As for the relationship between the brothers Lauder, as a longtime family friend (and regular Estée walker in the 1980s), I can attest that it has never been better. Likewise, the assumed alliances of Ronald and MoMA versus Leonard and the Met may be less ironclad than people think. It was interesting to note that Jo Carole, Ronald’s quietly influential wife, was seated to the right of Tom Campbell, with Philippe de Montebello on her other side.

“The Met’s holding all the cards now,” a top auction-house executive told me. “It didn’t use to be that way. Even the Whitney has the buzz, the glamour. Both the Met and the Whitney have exciting expansion projects. MoMA’s expansion is not exciting. I don’t think MoMA is dead in the water, however.” Adds Picasso biographer John Richardson, a V.F. contributing editor, “The Met is upwardly mobile at the moment and it’s doing everything it can to be more modern and more varied in what it has to offer, without vulgarizing things. And MoMA, an institution that I revere, is in a period of going slightly down in everybody’s estimation.” (The Guggenheim doesn’t figure into this competition, because, as one Manhattanite puts it, “they’re expanding in Abu Dhabi.”)

The election of Thomas P. Campbell, then 46, as director and C.E.O. of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by its board of trustees, in September 2008, came as something of a surprise. And few could have expected that the Singapore-born, Oxford-educated tapestry specialist from the museum’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts would so quickly and boldly move into territory long considered the domain of MoMA (and, to a lesser degree, of the Whitney and the Guggenheim). Indeed, in passing over Montebello’s presumed successor, Gary Tinterow, the flashy chief curator of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art, the Met’s search committee (chaired by Annette de la Renta) appeared to be reaffirming the museum’s commitment to its historical permanent collection and its reluctance to get more deeply enmeshed in the hyped-up souk of Koons, Hirst, and Abramović.

Throw MoMA from the Throne

But it soon became clear that the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere and its seemingly unassuming director were on the march, and that MoMA, the world’s greatest modern-art museum, and its anything-but-unassuming director had better watch out. Of course, that is not the way Campbell would put it. “I want to emphasize we’re not trying to take on institutions that are so strong in what they do,” he told me in an interview in his office, where Warhol’s Mona Lisa has pride of place. “The depths of MoMA’s collections, the scholarship … what it brings to the 20th-century narrative is so multi-layered and nuanced. It is the leading institution in the world in that field. We’re not trying to compete. What we can do, what we want to do, is tell the narrative of the 20th century and contemporary art in the context of 5,000 years of art history, and our audience wants to see that here. It’s a different experience to seeing it at the MoMA or seeing it at the Whitney. Ultimately, I think that’s why Leonard made his decision with his gift. He wanted to place Cubism in that longer arc—and his collection probably would have been redundant to MoMA anyway.”

By the time Campbell officially started as director, in January 2009, talks between Montebello and Lauder regarding his Cubist gift had already begun, as had their discussions about the Breuer building. What to do about the Whitney’s 1966 brutalist landmark was a major issue for the museum. Heeding the calls of the museum’s curators for more space to show both the permanent collection and the ever more gigantic works being created by contemporary artists, the Whitney’s board had conditionally committed to purchase a city-owned site downtown, on which it would build a satellite museum. As Carol Vogel reported in the Times, there were rampant rumors that the Whitney would abandon its uptown home altogether. In March 2008, however, Lauder, the board’s chairman, told the Times, “Like so many architecture-lovers, I believe the Whitney and the Breuer building are one.” To make his point clear, he gave the museum a cash gift of $131 million—with the stipulation that the Breuer would not be sold “for the foreseeable future.” Campbell negotiated the arrangements to lease the Breuer with the Whitney board and director Adam Weinberg, not Lauder, apparently to avoid the appearance of a quid pro quo, along the lines of “You get my Picassos and Braques, but you have to take my Breuer too.” “But the Whitney is an institution that’s very dear to Leonard’s heart,” Campbell added. “And I think he was a moving spirit behind the scenes.” In any case, the Met-Whitney agreement, concluded in May 2011, was a win-win for both institutions.