But by now, more than a century on, this art is so synonymous with money that it looks not like thrilling innovation but like a safe investment instead of raising “the question of beauty itself,” these paintings appear as icons of good taste. Of course, the great Cubist paintings were always destined for the halls of the well-to-do-Picasso, Braque, Gris, and finally Léger were all snapped up into exclusive contracts with dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. That is the amount that the Lauder collection is valued at, the hook for headline-writers everywhere touting his donation. How do we see it? For one thing, when we look at it, we see a billion dollars. But it takes real effort-and is maybe even impossible now-to see the work as Apollinaire did. “It has raised the question of beauty itself.” To anyone who’s taken Modern Art 101, the Met’s “Cubism” show will certainly elicit a shiver of pleasurable recognition. “I consider the modern school of painting to be the most daring thing that has ever existed,” the poet-critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who had introduced Braque to Picasso in 1907, wrote with characteristic poet-critic hyperbole in The Cubist Painters. Photo: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. He should really be called a “tubist” instead of a “cubist.”įernand Léger, Drawing for “The Staircase” (1913). Both are on tan paper, both a collection of shimmery cylinders standing in for typical artistic subject matter. His 1913 Drawing for “The Staircase” and Still Life, from the same year, look startlingly similar. The show concludes with a too-abbreviated presentation of the other big name, Fernand Léger, whose signature move was to transform everyone and everything he saw into robot-like cylindrical parts. In works like Houses in Paris, Place Ravignon (1911)-displayed both as a study and as the final version to show how meticulous the placement of the fragmented forms is-Gris’s melodious spin on Picasso/Braque’s wild style looks terrific, though it does not dispel his reputation as Friends to their Seinfeld, the better-looking rip-off, but missing some of the spiky, subversive edge. Next comes Juan Gris, Picasso’s fellow Spanish expat and a former political cartoonist, who gets his own gallery at the Met. Juan Gris, Houses in Paris, Place Ravignan (1911).

Often, these center on references to table games, like dice or chess, as well as musical instruments, suggesting both the hothouse art studio atmosphere that was the context of their work, and what the two painters were doing: playing around, jamming together. This discovery inspired an exchange of exploded still-lifes, the kind of intimate yet adventurous paintings that we think of as quintessentially Cubist. Ultimately, they out-Cézanned Cézanne, carrying the Post-Impressionist master’s laborious analysis of form to the point where form broke apart all-together. In smallish landscapes like Picasso’s The Oil Mill (1909) and Braque’s The Castle of La Roche-Guyon (1909), they come across very much as what they were, lusty young art nerds competing to out-Cézanne one another. Thus, in the opening galleries, you have a cascade of classic early-period Cubism by Picasso and Braque. Photo: © 2014 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Instead, Lauder’s collection focuses on the biggest names, the “Four Horsemen” of the Cubist apocalypse. It was used then to refer to artists like Jean Metzinger and Henri Le Falconnier, as well as Marcel Duchamp and his brother, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, the so-called “Salon Cubists.” This context goes missing from the Met’s “Cubism” blockbuster. In the show’s catalogue, Jack Flam reminds us that the term “cubism” actually came into currency in 1910 to describe a group that specifically did not include the movement’s pioneers, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. (As the heir of Estée Lauder, Leonard is, incidentally, a perfect representative of Thomas Piketty’s theory that we are returning to “patrimonial capitalism.”) Lauder’s obsessive Cubist collection, a trove he pledged to the Met last year as a promised gift. The show, sweeping through six packed, mausoleal galleries, presents some of the best examples of Cubist art that money can buy-and I mean that phrase very literally, since it is in essence a curated inventory of cosmetics mogul Leonard A. Now that this is out of the way, we can move on and ask if there is actually anything left to say about Cubism. First things first: The Metropolitan Museum’s current “Cubism” show is very good.

Cubism artist