A front-page Times news article on Leonard Lauder's donation of cubist art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art erroneously reports that Mr. Lauder has purchased or collected cubist works to the exclusion of anything else. The Times makes this inaccurate point twice:
In the New York art scene, which is heavily populated with big-time collectors, Mr. Lauder is a singular figure. While many of his peers have made splashy acquisitions, seduced by the latest trends, he has quietly and steadily built a museum-worthy collection with a single focus, on Cubism….
Mr. Lauder and his younger brother, Ronald S. Lauder, a founder of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, are among the most influential collectors and supporters of art in New York. But while others buy widely, often in multiple periods and styles, Leonard Lauder stands out for his single-minded focus.
"Single-minded focus"?
A dispatch by Judith Dobrzynski in the New Yorker in 2012 reported that Leonard Lauder "collects sports postcards, fashion postcards, war postcards, advertising postcards, celebrity postcards, industrial postcards, and history postcards, mostly lithographs or vintage photographs, by known and unknown artists alike." The same report says that he donated 20,000 postcards by "early-twentieth century Japanese artists" to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and that his office in New York "brimmed with art by Richard Serra, Jeff Koons, Agnes Martin, Joseph Cornell, Beverly Pepper, and Claes Oldenburg."
It might be the Oldenberg "sculpture of a larger-than-life typewriter eraser" that the Times mentioned in a magazine article about Leonard Lauder in 1987 and that was still on display in his office 15 years later.
Anyway, this idea that Leonard Lauder has ignored the latest trends and has had a "single-minded focus" on cubism is inaccurate.