LEONARD A. LAUDER

Leonard A. Lauder ran the cosmetics company his parents founded, as its chief executive from 1982 to 1999; that is the only line here about his business. He died in New York on 14 June 2025, at ninety-two. This is about the pictures: the Cubist collection he gave to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Klimt sold in November 2025.

The Collector

He began, in his own account, at seven or eight, with picture postcards of the Art Deco hotels of Miami Beach, and he never stopped; some 120,000 of his postcards are promised to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His first major purchase was a Schwitters collage, at auction, in 1966: “I remember sitting in the salesroom raising my hand and being terrified every step of the way.” In 1976 he made his first two Cubist acquisitions, one of them a Léger watercolour bought at Sotheby’s; in 1980 he bought his first Cubist painting, Picasso’s Carafe and Candlestick of 1909, from the dealer Eugene Thaw.

What made him a collector of Cubism was a lecture. Kirk Varnedoe, lecturing at New York University, put Lauder’s own Picasso, The Scallop Shell, on the screen and explained it. Lauder called that hour “probably the most valuable hour or two of my art-collecting life.” He read the catalogues raisonnés over and over: “If something said ‘private collection’, that meant that someday it might come my way. If it did, I’d be ready for it.”

The chance came after the death in 1984 of Douglas Cooper, the historian and collector of Cubism. In the Geneva Freeport his hosts told him he could have as many as he wanted, and kept telling him to take more. He took eighteen works. From then on, he said, he would “acquire only the best Cubist works and stick to Braque, Picasso, Léger and Gris”, and he understood that it was now his responsibility “to maintain this treasured collection, enlarge it and, ultimately, leave it to a museum.”

The Gift

In April 2013 the Met announced that he had pledged it seventy-eight works by those four painters: thirty-three by Picasso, seventeen by Braque, fourteen each by Gris and Léger. With the gift came a research centre for modern art at the museum, endowed with $22 million from trustees and supporters, Lauder among them. Among the works are Braque’s Trees at L’Estaque of 1908, from the exhibition in Kahnweiler’s gallery that gave Cubism its name, and Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass of 1912, the first papier collé. “This is a gift to the people who live and work in New York,” Lauder said, “and those from around the world who come to visit our great arts institutions.” When Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection opened at the Met in October 2014, it held eighty-one works, curated by Emily Braun, who had looked after the collection since 1987, and Rebecca Rabinow. In 2018 he helped the Met buy Gris’s The Musician’s Table at Christie’s. His company’s account of his life puts his view simply: the role of a collector was “to conserve, not possess.” He was also a trustee of the Whitney for more than thirty years, and its chairman.

The Klimt

He did not collect Cubism alone. In 1985 he bought Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, painted between 1914 and 1916 for her parents, Klimt’s patrons, and lent it now and then, to the Belvedere in Vienna and the Neue Galerie in New York. After his death Sotheby’s offered his collection in a single evening sale of twenty-four lots on 18 November 2025, the sale that launched its new headquarters in the Breuer building on Madison Avenue. The Almanac’s entry for the Autumn Auctions records what followed: the Klimt opened at $130 million and sold after twenty minutes for $236.4 million, the highest price paid for a work of modern art at auction.

The Season

The Autumn Auctions are built around their single-owner sales. It is the end of a collector’s life that the season usually sees: a last public view of ten days, and then the pictures go to other houses. His Cubist pictures show the other ending: a collection assembled with a museum in mind and kept together for it, on view for good at the Met on Fifth Avenue.