Emily Fisher Landau’s Life: The Ultimate Art Collector
Emily Fisher Landau was born on August 23rd, 1920 in New York state. Her second husband was Martin Fisher, a real estate developer who used to give Emily jewellery parures for birthdays and anniversaries. On a spring afternoon in 1969, armed burglars disguised as air conditioning repairmen robbed her from all the gifts. In an interview, she said she “was devastated… [but] I decided [she] didn’t want the jewellery anymore.” Thanks to the insurance settlement she received, she now had immediate funds to start her own collection. In another interview, she stated that “what [she] really wanted to buy was paintings, so probably the theft was one of the best things that ever happened to [her].”
The ultimate proof that a discerning eye for art has no need for a degree, Fisher Landau already had purchased a metre-tall Alexander Calder mobile in 1968 – before the heist ever happened. However, her collecting spirit increased significantly in the 1970s, and she credited artist Josef Albers with kickstarting her interest. In just a few years, she purchased works by Matisse, Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Paul Klee. Following the death of her second husband in 1976 she paused the enterprise until the early 1980s, when she met and hired designer Bill Katz to redecorate her Park Avenue apartment. She began redeveloping her collection, with a particular focus on contemporary works, and mingled with the likes of Warhol and Rauschenberg.
By the mid-1980s, Fisher Landau had become a trustee and long term benefactor at the Whitney Museum of American Art – she remained in the position for several decades, and the museum’s fourth floor is now named after her. In May 2010, she made a historic gift to the institution, consisting of 367 by names such as Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, Ruscha and Agnes Martin. Beyond the Whitney, she sat on the board of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Metropolitan Opera and had opened the Fisher Landau Center, which displayed much of her collection between 1991 and 2017.
In her later years, Fisher Landau struggled with Alzheimer’s disease and passed away at the age of 102 on March 27th, 2023.