On February 10, 2021 Pauline Willis, AFA Director and CEO, engaged in an intimate conversation with Leonard A. Lauder and Judy Glickman Lauder on their passion for art, collecting and philanthropy, and their hope for the future of the art world.
Leonard A. Lauder is the chairman emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. and the senior member of its Board of Directors.
Mr. Lauder serves as chairman emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is one of the museum’s most significant benefactors, giving a milestone gift of $131 million in 2008 to the museum’s endowment. In addition, he helped the Whitney acquire 948 works of art, 760 of which he gifted personally; another 188 pieces were brought in with the assistance of acquisition committees and other generous collectors. The Whitney Museum honored Mr. Lauder in 2016 by naming its new downtown home the Leonard A. Lauder Building.
In 2013, Mr. Lauder pledged his collection of 78 Cubist paintings, drawings and sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has since added several major works to that promised gift. In concert with the donation of his Cubist collection, he helped establish the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, the first such center dedicated exclusively to modern art within an encyclopedic museum. The center supports a robust program of fellowships, focused exhibitions, and public lectures.
Mr. Lauder is the co-founder and co-chairman of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation and the honorary chairman of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and is a major supporter of the University of Pennsylvania, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Aspen Institute.
He was named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy in 2014.
Judy Glickman Lauder is an internationally recognized photographer, humanitarian and philanthropist. Her work is held in private collections and public institutions around the world, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the United States Holocaust Museum. She is represented by the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City.
A number of her photographs were recently published by the Aperture Foundation in a book titled Beyond the Shadows: The Holocaust and the Danish Exception (2018). These photographs are also the subject of two traveling exhibitions, Holocaust: The Presence of the Past and Resistance and Rescue: Denmark’s Response to the Holocaust, which have been shown at more than two hundred institutions around the world. Other books include Upon Reflection: Photographs by Judy Ellis Glickman (2012) and Both Sides of the Camera: Photographs from the Collection of Judith Ellis Glickman (2007), as well as a book on the work of her father, For the Love of It: the Photography of Irving Bennett Ellis (2008).
Ms. Glickman Lauder serves on the Board of Trustees of the Portland Museum of Art and is a member of both the Getty Museum Photographic Council and the Photographic Visiting Committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, she is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.
