think we know about the tumultuous years of early 20th century Paris and its venerable place in art history is there: in the relationships between the great artists of the day; the process of tentative trial and error that made up a ‘movement;’ the radical nature of the work—now casually accepted—and the marginal lives each artist was compelled to live (the ‘starving artist’ stereotype started here) as an outgrowth of their belief in making something new…art that could change the world as they knew it.

Cubism was one of the most influential visual art styles of the early twentieth century. It was literally and factually ‘created’ by Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1881–1973) and Georges Braque (French, 1882–1963) in Paris between 1907 and 1914. The French art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism after seeing the landscapes Braque had painted in 1908 at L’Estaque, in emulation of Cézanne. Vauxcelles called the geometric forms in the highly abstracted works “cubes.”

Right: Georges Braque,’Trees at L’Estaque’ (summer 1908), Oil on canvas, 31 5/8 x 23 11/16”.

Other influences on early Cubism have been linked to Primitivism and non-Western sources. The stylization and distortion of Picasso’s ground-breaking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Museum of Modern Art, New York), painted in 1907, came from African art. Picasso had first seen African art when, in May or June 1907, he visited the ethnographic museum in the Palais du Trocadéro, in Paris.

The Cubist painters rejected the inherited concept that art should copy nature, or that they should adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling, and foreshortening. They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relief-like space. They also used multiple or contrasting vantage points.

More than half of the Lauder Cubist Collection focuses on the six-year period, 1909-14, during which Braque and Picasso—the two founders of the Cubist movement—collaborated closely. Their partnership began in earnest in the fall of 1908, when the visionary dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler exhibited Braque’s most recent paintings in his Paris gallery. Henri Matisse is known to have disparaged Braque’s pictures as “painting made of small cubes;” the term Cubism first appeared in print in Louis Vauxcelles’s review of the Kahnweiler exhibition. The Collection includes two landscapes from this historic show: The Terrace at the Hôtel Mistral (1907), which marks Braque’s transition from Fauvism to Cubism, and the iconic Trees at L’Estaque (1908), which inaugurates Cubism. Curator, Braun notes that, “It created a new form of pictorial space that Braque arrived at from his close study of Cézanne’s landscapes.”

By 1909 Braque and Picasso were inseparable. As Picasso later recounted, “Almost every evening, either I went to Braque’s studio or he came to mine. Each of us HAD to see what the other had done during the day. We criticized each other’s work. A canvas wasn’t finished until both of us felt it was.” A pair of identically sized paintings from 1911 in the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection—Braque’s Still Life with Clarinet (Bottle and Clarinet), 1911, and Picasso’s Pedestal Table, Glasses, Cups, Mandolin (1911), left—exemplify a pivotal moment in the history of Cubism, when the two artists began to picture objects from different points of view in an increasingly shallow space. Only a few clues were retained to help viewers decode the picture, the profile of an instrument or the tassel of a curtain. As the works hovered on the brink of illegibility, Braque and Picasso began to introduce “certainties,” as Braque called them: painted letters and words and, soon after, actual pieces of rope, newspaper, sheet music, and brand labels. They inspired other artists to incorporate all kinds of unorthodox materials into works of art.

The Lauder Cubist Collection contains such landmark paintings as Picasso’s landscape The Oil Mill (1909), which was one of the first Cubist pictures reproduced in Italy. After seeing it in the December 1911 issue of the Florentine journal La Voce, the Italian Futurists were inspired to modernize their style and engage in a rivalry with their French peers. Picasso’s Still Life with Fan“L’Indépendant” (1911), in the Collection, is one of the first works in which he experimented with painted typography, in this case the gothic type masthead of L’Indépendant, the local newspaper of Céret, in the foothills of the Pyrenees.

In Cubist work up to 1910, the subject of a picture was usually discernible. Although figures and objects were dissected or “analyzed” into a multitude of small facets, these were then reassembled, after a fashion, to evoke those same figures or objects. During “high” Analytic Cubism (1910–12), also called “hermetic,” Picasso and Braque so abstracted their works that they were reduced to just a series of overlapping planes and facets mostly in near-monochromatic browns, grays, or blacks. In their work from this period, Picasso and Braque frequently combined representational motifs with letters. Their favorite motifs were still lifes with musical instruments, bottles, pitchers, glasses, newspapers, playing cards, and the human face and figure. Landscapes were rare.

Right: Georges Braque, ‘Fruit Dish and Glass Sorgues,’ (autumn 1912), Charcoal and
cut-and-pasted printed wallpaper with gouache on white laid paper; subsequently
mounted on paperboard, 24 3/4 × 18”.

