On the Collection of Art: Leonard Lauder & the Collector

“My role is not to posess, it is to conserve.” — Leonard A. Lauder

The Connoisseur: Leonard A. Lauder

It has been just under a month since the hammer fell in Sotheby’s Breuer headquarters, marking the sale of Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16) for $234 million.¹ The piece belonging to Leonard A. Lauder, a cosmetics tycoon and former chief executive of Estee Lauder, broke the record for the most expensive work of modern art ever sold. Alongside the Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, (pictured) one of the Viennese artist’s full-length portrait commissions depicting the daughter of his most influential patron, 24 additional works by Matisse, Munch, and others were put up for sale. The auction came six months after the collector’s death in June.

While Lauder is best known for his work transforming his mother’s company into the multinational behemoth it is today, his real passion lay not in selling lipstick but in collecting Picassos and other masterpieces. Centered in New York City, Lauder’s collection traces the evolution of modern art, from Monet’s Impressionist landscapes to abstract expressionist works by Agnes Martin. However, rather than seeking to acquire them solely for ownership, Lauder made it his mission to develop his collection for the sake of curation and, most importantly, preservation.

During his time as the chairman of the Whitney Museum’s board of trustees, Lauder personally worked on the acquisition of over a thousand individual works out of a collection of just over twenty thousand.² He put a special emphasis on caring for American artists and supporting their work. His commitment to the art industry began when he was only a child. Born and raised in NYC, visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the myriad of other world-class institutions the city has on offer, Lauder was made keenly aware of the value of having the world’s crown jewels on public display. He later demonstrated his gratitude with donations worth hundreds of millions of dollars and by gifting his entire Cubist collection, valued at over a billion dollars, to the MET upon his death. It is his devotion to serving the public through art that made him who he was: one of the foremost collectors, connoisseurs, and devoted philanthropists of his generation.

The Serious Collector

I had the opportunity to visit Lauder’s Cubist collection at the MET earlier this month. The collection, now housed in the museum’s Modern and Contemporary Art department, includes over eighty paintings and spans multiple galleries. Moving from Léger’s perplexing still lifes and landscapes to Delaunay’s “La Tour Simultanée” and Braque’s “Mandolin and Fruit dish,” I considered and explored the role of the collector. Here were dozens of museum-grade paintings, cumulatively worth the equivalent of a mid-sized corporation that had belonged to one man alone. Rather than being kept in museum spaces where the public could appreciate their undeniable beauty, they were hung in living rooms, except when on loan.

And yet, the public owes Lauder for his incessant search. Without his commitment to searching for the best, or in his own words, the works that merit an “oh my god” exclamation, they may not have remained in their pristine conditions or have been conserved for posterity.³ The collector is ultimately the guardian of the pieces he chooses to acquire. In the words of Amor Towles in his short story, The Didomenico Fragment, “the essential role of the serious collector [is] the preservation of cultural heritage.”⁴ Thus, the true collector must be a knowledgeable curator, attuned to the complexities of art history, to be a capable steward of the treasures within their care.

But we must not neglect the personal utility of collecting. At its core, for those in the industry who collect out of genuine interest rather than greed, the process is one of self-discovery and expression. For connoisseurs like Lauder, each acquisition is made out of love for the artist and the distinct perspective that manifests in their creations.⁵ By spending hours every day lounging beside what they deem to be masterpieces, strokes of genius, collectors nourishe their souls. Ownership is a means of protecting the perspective, the unique means of seeing and understanding the world, present in each work, from fate’s injustices.

Conclusion

While marvelling at the exorbitant prices of the pieces from Lauder’s collection sold at auction may be understood by many as a testament to his success as a collector, his donation to the MET is far more representative of what he stood for. Lauder understood, as Robert Lehman before him, that collecting and an appreciation for the arts must be joined by philanthropy. For while “the serious collector dedicates his life to the hunt for works of beauty, especially those that have been forgotten or forsaken,…[after his passing]…he donates the paintings to a museum where…[they] will hang in a carefully controlled environment so that…[they] can be appreciated by lovers of art for generations to come!”⁶

Image Credit: New York Times

1. Sotheby’s, “Historic Night at Sotheby’s Continues as White-Glove Leonard A. Lauder Collection Totals $527.5m,” press release, November 18, 2025, accessed December 14, 2025, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/historic-night-at-sothebys-continues-as-white-glove-leonard-a-lauder-collection-totals-527-5.

2. Sotheby’s, “The Leonard A. Lauder Collection | A Once-in-a-Generation Sale with Klimt, Matisse & More,” video, November 18, 2025, accessed December 14, 2025, https://www.sothebys.com/en/videos/the-leonard-a-lauder-collection-a-once-in-a-generation-sale-with-klimt-matisse-more.

3. ibid

4. Amor Towles, Table for Two (New York: Viking, 2024), 209.

5. Leonard A. Lauder, “Leonard A. Lauder on Collecting,” video, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 14, 2014, accessed December 14, 2025, https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/leonard-lauder-on-collecting.

6. Amor Towles, Table for Two, 209.