With Leonard Lauder Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art Attempts to Fill a Modern-Art Gap

‘It Is High Time That We Turned Attention to Our 20th-Century Collection’

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The cosmetics executive Leonard Lauder made global headlines last year when he agreed to donate $1 billion of Cubist artwork to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Next Monday, the museum unveils the collection for the first time, as it seeks to raise its profile as an institution for modern and contemporary art.

The collection, considered one of the most important assemblages of Cubism in the world, marks a turning point for the Met that includes new curatorial hires, a planned renovation of its Lila Acheson Wallace Wing and an expansion into the building currently occupied by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Lauder said he decided to donate the collection to the Met because he wanted the gift to be a transformative one.

“It will catapult them into the 21st century,” he said.

Thomas Campbell, the museum’s director, agreed.

“This collection is catalytic,” Mr. Campbell said in an interview. “It will provide the foundation and the introduction in new galleries to our presentation of 20th-century art.”

When Mr. Lauder pledged the gift in April 2013, his collection consisted of 78 works by four artists: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger.

At the time, Mr. Lauder said he would continue to acquire and donate works for the collection.

He has done so: The collection now includes 81 works. The latest additions are a work on paper by Picasso, a still life by Gris and “The Village,” a painting by Léger.

The works fill “an enormous gap” in the Met’s collection, Mr. Campbell said.

Plans for the renovation of the Wallace Wing are still in the early stages, and a budget hasn’t been set. But the goal is to create a more worthy home for the Lauder collection and the museum’s modern and contemporary holdings—an area that other New York institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney, have long focused on.

“Unfortunately, the galleries in which our holdings of 20th-century art are currently displayed are not as well suited to the art as we would ideally like,” Mr. Campbell said. “It is high time that we turned attention to our 20th-century collection.”

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