By Andrew M. Because the artworks in question, gathered by Lauder and his curator, Emily Braun, over decades of sedulous connoisseurship and indefatigable pursuit, represent the single most important development in the long period we now view as Modern and contemporary art.
To understand the achievements of Cubism, Artspace editor-in-chief Andrew M. Cubism is famous for its difficulty, and the fact that in the early years of its development, Picasso and Braque treated it as a secret, denying its existence to outsiders. What, exactly, was Cubism? In working on this exhibition for the past year and a half, I have constantly been surprised by the wit in these works, the play, the sense of humor that these young artists exhibited in these pictures. But Cubism developed at a time in the early 20th century when people were challenging everything that was accepted about the world around them, about how it looked.
It was completely flattened and rendered from a different perspective. You also had x-rays showing the innards of people and objects. You have to remember that it was a time of political chaos, as the Great War was beginning to loom in the distance. It was a time when people were exploring and pushing boundaries and really questioning everything they had accepted as fact up until then, because everything was about to change.
With Picasso—as you can see from the second room of the show, from —he was very much looking at the Old Masters, and yet he was depicting them in different ways, challenging them. He was paying homage, and yet he was about to blow them up. You mentioned the way photography was providing novel perspectives at the time—how does that relate to the explosion of the pictorial plane?
What makes that the right way of showing something? Kahnweiler sold works to all the early collectors of Cubism, including G. That was also a view shared by the collector Douglas Cooper, and Leonard Lauder has felt that way as well. There were many artists who worked in the Cubist idiom, but his belief is that these were the four artists who were essential, who were instrumental, and who led the way before other artists began working in the same mode.
