NEW YORK, NY.- A masterpiece by Picasso from the renowned Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection is now on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. This display of Picasso’s Woman in an Armchair (Eva) from 1913 provides a special opportunity to view one of the masterworks from the collection at the Met. The work is on view in the first-floor galleries of the Museum’s Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for modern and contemporary art for at least the next three months.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum, announced on Tuesday, April 9, that Mr. Lauder has committed to give the Museum his collection of 78 works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger, which stands as one of the foremost collections of Cubism in the world. The collection, distinguished by its quality, focus, and depth, includes 33 works by Picasso, 17 by Braque, 14 by Gris, and 14 by Léger. It is unsurpassed in the number of masterpieces and iconic works critical to the development of Cubism. Mr. Campbell concurrently announced that, in coordination with the gift, the Metropolitan Museum is establishing a new research center for modern art at the Metropolitan,supported by a $22-million endowment funded by grants from Museum trustees and supporters, including Mr. Lauder.

Cubism was the most influential art movement of the 20th century: it radically destroyed traditional illusionism in painting, revolutionized the way we see the world (as Juan Gris said), and paved the way for the pure abstraction that dominated Western art for the next 50 years. Led by Picasso and Braque, the Cubists dismantled traditional perspective and modeling in the round in order to emphasize the two-dimensional picture plane. Cubist collage introduced fragments of mass-produced popular culture into pictures, thereby changing the very definition of art.

Picasso’s synthetic Cubist masterpiece Woman in an Armchair (Eva) (1913) is one of the artist’s most radical and imposing paintings. This provocative and highly eroticized image of Picasso’s mistress Eva Gouel was hailed by André Breton in his seminal text Surrealism and Painting (1928).