During the winter of 1912–13, Picasso executed a great number of papiers collés. With this new technique of pasting colored or printed pieces of paper in their compositions, Picasso and Braque swept away the last vestiges of three-dimensional space (illusionism) that still remained in their “high” Analytic work. Whereas, in Analytic Cubism, the small facets of a dissected or “analyzed” object are reassembled to evoke that same object, in the shallow space of Synthetic Cubism—initiated by the papiers collés–large pieces of neutral or colored paper themselves allude to a particular object, either because they are often cut out in the desired shape or else sometimes bear a graphic element that clarifies the association.

Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass (1912), the very first Cubist papier collé (paper collage) ever created, is also in the Collection. It was revolutionary for any art form to incorporate ready-made objects into a finished piece. During the summer of 1912, while vacationing with Picasso in the south of France, Braque saw imitation wood-grain wallpaper in a store window. He waited until Picasso left town before buying the faux bois paper and pasting it into a still-life composition. Braque’s decision to use mechanically printed, illusionistic wallpaper to represent the texture and color of a wooden table marked a turning point in Cubism. Braque later recounted, “After having made the papier collé [Fruit Dish and Glass], I felt a great shock, and it was an even greater shock for Picasso when I showed it to him.”

Left: Pablo Picasso, ‘Nude in an Armchair Horta de Ebro’ (present-day Horta de Sant Joan), summer 1909, Oil on canvas 36 1/4 × 28 ¾”.

Some of the paintings and sculptures in Mr. Lauder’s collection were particularly radical for their time, like Picasso’s Nude in an Armchair, the artist’s 1909 image, in which he translated the female body into his own Cubist language. Picasso’s sculpture Head of a Woman, from 1909, is thought to be the first Cubist sculpture.

Braque and Picasso shared an interest in aviation, which extended to Braque’s nickname, “Wilb[o]urg” (after Wilbur Wright). The most famous example of their aviation puns is Picasso’s The Scallop Shell: “Notre Avenir est dans l’Air” (1912). This oval-shaped painting is simultaneously a representation of a tabletop and a blatantly flat canvas. The still-life elements of the work include a trompe l’oeil rendering of a pamphlet that had been issued by the French government in February 1912, to raise public support for military aviation. Picasso included it as a witty reference to his and Braque’s daring, groundbreaking Cubist enterprise.

Picasso’s synthetic Cubist masterpiece Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair (1913-14) is one of the artist’s most radical and imposing paintings. This provocative and highly eroticized image was hailed by André Breton in his seminal text, Surrealism and Painting (1928). Additionally the Lauder Cubist Collection holds examples of two key Cubist sculptures: a rare cast of Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande), 1909, which introduced the analytic Cubist style into three dimensions, and The Absinthe Glass (1914), which signaled the end of traditionally modeled sculpture. Each of the six casts in the edition was hand-painted by Picasso and includes an actual perforated tin absinthe spoon, thus blurring the boundaries between a multiple and a unique work of art.

Still lifes with flutes, guitars, mandolins, violins, and sheet music are indicative of Braque’s and Picasso’s personal pastimes as well as their enthusiasm for popular vaudeville tunes. Their word play and images combine ribald jokes and erudite references, high and low, as well as allusions to the Cubist movement and commentary on world events. In Violin: “Mozart Kubelick” (1912), for example, Braque indulged in a double entendre by including the name of the famed Czech violinist Jan Kubelik (1880-1940). The first three letters of his name (“KUB”) were those of a common bouillon cube, a foodstuff widely advertised on posters of the period, much to the delight of Braque and Picasso, who appreciated the pun on the word “Cub”ism.

Violin: “Mozart/Kubelick” was one of three pictures by Braque that Kahnweiler sent to the New York Armory Show of 1913, the exhibition that introduced European modernism to the American public. It became one of the most caricatured Cubist images in the American press, which delighted in pointing out that Braque had put the “cube in Kubelik” and also that he had misspelled the maestro’s name.

Legend has it that, a few years earlier, on his way to visit Picasso at the Bateau-Lavoir, the rundown artist complex in Montmartre, Kahnweiler had glanced into the open window of Juan Gris’s studio and asked to see his work. In late 1912, the dealer began representing Gris. Whereas Braque and Picasso exhibited exclusively with Kahnweiler, Gris sent work to the annual Salon displays, bringing wider visibility to the new Cubist style. The Futurist artist, Umberto Boccioni, for example, was directly influenced by Gris’s Head of a Woman (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) after he saw it at the spring 1912, Salon des Indépendants. Gris took the analytic Cubism of Braque and Picasso and made it his own with precisely delineated compositions, flattened planes, and rhythmic surface patterns that prefigure the synthetic Cubism of the war years.

