Buy, Donate, Repeat: At 91, Leonard Lauder Has More to Give

In the 1980s, when major collectors were scooping up paintings by Monet and Matisse, Leonard A. Lauder, the philanthropist and cosmetics heir, was forging his own path with Cubism, collecting Picasso and Braque, its pioneers.

Decades before, rather than amassing hotel postcards to send to friends and family, Lauder began collecting them wherever he went.

And when trustees at places like the Museum of Modern Art were writing checks to build new and bigger buildings, Lauder was intent on growing the endowment of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he is its chairman emeritus.

“Here’s the weird thing about me,’’ he said over lunch in his Manhattan apartment, before a wall of photographs by Irving Penn. “I rarely give money to an institution for their ideas. I create my own.’’

Then he added, “Just as most collectors give a big gift and then it’s over, I never stop.’’

It’s been 11 years since Lauder promised the Metropolitan Museum of Art 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures worth more than $1 billion, a gift that instantly transformed the Met’s Cubist holdings to one that scholars say exceeds such world class institutions as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Yet at 91 his thirst for collecting is as voracious as ever. Since the gift was first announced Lauder, the emeritus chairman of the Estée Lauder Companies — whose fortune was estimated by Forbes this year at $15.1 billion — has quietly added 12 major Cubist works to the Met’s holdings — by artists including Picasso, Léger, Gris and Braque. Beyond these 20th century masters he is also helping the museum shore up its representation of postwar and contemporary artists, with seminal paintings by Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein and Larry Rivers.

On a wintry day, he pointed to a painting by Rivers, the proto-pop artist, on an adjacent wall. (He died in 2002.) “Rivers was not appreciated in his time,” said Lauder, who first fell in love with his work at a show at the Jewish Museum in 1965. “I just bought another Rivers — ‘The Last Civil War Veteran’ (1960) — for the Met because I realized they didn’t have a major work by him.’’

The Met’s photography collection has also benefited from Lauder’s largess, with a growing number of Irving Penn images he is constantly buying, mostly from dealers. Perhaps less known among his holdings is a group of graphically bold and colorful literary posters created in the 19th century by top illustrators to publicize magazines, newspapers and books. In 1984 Lauder donated them to the Met — it was the first entire collection he gave the museum — and since then the number of posters has more than doubled, to some 400 works.

“What museums are known for is not their architecture or their shows but ultimately their collections,’’ Lauder said. But building great collections takes time, patience and determination. Together with Emily Braun, an art history professor at Hunter College who has been Lauder’s curator for 37 years, they know where all the great Cubist works are, keep a keen eye on auctions and art galleries and think nothing of spending years trying to get a coveted painting or drawing. “It keeps me alive,” he said. “I don’t want to stop.”

Sometimes they succeed in their hunt; sometimes they don’t. Collecting, Lauder explains “requires study, travel, perseverance, mistakes, refinement and, of course, buying.’’

(This passion runs in the family. His younger brother, Ronald S. Lauder, a dynamic collector, is a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and a founder of the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side.)

“One work that got away was Léger’s ‘Composition (The Typographer),’” Leonard Lauder recalled in an email. “I first saw it in the mid-1980s in the home of Hester Diamond, who was the widow of the art dealer Harold Diamond.’’ The 1918-19 painting “was magnificent, but so was the price, so I didn’t buy it. In 1969 Hester sold it to Jacques Koerfer,” the German-born former chairman of BMW and collector of modern art.

“I thought that the moment had passed forever,” Lauder mused. “Of course, I heard my mother’s voice in my head, ‘You only regret what you do not buy,’ but it was too late.”

Eight years after Koerfer died in 1990, Christie’s auctioned several paintings from his estate. Because of the large size of the Léger (it measures more than 8 feet by 6 feet), Lauder said, “my sense was that I’d be able to purchase it because collectors of early Modernism are drawn to more modestly scaled works.” He was successful. “However, it was so large,” he recalls, “we had to remove the windows in our living room and have the crate hoisted by crane from the street. Fortunately the weather cooperated.’’ It is now part of his promised gift to the Met.

‘You Have to Make One Big Purchase’

Years before, he applied the same tenacity to transform the Whitney Museum from a provincial New York institution to a world-class museum known for its extraordinary holdings of American art. Lauder became a trustee in 1977, and eventually, its most important benefactor. In 2008, rather than contributing toward the construction of its new home in Manhattan’s meat packing district, he gave the Whitney $131 million toward its endowment, the biggest donation in the institution’s history.

In 1977, he recalled, he persuaded 15 people to donate $5,000 each to buy “Die Fahne Hoch!’’ (“Hold the Flag High’’), an early Black Painting by the young Frank Stella. The owners, Eugene and Barbara Schwartz, prominent collectors, had agreed to give it to the Whitney as a joint gift, if the museum could raise the other half, $75,000. In his 2020 memoir “The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty,’’ Lauder explained that when he finally was able to get the 15 donors together to buy it, the wall label read “like the Manhattan phone book — a very long list of names. It didn’t make us look like we were a heavy hitter in the art world.’’

“That’s when I took Tom Armstrong to lunch,’’ he said, referring to the Whitney’s longtime director, who died in 2011. “And I told him you’re never going to get anywhere doing that. You have to make one big purchase that’s going to make headlines.’’ Eventually Lauder spearheaded a group of trustees to pay for the museum’s 1980 purchase of Jasper Johns’s “Three Flags’’ for $1 million, which at the time was the highest price paid for the work of a living artist. In doing so Lauder created the model for the headline-grabbing donation that would transform the museum world, and the art market.

