The Metropolitan Museum of Art is exhibiting two individual canvases by a couple of Spain’s greatest artists, one a temporary loan, the other piece a prelude of things to come.

Upstairs in the galleries of European Painting hangs Diego Velázquez’s 1638 portrait of Francesco I d’Este, Duke of Modena. Displayed in an otherwise empty gallery and lit with a combination of natural and artificial light, the Duke’s life-sized bust in three-quarter view stares back at museumgoers with a determined gaze softened by tender facial features. The subtly modeled visage is contrasted against a semi-transparent purple sash made of rough, globby strokes that look finger-painted on. Like the turned canvas in Velázquez’s Las Meninas, the Duke wears armor whose faint, dark reflections tell the secret story of the portrait’s creation. The painting of Francesco I d’Este, never before exhibited in the United States, has been loaned to the Met from Modena, Italy’s Galleria Estense, which is closed for repairs after sustaining damage in an earthquake last May.

Downstairs, in the first-floor galleries of the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, the museum has hung Woman in an Armchair (Eva), 1913, by Pablo Picasso. Fittingly, the painting is located in a corridor between the Gelman Galleries’ school-of-Paris modernist collection and the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. The Synthetic Cubist canvas, influenced by African tribal sculpture, is part of a promised gift from Leonard A. Lauder of 78 Cubist works valued at over $1 billion. Like the Jacques and Natasha Gelman collection, deemed by the museum in 2001 as the “most generous and significant gift to the Department of Modern Art,” the Met has called Mr. Lauder’s collection a “transformational” bequest with a number of defining works from a “groundbreaking movement of the 20th century.”

In the Picasso canvas the artist’s mistress Eva Gouel is painted half-nude in warm caramel browns, modeled geometric forms and flat, designed shapes arranged and stacked in the spatially compressed Cubist piece. Posed on a purple tufted armchair, the sitter’s body parts are highly abstracted: Eva’s head reduced to a flat triangle with a ‘t’ drawn in place of facial features, breasts made into torpedo-like forms reminiscent of the bosom in African tribal sculpture and hair simplified into a wavy ornamental shape foretelling Art-Deco design.

More than half of Mr. Lauder’s collection focuses on important early Analytical Cubist innovations by Braque and Picasso. Working in close contact from 1909 to 1914, the formal inventions by these two painters spread like wildfire, giving rise to Futurism, Art Deco, American Precisionism and more. In today’s art market there is perhaps good reason to be wary of the sway some collectors carry; when wealthy collectors serve on museum boards and appoint curators there is clearly room for conflicts of interest if recently acquired contemporary art is legitimized through museum exhibitions, increasing the value of personal holdings. But that is not the case here. With this gift of historically significant works, Mr. Lauder, like his brother Ronald S. Lauder, who opened the Neue Galerie in 2001, joins the ranks of patrons whose largess has greatly improved public access to world-class artwork in New York City.

An exhibition of works from the Lauder Cubist Collection is planned for Fall 2014 and Velázquez’s Portrait of Francesco I d’Este, A Masterpiece from the Galleria Estense, Modena, is on view through July 14, 2013, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 212-570-3951, www.metmuseum.org

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com