You can make a major mark on the nation’s cultural institutions if you’re a billionaire beauty mogul with a passion for art. This is one takeaway from the long and active life of Leonard Lauder, who died June 14 at the age of 92 in New York. The eldest son of the cosmetics entrepreneur Estée Lauder, Leonard Lauder was known for both his business acumen and his philanthropy, including hugely influential giving in the arts.
He not only grew the company his parents launched into an industry leader and innovator, but also collected and then bequeathed 78 important cubist paintings, sculptures and drawings valued at $1 billion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. The most significant gift in the history of the Met, it transformed the Met into a leader in early 20th Century art.
As the New York Times reported in 2013, the gift put Lauder “in a class with cornerstone contributors to the museum like Michael C. Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, Henry Osborne Havemeyer and Robert Lehman.” He went on to donate 12 more cubist pieces to the Met.
Lauder served as the president of the Lauder Foundation, which he established in 1987 with his first wife, Evelyn, to “channel their resources and influence to causes they care deeply about.” A low-profile grantmaker, the Lauder Foundation is a major funder of the Aspen Institute and supports arts and culture, democracy, global development, education, Jewish causes and disease research. Lauder also cofounded and led the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation with his brother, Ronald S. Lauder, and with Evelyn, cofounded the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
On Thursday, June 19, his family gathered at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue to honor his life, along with a who’s who of New York and national power players, including U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Ed Markey; Donald, Jonathan and Steven Newhouse; Katie Couric, Jonathan and Lizzie Tisch, Steve Forbes, Estee Lauder leaders and staff, and numerous retail leaders, editors, art collectors, museum directors and more. A common thread throughout the ceremony’s speeches was “how many people Lauder loved and mentored,” reported the New York Post’s Page Six. The outpouring of reverent obituaries and tributes over the past 12 days across traditional and social media around the world highlights his influence and positive reach.
One of the last, great, serious collectors
Before donating art, you have to buy it, of course. As the obituary from the Esteé Lauder company put it, he “believed passionately in the importance of public access to art and museums.” This belief “inspired his philosophy that the primary role of a collector was to conserve, not possess.”
As a collector, Lauder maintained the kind of strategic discipline prized by highly effective philanthropists. Take his gift of cubist works to the Met: When he started collecting, most peers were focused on the more popular impressionism, leaving room for a collector of cubism, a term first used in print in 1908 to describe a visually deconstructive approach sparked by a collaboration between Picasso and Georges Braque. Lauder spent 40 years choosing works by now-renowned cubists including Picasso, Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. He worked with curator and art historian Emily Braun who, over 26 years, helped him find and acquire many of the style’s most significant pieces. Lauder bought work from the collections of the writer Gertrude Stein, the Swiss banker Raoul La Roche and the British art historian Douglas Cooper.
As he said in one of the many interviews he gave over the years, “You can’t put together a good collection unless you are focused, disciplined, tenacious and willing to pay more than you can possibly afford. Early on, I decided this should be formed as a museum collection… whenever I considered buying anything, I would step back and ask myself, does this make the cut?”
From an arts philanthropy perspective, his approach was like that of an “older generation of collectors” who support the “whole art ecosystem,” said Natasha Degen, a writer, critic and professor and chair of art market studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Case in point: his support of the Whitney Museum of American Art, to which he gave millions in money and art, including $131 million in 2008. This was the largest gift in the Whitney’s history and it transformed that museum “from a provincial New York institution to a world-class museum known for its extraordinary holdings of American art,” Carol Vogel wrote in a 2024 profile of Lauder in the New York Times. Lauder served as a trustee and later president and chairman of the museum and helped it grow its endowment and acquire art, including major works by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe and Alex Katz. He also donated works to the museum by other contemporary American artists, including 50 pieces by Jasper Johns. All this for a museum of American art by a man who himself loved European art and chose that for his Fifth Avenue duplex home.
“He was peerless in the sense that his greatest institutional affiliation was so far outside of his primary collecting passion,” the Whitney’s director, Scott Rothkopf, has said.
This “older” style of collecting also includes backing large public institutions rather than building a private museum or collection, and dedicating Lauder’s level of resources in a focused, consistent way. His death leaves a hole in the art market and arts philanthropy.
