The George Lindemann Journal
By JENNIFER MALONEY
Picasso's 'Woman in an Armchair (Eva)'
As curator Emily Braun stepped inside a Zurich vault with billionaire art collector Leonard Lauder, the small painting they had come to see made her giddy with excitement.
Ms. Braun, the private curator of Mr. Lauder's world-class collection of cubist art, was encouraging him to fill a gap in the collection by acquiring "The Oil Mill," a rare landscape by Pablo Picasso painted in a Catalan village in 1909. Passed down through the family of a French collector, it hadn't been seen in public for 70 years.
Standing before it, "we just couldn't contain ourselves," Ms. Braun recalled. Still, the cosmetics magnate wasn't convinced it was the right fit for his collection. Five years later, in 2000, he came around to her thinking and bought it.
Ms. Braun, known by friends and colleagues as "Mimi," has for 26 years been at Mr. Lauder's side, helping him shape a renowned collection of 78 cubist artworks that last month he donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The works, by Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger, are valued at $1 billion.
"We formed, I think, a very, very powerful partnership," Mr. Lauder said. "She and I are joined at the hip."
In addition to serving as steward of Mr. Lauder's cubist collection, a part-time job for which she is on call 24 hours a day, Ms. Braun is an art-history professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has also written books, curated shows and contributed to exhibition catalogs. She is co-curating an exhibition of the Lauder collection planned by the Met next year and guest curating a retrospective of the Italian painter Alberto Burri at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2015.
Friends and colleagues say she moves effortlessly from the scholarly world, where she is known for doggedly tracking down historical details, to the art market, where she keeps tabs on which cubist works are available for sale—and whether they merit Mr. Lauder's consideration. (With Ms. Braun's help, Mr. Lauder will continue to acquire works for the collection even after it goes to the Met.)
"A lot of my job has been saying no before things get to him," said Ms. Braun, 55 years old.
To avoid conflicts of interest, Ms. Braun is paid on retainer by Mr. Lauder, rather than at a percentage of the purchase price of the works she advises on. This is in keeping with the ethical guidelines of the College Art Association. She also discloses her side job each year to the university.
Ms. Braun grew up near Toronto. She studied art history at the University of Toronto and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, where she completed her Ph.D. on the modernist Italian artist Mario Sironi and the politics of art under fascism.
Throughout her studies, she held jobs that kept her connected to the contemporary-art world. In 1984, she was hired as a consultant to commission works by artists including Sol LeWitt and Scott Burton for the public spaces in and around the new headquarters for the Equitable Life Assurance Society, then being developed in midtown Manhattan. She was 27 years old and had a budget of $10 million.
While Ms. Braun was conducting research in Italy, her friend Dorothy Kosinski was working in Switzerland as curator of the collection of the late British art historian and collector Douglas Cooper. Ms. Kosinski, who is now director of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., invited Ms. Braun for a tour of the Cooper collection in Geneva, which included stunning Picassos and Braques stored in crates in a cold warehouse.
Not long after, in January 1987, Ms. Braun met Mr. Lauder for a job interview in New York. She had been recommended by her professor, Kirk Varnedoe, then an adjunct curator at the Museum of Modern Art.
Mr. Lauder explained that he intended to assemble a museum-quality collection of cubist art. "Very desirous of impressing him, I said, 'Oh, I think you should go to this collection that's sitting in a warehouse in Switzerland,' " Ms. Braun recalled. Mr. Lauder grinned and said: "I just bought that."
Mr. Lauder ultimately decides which works to buy. But each addition to his cubist collection has been preceded by in-depth conversations with Ms. Braun, whom Mr. Lauder described as "my partner and teacher and mentor."
While Mr. Lauder evaluates art on aesthetic grounds—looking for works, he said, that "sing to me"—he relies on his curator to weigh in on each work's historical significance, provenance, and physical condition.
Ms. Braun has traveled across the U.S. and Europe to view works that might interest her boss. Well-known as Mr. Lauder's curator, she tries not to tip her hand: When she attends an auction preview, she looks at everything, so as not to drive up bidding on a work he is after.
The first painting from Mr. Lauder's cubist collection was put on display at the Met last month: "Woman in an Armchair (Eva)," painted by Picasso in 1913 or early 1914. Mr. Lauder bought it in 1997 at a Christie's auction for $24.7 million.
Acquisitions are only part of Ms. Braun's job. As the collection's steward, she has overseen conservation efforts, arranged loans to museums and invited scholars to view works at Mr. Lauder's apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
Perhaps most importantly, she has spearheaded research on every work in the collection. A trove of archival materials documenting the life of each painting and drawing—including photographs, catalogs, inventories and articles—will go to the Met along with the collection.
Historical riddles that Ms. Braun is investigating include a painting hiding on the backside of a Léger painting in the collection. At some point, the artist crossed it out with diagonal brush strokes in diluted black paint. Did he ever exhibit that side of the canvas? She is still digging to find the answer.
Write to Jennifer Maloney at jennifer.maloney@wsj.com