A triple image of the American flag from 1958, it is now considered a landmark of 20th century art, one that Lauder calls the Whitney’s “Mona Lisa.’’ “That was the road to the future,’’ he mused. Since then he has helped the museum acquire nearly 50 works by Johns: paintings, drawings, sculptures and prints, because, as he explained, “I want the Whitney be the place to see Johns’s work.’’

When the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art were organizing a double Jasper Johns retrospective in 2021, Lauder wrested away from Philadelphia Johns’s “Painted Bronze,’’ two meticulously crafted cans of Ballantine ale placed side by side on a plinth, which had been on loan there for decades. Lauder got Johns, who owned it, to agree to sell it to him as a splashy acquisition for the Whitney.

Lauder also purchased several other Johns works in anticipation of the show, including an untitled painting from 2018, and “False Start 1,’’ a print from 1962.

“I love that Leonard is not only committed to spectacular masterpieces but also to prints and drawings that show an artist’s technical explorations and deep thinking,’’ Scott Rothkopf, director of the Whitney, said, pointing out that Lauder recently contributed the lead gift toward an endowment in honor of Adam Weinberg, the Whitney’s longtime director, who retired on Oct 31.

In the past decade he has also bought the museum dozens of works of art, including seminal sculptures by Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg; paintings by Rauschenberg, and Wayne Thiebaud along with photographs, prints and drawings by artists like Lucas Samaras and Brice Marden. His most recent purchase for the Whitney is a larger-than-life steel sculpture depicting a seated man with a haggard, forlorn stare, by the artist Charles Ray. Titled “Jeff,” it had been included in the museum’s 2022 Biennial and is considered one of the most important examples of Ray’s work.

Lauder enjoys the fact that these gifts — as well as scores of others — have remained under the radar until now. “I sell lipsticks,’’ he said with an impish grin. (And often, when he sees a woman applying lipstick, including this reporter, he will ask if it’s from one of Estée Lauder’s brands.)

These days he refuses to talk money, saying he is “interested in giving museums what they need.’’ Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum, called Lauder “a partner, a visionary and an advocate who has expanded and transformed the horizons of the Met,’’ in large part because “he understands the power of an image and how it can move us all.’’

Still on the Hunt

Images don’t always mean million-dollar artworks. Indeed, Lauder is nearly as passionate about postcards.

“When I was 7 my mother took me to Miami Beach, where she was selling her creams,’’ he said, describing Estée Lauder, a pioneer of the cosmetics industry, who died in 2004 at 97. “I’d go to Collins Avenue and get the hotel postcards and I loved them because they were fantasy: The blue skies were really blue; the beach sand was white, and everyone looked so happy. Also, I could get them for free.”

That was the beginning of a lifetime of collecting postcards. “I’m interested in popular culture and that’s where postcards come in,’’ he explained. “I love that they’re the predecessor for so many things: email, Instagram, social media.’’

In 2002, realizing that the Museum of Fine Arts Boston had the largest and most important collection of Japanese woodblock prints outside of Japan, Lauder gave the institution a collection of some 20,000 Japanese postcards.

“The postcard was in many ways the successor to the woodblock print,’’ explained Benjamin Weiss, the senior curator of visual culture at the M.F.A. “Around 1900, as traditional woodblock prints became unfashionable in Japan, much of the artistic invention that had kept prints at the center of attention over the previous century and a half — and which had captured the imagination of viewers and collectors in Europe and the United States — migrated to the postcard. ”

Eight years later, in 2010, Lauder ended up giving Boston more than 100,000 postcards from the 1870s through just after World War II. “The collection is still growing,’’ Weiss said, especially what is known as Real Photo Postcards, which are cards printed from photographic negatives and capture daily life in early- 20th-century America.

Postcards and photographs share a similar visual aesthetic. Little wonder then that Lauder came to his love of photography. In the 1970s he had already commissioned Irving Penn to photograph ads for Clinique that highlighted either a single product or several meticulously arranged on a shelf. “It’s so important to present products in an engaging way to the people we are trying to reach,’’ he said. The images instantly helped define the Lauder brand. (The composition of Penn’s images has been copied so many times over the years that some on Instagram have called them “shelfies.”)

While Lauder credits Carol Phillips, Clinique’s founder and former chairman, with the idea of asking Penn to create the ads, “That would never have happened were Leonard not so brilliantly attuned to the language of cosmetics and product advertising,’’ said Jeff Rosenheim, the Met’s curator in charge of the department of photographs.

“My love of photography blossomed when I married Judy, a great photographer and a great collector of photography,’’ Lauder said, referring to Judy Glickman, whom he married in 2015.

Braun says that “Leonard is really a historian,” which distinguishes him as a collector. “He’s also a tremendous reader and scholar.’’ In 2013 he and Met trustees established the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, where scholars organize small shows that focus on the work of a particular artist. Its inaugural exhibition — “Birds of a Feather,’’ in 2018 — explored the artist Joseph Cornell’s fascination with Juan Gris’s collage, “The Man at the Café,’’ depicting a mysterious male figure reading a French newspaper, with a black fedora casting an eerie shadow.

In 2021 Lauder ended up giving the collage to the Met. It is the largest example of Gris’s papiers collés, or pasted papers from 1913 and 1914, that are not only rare (he produced 40 over an eight-month period) but considered the highest point of his creativity. The Met now has seven examples of pasted papers, more than any other collection.

But Lauder is still on the prowl for more works by Gris from this period. As recently as 2022, he added “Violin and Engraving” from 1913 to the Met’s collection, which features an old master print collaged onto the canvas. “Collecting is a journey,’’ he said, “one that is best navigated by patience and a good eye.’’