12/24/2023 0 Comments Examples of cubismThe first was the art of Paul Cézanne, with its fractured perspectives and analytical style of observation. Cubism cohered over time, with trial and error, as Picasso and Braque played off of each other’s insights and drew on two sources that, at first, make an unlikely pair. Neither Braque nor Picasso invented cubism on his own, and the movement has no single breakthrough painting. Two-dimensional frankness is almost here. The illusion of three-dimensional space is giving way. The other, painted just a few months later, is of the same village – but now Braque has broken the landscape into sharp, rectangular, brown and tan facets, overlapping in a shallow picture plane rather than receding into the distance. One is a slightly traditional landscape of a village near Marseille, with trees and a building in the distance behind an ornamental balustrade. Once you get past the wall-sized images of Lauder’s living room (I could have done without those), the exhibition opens with two Braques from the very first cubist exhibition, in Paris in 1908. Lauder CollectionĪmong this show’s many virtues, it offers a reminder that Braque was the equal of Picasso, maybe even the better painter, in the years before the first world war. Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair by Pablo Picasso (late 1913). The donation is a milestone in the history of the Met, and a supreme act of philanthropy that is all too uncommon in this second Gilded Age, when a stingy new class of toxic mortgage vendors and smartphone app merchants have proven far less generous than last century’s more civic moguls. Goodness knows there are other rich folks who collect art as a social sport and then flog it as a tax write-off, but Lauder’s collection, which goes on display next week, was always intended to land at a museum. Last year, he gave all 79 paintings – 34 by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, the remainder by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, instantly elevating the museum’s early modern collection to the level of MoMA or the Pompidou. Lauder has spent much of his life assembling an unparalleled collection of works of cubism, the difficult and revolutionary art movement that set the stage for modern and contemporary art. I’m inclined to agree – but I would offer a one-time exemption for cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder, whose numerous billions have been put to rare good use. C apital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty’s magnum opus on inequality, ends with a rousing call to save democracy by confiscating the wealth of the very rich.
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