The 27th Annual Margaret Scolari Barr Lecture in the Fine Arts offered a fascinating account of the many intersections of Picasso’s Cubist works with collaborations between art historian and curator Emily Braun and art collector and philanthropist Leonard Lauder. Braun, Distinguished Professor at Hunter College as well as the Graduate Center at CUNY and Curator of the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, shared her multifaceted and deep insights about one of the most important and influential periods in modern art.

 

In her talk, “Hanging with Picasso,” Braun illuminated the story of her 30-year professional career, being surrounded by Picasso’s Cubist work and fully immersed in studying and decoding every aspect of his iconic masterpieces. As a graduate student in 1987, Braun landed an opportunity to work with Lauder and has since helped build his unsurpassed Cubist collection. And while the physical ownership of the billion-dollar collection resides with Lauder—and eventually with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the future beneficiary of his extraordinary generosity—Braun laid claim to her intellectual ownership of these works. “It is magical to know that I know these pictures better than anyone else can ever know,” Braun noted.

 

Her presentation transported the Spence audience from her childhood home outside Toronto where she first encountered Picasso’s work in Thomas Craven’s A Treasury of Art Masterpieces, to trips to the Art Gallery of Ontario as a teenager and later to Milan where she conducted research on her dissertation on fascist culture. “From Milan to Cubism,” Braun presented a puzzle as she began to bridge what transpired when she received a chance invitation from a fellow art history student to see a special collection in Geneva. There, she caught glimpses of Douglas Cooper’s great Cubist collection warehoused in anticipation of the sale of his estate. This trip brought Braun into the same realm as Lauder, who had seen Cooper’s collection on display in London shortly before the collector’s death and inspired him to build a similarly impressive collection of Cubist artwork. Her knowledge of the Cooper collection gave Braun a leg up in being hired by Lauder. Working side-by-side for three decades, Braun and Lauder researched, identified, sought out, purchased and brought together the most comprehensive collection of works by four “essential Cubists,” a term first coined by Cooper referring to Picasso, Gris, Braque and Léger. Sharing images of Lauder’s library and living room, where some of the collection lives, Braun talked about how thoughtfully they created a dialogue among these masterpieces, “making each piece speak to each other.”

 

Braun also revealed how she pieces together a complete story and history of each work, including studying labels on the back of paintings to find evidence of provenance. Along the way, Braun admitted to learning a whole new way of “seeing and understanding the world that went way beyond the history of the art,” and that her partnership with Lauder taught her the language of “philanthropy and the art of the deal.”