You can finally forgive 80-year-old Leonard Lauder for skipping the line to vote in last November's election (bypassing even Martin Scorsese!). The Estée Lauder chairman emeritus plans to donate 78 pieces of cubist art — that's 33 by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, 14 by Juan Gris, and 14 by Fernand Léger — worth a reported $1 billion to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, WWD writes. The collection comprises part of an exhibit that opens fall 2014, and the Met is also setting up the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, which "will be supported by a $22 million endowment funded by grants from museum trustees and supporters, including Lauder," the trade notes. Lauder told WWD he talked to other museums about his collection, but ultimately, "I didn't want it to be a beauty contest and I did not want to pit one against the other." Spoken like a true makeup mogul.
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but is it art?
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