Jill Spalding reviews the exhibition Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, on view through February 16, 2015.
Spalding writes: "These are the two giants here, with Picasso, as ever the taller, though Fernand Léger, who anchors the last room with the stunning Composition (The Typographer), 1918-19, is a formidable contender with 15 drawings and paintings that majestically rework Cubism’s formal components into fractured assembly lines. The surprise is Juan Gris. Seeing several of his works shown together (his output was truncated by a short life) brings home the significance of his contribution; the fastidious building up of illusion, the quietude, and most remarkably, the almost erotic use of colour to introduce an element uninteresting to his colleagues – the notion of beauty."
