It has just been announced that Leonard Lauder, Chairman Emeritus of Estée Lauder, the cosmetics empire, and 80 years old now, is donating his entire private collection of important Cubist works of art – comprising 78 paintings, drawings and sculptures – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a collection which he put together painstakingly over many years and which is likely worth today more than $1 billion.
 
The collection includes 33 works by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, 14 Férnand Legers and 14 works by Juan Gris, and taken as a whole the collection presents the development of Cubism, which took the art world by storm in the early part of the twentieth century.  According to scholars, this private collection is as good as any in existing collections in the best museums in the world anywhere today.
 
The gift of Lauder’s entire collection to the Met was finally approved by its Board on Wednesday, after Lauder held discussions about such a donation over several years with more than one potential recipient.  There are no strings of any kind attached to the collection as to how it may be displayed by curators of the museum, and preparations are now underway for an initial exhibition of these works for the second half of 2014.
 
For a New Yorker aware of what his collection could do to transform one of the city’s most  important, and especially to this writer it must be said one of its stuffiest, museums Mr. Lauder saw the Met as a perfect fit. “Whenever I’ve given something to a museum, I’ve wanted it to be transformative,” Mr. Lauder explained. “This wasn’t a bidding war. I went knocking, and the door opened easily.”