Billionaire art collector, philanthropist, and cosmetics magnate Leonard A. Lauder has died at age 92. The son of Joseph and Estée Lauder (born Josephine Esther Mentzer), he helped grow her namesake business, founded in 1946, into a company with global reach for women’s makeup and face creams, while also donating millions to museums and medical research.
That included a gift valued at over $1 billion, featuring 78 works from his Cubist art collection to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, including work by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. Lauder acquired many of these pieces from leading Cubist collectors such as Gertrude Stein, Raoul La Roche, and Douglas Cooper.
At the time of the promised gift’s unveiling, in 2014, the Met called the collection “unsurpassed in its holdings of Cubist art.” (He later expanded the donation to include 12 additional major works, as well as postwar paintings by Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, and Larry Rivers, and also helped found the museum’s Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art.)
The Estée Lauder Companies, where Lauder had worked since 1958—becoming president in 1972, chief executive in 1982, chairman in 1995, and chairman emeritus in 2009—announced his death. (The New York Times published his obituary.) Lauder’s work with the business made him one of the richest men in the U.S., included on last year’s Forbes 400 list of American billionaires.
Juan Gris, Still Life with Checked Tablecloth (1915). Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, Purchase, Leonard A. Lauder Gift, 2014.
That wealth afforded Lauder the opportunity to own some of the world’s most significant masterpieces. And when he hesitated to make a purchase, he told the Times in 2024, he would recall his mother’s advice that “you only regret what you do not buy.”
Lauder made his first purchase at just six, buying a postcard of New York’s Empire State Building that cost just five cents—his allowance at the time. His collection grew to include 130,000 historic postcards featuring lithographs and vintage photographs, most of which are a promised gift to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Family members didn’t always understand Lauder’s obsession with the form. “They considered me odd, but I’ve always been odd,” he told Artnet News correspondent Menachem Wecker in 2022. “I don’t consider that an insult, but a compliment.”
Photographic wallpaper depicting Leonard Lauder’s collection on display from his apartment, installed at a 2014 exhibition of his collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Cubism” exhibition. Photo: courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York was another beneficiary of Lauder’s largess. He made the largest gift in the museum’s history in 2008, with a combination of art and money worth $131 million, including 50 paintings by Jasper Johns. When the museum opened its Meatpacking flagship in 2014, it named the building after him. (Lauder served at various points as a Whitney board member, and its president and chairman.)
Born in on the Upper West Side in 1933, Lauder had a younger brother, Ronald Lauder, who also embraced the arts, founding New York’s Neue Galerie, for early 20th century Austrian and German art and design. Lauder is survived by his brother, his two sons, five grandchildren, two great-grandsons, and his second wife, photographer Judith Glickman. (Lauder’s first wife, Evelyn Hausner, died in 2011.)