So this week the art world and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s* members are getting a first look at the Leonard Lauder Cubist collection–assembled over the past 40 years. The masterpieces and seminal works he has purchased amount to the best private Cubist collection in existence, by design: Â He always has a museum gift in mind as he collects. When I spoke with him in 2012, he said: “Many people collect to possess. I collect to preserve, and no sooner do I have a collection put together than I am looking for a home for it in a public institution.”
That belies reality, a little–he has told me that it’s long before he starts looking for a museum that he thinks about the coherence and importance of a collection he’s assembling. That quote came from a visit I made to him to discuss his postcard collection, much of which he gave to the MFA-Boston. Â I wrote about it in a short piece for New Yorker.com, which relates–among other things–how he became a collector as a child.
More recently, but before he was giving interviews for the big Cubist reveal, I asked Lauder some questions via email. most of which I’ve  not seen asked or answered elsewhere. Here are his replies.
Which purchase/which painting convinced you to focus on Cubism, why and when was that?Â
The picture that prompted me to focus on Cubism in a big way, and not just as part of a modernist collection, was Picasso’s Scallop Shell (Notre Avenir est dans l’air), which I acquired in 1980. But it is was a few years later, while attending a lecture by Kirk Varnedoe at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, that the importance of this picture for my future collecting really hit me. The slide of it was projected on the screen and Kirk discussed it at length and I learned things about it that inspired me to dig even deeper into Cubism. I had bought it from the Leigh and Mary Block Collection, when it had been partially dispersed and I realized that if I could obtain pictures of this quality I was going to keep them together. As it happens, not that many people were collecting cubism at that time: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism were driving the market.
What was your first purchase of a Cubist work? Does it remain in the collection, or was it sold? Has there been much selling, to refine the collection?
I bought two drawings by Fernand Léger in the early months of 1976: Drawing for the “Staircaseâ€, 1913, and Study for the “Aviateurâ€, 1920. The first was a beautiful gouache and oil on paper, from his famous pre-war “Contrasts of Forms†series and the second, a watercolor in his postwar Purist period style that really grabbed me for its clean lines and precise design. (I have a few Legers from the early 1920s, and think of Purism as the last moment in the original heroic years of Cubism.)
I have sold very few of my Cubist works– I think I can count them on one hand, and only when I wanted to refine the collection, or in another case, because I was feeling financially pressed at the time.
You have two works from the historic first show of Cubism in 1908–when did you get them, and what are the stories behind their purchases? (E.g., were they hard to find, were many other collectors after them? Etc.)
The Terrace of the Hotel Mistral, 1907, was in a fine American private collection for years–the Werner and Margaret Josten collection. It was the dealer Stephen Mazoh who brought it to my attention in 1994. Since I was already known by then as a collector of Cubism, dealers often put me on the list to contact–maybe even the top of the list. This was not a picture that I had identified and chased as was often the case, but one that came to me. As soon as I saw it, I knew what it was: Braque’s last fauve, first proto-Cubist picture, and that it was in the famous show. Trees at L’Estaque, the second picture that I own that was in the historic Kahnweiler show and part of the breakthrough landscapes by Braque of “little cubes†(as the critics called them), came from the Douglas Cooper estate, the majority of which I had purchased in late 1986.
Which work had the place of honor in your apartment–and why?
They are equally honored. But the one that takes up the largest wall area is Léger’s The Typographer, (1918-1919), simply because it is by far the largest in scale, a scale unusual for a Cubist picture.
What will hang in your apartment when the exhibition is up at the Met?
Before I started to collect Cubism, I had started to acquire works by German and Austrian modernists. I still have several painting and drawings from this earlier phase of my collecting and those will take pride of place while the works are on exhibition at the MMA. As you know, I have also bought fabulous modern posters over the years, from the first half of the twentieth century. I also intend to hang some works by my fiancé, Judy Ellis Glickman, who is an acclaimed photographer.
The exhibition, which opens on October 20, presents 81 works of art. You can bet they will be a treat to see.
Photo Credits: Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum
*I consult to a foundation that support the Met