The Lauder Cubist Collection contains six painted collages that Gris created during the first half of 1914. Several of them incorporate wry references to the fictional criminal mastermind Fantômas, the subject of a wildly popular crime series. The shadowy Man at the Café (1914) hides his face behind a newspaper, made up of an actual clipping whose headline pointedly reads: “Bertillonage/ One will no longer be able to fake works of art.” Gris alludes to the criminal identification systems, or Bertillonage, of Alphonse Bertillon, one of the fathers of forensic science, whose methods were featured in the storylines of the Fantômas films. With mock suspense, Gris suggests that, having read about the latest criminal detection methods in the newspaper, the man at the table will escape the authorities once again—as will the Cubist masterminds in their games of visual deception.

In 1913, Kahnweiler added Fernand Léger to his stable of artists. Like Gris, Léger developed Cubism into a distinctive and influential style, in which dynamic intersections of spherical, cylindrical, and cubic forms evoked the new, syncopated rhythms of modern life. The Lauder Cubist Collection features several important works from Léger’s series, Contrasts of Forms, wherein Léger worked out his primary oppositions of light and dark, angled and curved planes, color and line. The complex image of The Tugboat (1918), with the central figure’s body reduced to same geometric elements as the machinery and industrial space around it, captures the dehumanization that Léger had experience first-hand during World War I.

Gris and Picasso, both Spanish citizens, remained in France during the war. Picasso’s political sentiments are evident in the collection’s Playing Cards, Glasses, Bottle of Rum: “Vive la France” (summer 1914; partially reworked 1915). Braque and Léger were among the many French artists who were mobilized to the Front. Léger was injured and after more than a year’s hospitalization he began working on Composition (The Typographer), 1918-19, one of the largest Cubist works ever painted. Its mural-like size anticipates his collaboration in the 1920s with the architect Le Corbusier. Composition (The Typographer), the definitive version of a series of three, reflects the affinity Léger felt toward the anonymous working man and his fascination with the trappings of modern Paris, from advertisements to architecture. Léger drew on his background as an architectural draftsman in celebrating the beauty of machines and in this way led Cubism into a new modernist machine aesthetic.

Right: Fernand Léger, ‘Composition (The Typographer),’ 1918–19, Oil on canvas, 98 1/4 × 72 ¼”.

While Picasso and Braque are credited with creating this new visual language, it was adopted and further developed by many painters, including Fernand Léger, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Juan Gris, Roger de la Fresnaye, Marcel Duchamp, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, and even Diego Rivera. Though primarily associated with painting, Cubism also exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century sculpture and architecture. The major Cubist sculptors were Alexander Archipenko, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and Jacques Lipchitz.

For any student of Modernism, and particularly Cubism, this long-awaited addition to the Met’s collection is welcomed. The Lauder collection, which includes 33 Picassos, 17 Braques, 14 Légers and 14 works by Gris, is valued at more than $1 billion. Experts believe the collection is among the world’s greatest, placing the museum, whose representation of early 20th century art had been sparse, on a level with institutions like MoMA, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Up to now, Cubism has been only sparsely represented at the Met. In fact it only received its first Cubist paintings in 1996. In a 2010 review of an exhibition of the Met’s Picasso collection, critic, Holland Cotter noted in The New York Times, “When the Museum of Modern Art was wolfing down audacious helpings of Cubism, the Met was content with a tasting menu of Blue Period, Rose Period and neo-Classical fare.”

The aesthetic landscape at the Met, so richly endowed in every other category, has been changed, thanks to the Lauder endowment and the newly-renovated Modern and Contemporary galleries, in its main building. Mr. Lauder, 80, noted at the show’s opening that “I liked Cubism’s aesthetic. Forty years ago, when I started collecting, a lot was still available, because nobody really wanted it. It was also relatively inexpensive because the fashion was for Impressionism and post-Impressionism.”

Times have changed.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection:

Edited by Emily Braun and Rebecca Rabinow, this groundbreaking new history of Cubism, based on works from the most significant private collection in the world today, is written by many of the field’s premier art historians and scholars. The collection, recently donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes 80 works by Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Léger and is unsurpassed in the number of masterpieces and iconic pieces deemed critical to the development of Cubism.

Twenty- two essays explore various facets of Cubism from its origins and consider small groupings of works in light of specific themes—such as a study by neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel on Cubism and the science of perception. Also included is a fascinating interview in which Lauder discusses his approach to collecting. This is a work to place beside other great histories of Modernism. It is a comprehensive, copiously illustrated book that offers a greater understanding of Cubism and will stand as a resource on this pioneering style for many years to come.

400 pages, 300 full- color illustrations. 10” x 12”. Hardcover, clothbound. $65.00

purchase at: http://store.metmuseum.org/exhibition-catalogues/cubism-the-leonard-a-lauder-collection/invt/80024577#.VGyyulgtDIU