Lauder appeared on 25 consecutive editions of the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list between 1990 and 2024. Evelyn Lauder died in 2011 after a 52-year marriage. Leonard Lauder remained a widower for three years, then married photographer Judy Glickman. Together with his second wife, he continued donating art, including a $5 million gift to the Portland Museum of Art, one of the “great moments in the museum’s history.” (This very sweet account about how the writer of an article on his engagement to Glickman got the story shows his intense focus on building the beauty business, his desire to use his influence to help those he cared about, and his incisive honesty.)
As art dealer David Nash, who sold Lauder paintings by Braque and Picasso, told Artnet, “Everyone I’ve spoken to noted that he was one of the last great, serious collectors. Inside America, I don’t see people like that.”
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A fortune made in makeup
Estée Lauder started life in the New York borough of Queens as Josephine Esther Mentzer. Her parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe, and according to company literature, she became interested in cosmetics as a girl after an enterprising chemist uncle came to live with the family and started formulating skin creams in the kitchen. (Her parents called her Esty, which became Estée.) She met Joseph Lauter in the 1920s, married him in the 1930s and moved to Manhattan. During the depression, Joseph owned a chain of luncheonettes and a silk business and went on to run other businesses. Esther sold skin cream and makeup.
Estée gave birth to Leonard Alan Lauter in 1933. (The senior Lauters changed their last name soon after.) The Lauders also had a second son, Ronald S. Lauder, who went on to work for the U.S. Department of Defense, serve as ambassador to Austria and founded the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side, near the Met. After divorcing and remarrying, the elder Lauders formed the cosmetics company Esteé Lauder in 1946. Estée handled marketing and promotion and became the face of the company. Within a year of its founding, Estée Lauder had its first major order from Saks Fifth Avenue.
Leonard Lauder went to Bronx High School of Science, graduated from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. He joined the family business in 1958 and went on to spend decades there as a senior executive and marketing expert/corporate strategist. He is credited with business strategies that propelled the company to the top, including selling products only in high-end department stores rather than drugstores or discount places, and expanding internationally.
He also had the idea of developing multiple brands to compete against each other, a strategy he purportedly gleaned from his time in the U.S. Navy, where he noticed that different ships of the same naval squadron protected each other. As the company faced a retail threat from upstart Revlon, Lauder devised a line that would tap the growing focus on skin sensitivity among wealthy makeup buyers. Thus, Clinique was born, the first high-quality, allergy-tested, dermatologist-approved makeup and skincare line. Its branding included saleswomen in white lab coats and computers that could crunch the numbers and deliver a customer’s skin type from among four different ones, another innovation. (For a good, short read about Lauder’s savvy moves in the makeup industry, check out this “case study” on the business blog CommonCog.)
Estée Lauder’s sales hovered around $800,000 a year when Leonard Lauder joined the company. By 1965, it was the fastest-growing beauty company in the country. He became the company’s president in 1972, chief executive from 1982 to 1999, chairman in 1995, and chairman emeritus in 2009, when he retired. Along the way, he helped launch not only Clinique, but also Aramis, Lab Series and Origins. Under him, the company also acquired other beauty brands, including Aveda, Bobbi Brown, Jo Malone London, La Mer, and M∙A∙C. Today, with the family retaining 85% of the voting stock and 38% of the common total, the now-public company — valued at more than $16 billion in 2021 — markets products at different price points under more than 20 brands in 150 countries. Lauder also amassed a personal fortune of about $10.1 billion, making him one of the 100 richest Americans.
In 2011, the Carnegie family of institutions awarded its Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy to the Lauder family for its long-standing commitment to philanthropy and public service. In 2014, the New York Landmarks Conservancy named Lauder as a Living Landmark, and in 2016, the Gordon Parks Foundation gave Lauder and Glickman Lauder its Patron of the Arts Award. He went on to publish a memoir in 2020, “The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty.”
Lauder’s son, William P. Lauder, chair of the board of directors of the Estée Lauder Companies, said in the company’s obituary, “He was the most charitable man I have ever known, believing that art and education belonged to everyone, and championing the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer’s and breast cancer. Above all, my father was a man who practiced kindness with everyone he met.”
