Reservations required
Members may make reservations beginning at 10 a.m. on the following days:
Chairman’s Forum: Wednesday, November 29
Benefactors Council: Wednesday, December 6
All Four Arts Members: Wednesday, December 13
Tickets ($50) will be available to the public at 10 a.m. on December 27, subject to availability. Additional tickets for guests may be purchased at this time.
Leonard Lauder, in conversation with Emily Braun
“Tales from a Cubist Art Collector”
Thursday, January 4, 2024 at 11 a.m.
**Note special day and time**
In a special Thursday morning edition of the Esther B. O’Keeffe Speakers Series, Four Arts trustee Leonard A. Lauder will discuss his art collecting with his curator, Emily Braun. Mr. Lauder started collecting postcards in elementary school and over the decades built one of the world’s most significant holdings of postcards—numbering close to 150,000–from the 1890s to the 1940s, which he donated to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. In the 1980s, he became fascinated with Cubism, focusing on the four pioneering Cubist artists, Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso. In 2013, he made a promised gift of 78 masterworks by these artists to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As part of this historic and transformative gift and in collaboration with museum trustees, he also established the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at the Met. Mr. Lauder has also long been a major benefactor of the Whitney Museum of American Art and is now Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees. He has donated over 760 works of art to the museum and helped fund the acquisition of an additional 188 works, and in 2008 provided an unprecedented gift to its endowment in advance of its opening of its new building in 2015.
Mr. Lauder serves as Chairman Emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies, the global cosmetics company founded by his parents Estée and Joseph Lauder. He held the position of CEO from 1982-1999, during which time he oversaw the company’s IPO and acquisition of several major cosmetics brands, including MAC, La Mer, Aveda, and others.
Mr. Lauder graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He also studied at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business before serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. He joined The Estée Lauder Companies in 1958. Mr. Lauder is co-founder and chairman of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, chairman of The Aspen Institute International Committee, honorary chair of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and a member of the President’s Council of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital.
Emily Braun is Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. Since 1987 Dr. Braun has curated Mr. Lauder’s collection of Cubist art and in 2014 co-curated Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its catalogue won First Place from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), as well as the Henry Allen Moe Prize, New York Historical Association, for Catalogue of Distinction in the Arts. Dr. Braun was also the curator of Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2015) and co-curator of The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons at The Jewish Museum (2005), among other exhibitions.