Leonard A. Lauder, cosmetics heir turned cultural philanthropist, died in New York on June 14 2025 at the age of ninety-two. While he helped expand Estée Lauder into a global beauty brand, collectors and curators will remember him foremost for transforming public art collections through gifts that rank among the most significant of the past century.
Lauder’s defining contribution came in 2013 when he pledged seventy-eight Cubist masterpieces by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris and Fernand Léger to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a trove valued at more than one billion dollars. The Met simultaneously established the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art to study the movement, supported by a twenty-two-million-dollar endowment.
At the Whitney Museum of American Art Lauder was trustee, president and chairman, and in 2008 he made the institution’s largest gift: one hundred thirty-one million dollars and dozens of key works, including paintings by Jasper Johns. When the Renzo Piano building opened in 2015 it was named the Leonard A. Lauder Building in his honor.
His passion for collecting began with a five-cent postcard at age six and grew into an archive of roughly one hundred thirty thousand cards, promised to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. The Leonard A. Lauder Postcard Archive now anchors one of the world’s most comprehensive resources on the medium.
Lauder believed that art should be shared. Many acquisitions came directly from famed private collections, yet he chose to place them in public trust, saying the works “belong to the people who live and work in New York and to those who visit our great arts institutions.” His vision reshaped the narrative of modern art in the city and set a benchmark for philanthropic giving.
He is survived by his wife, photographer Judith Glickman Lauder, his sons William and Gary, five grandchildren, two great-grandsons and his brother Ronald. Museums from Boston to Manhattan will continue to benefit from his eye, his resources and his unwavering commitment to making art accessible.
