Leonard Lauder, billionaire arts philanthropist and chairman emeritus of Estée Lauder Companies, has died aged ninety-two. The eldest son of cosmetics entrepreneurs Estée and Joseph H. Lauder, who cofounded the company in 1946, Leonard oversaw a growth in sales from $800,000 per year when he joined in 1958 to more than $16 billion in 2021. His own fortune was estimated at $15.1 billion by Forbes in 2024.
A prolific art collector and philanthropist of the arts, Lauder maintained longterm relationships with a number of major museums. He donated 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures worth more than $1 billion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013. He later added 12 further Cubist works to the museum’s collection, by artists including Picasso, Léger and Braque, alongside works by postwar and contemporary artists including Alex Katz and Roy Lichtenstein, and photography by figures such as Irving Penn.
Lauder was a trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1977 to 2011, as well as its most important benefactor. In 2008 he gave the institution $131 million towards its endowment, the largest donation in its history. He also purchased numerous work for the museum’s collection, including by Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Wayne Thiebaud and Charles Ray.
Born in 1933 in New York, Lauder was a voracious collector of postcards from a young age, with a keen interest in popular culture. In 2002 he donated 20,000 Japanese postcards to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston after learning that the museum had the largest collection Japanese woodblock prints outside of Japan. In 2010, he donated the museum a further 100,000 postcards dating from the 1870s to the 1940s.
‘Collecting is a journey,’ he told the New York Times at the end of 2024, ‘one that is best navigated by patience and a good eye.’
