A tale of two brothers—and their museums.
By Norm MacAfee
They can look like department stores, airport terminals, and corporation headquarters — or castles, cloisters, and mansions. Some are treasuries of the past, while others exist at that point, the famous “cutting edge,” where present becomes future. In New York City, more people go to them than to all other arts venues (opera, concerts, ballet, theater) combined; attendance even outstrips that for all the city’s professional sports events. They are museums — the great success story of American culture in the 1990s.
Not so coincidentally, another 1990s phenomenon is the ascendance of two brothers — and fellow Penn alumni — to the chairmanships of major New York museums: Leonard Lauder, W’54, to the Whitney Museum of American Art and Ronald Lauder, W’65, to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
In 1946, their parents founded the Estée Lauder Company, which has since grown into a multi-billion-dollar corporation, purveying perfumes and cosmetics around the world through its Estée Lauder, Clinique, Prescriptives, and Aramis lines. It’s a “museum-quality” company, which means you’ll always find its products at Bloomingdale’s and Neiman Marcus but never at K-Mart or your local discount drugstore. The Rockefeller fortune, from the oil industry, fueled the founding of the Museum of Modern Art. Vanderbilt money from railroads funded the Whitney. But now the Lauder name is replacing Rockefeller and Vanderbilt at the two museums. Oil and railroads versus fragrance and skin-care products. It’s a new world … post-industrial, post-Cold War, postmodern.
It was Leonard Lauder who, as a six-year-old, began the collecting mania that has fed the brothers’ love of art. Leonard’s first passion was postcards of Art Deco hotels in Miami Beach. Today, he and his wife, Evelyn (who is a corporate vice president at Estée Lauder), collect early 20th-century French painting, English dolls’ heads from the 1920s, plaques from a Brooklyn movie palace, and much else. As well as being chairman of the board at the Whitney, he’s president and chief executive officer of Estée Lauder, Inc., and he seems to love his job, selling beauty around the world. In photos from press conferences announcing a new product or ad campaign, he’s invariably smiling, often surrounded by glamorous Estée Lauder models. But, as Aubrey Beardsley is quoted in another context (The Cantos of Ezra Pound, C’05, G’06), “Beauty is difficult,” and heading the company keeps Lauder on a rigid schedule of meetings and travel. Finding time for an interview is almost impossible. He’s in New York for a day and a half. Finally, we talk on the phone.
When I ask what attracted him to contemporary art, he talks not about painting, or sculpture, or the Whitney. “When I was in elementary school I would go to MoMA twice a week to see the old movies … and of course I would see the art there, too. Then, when I went to Penn, I founded a cine-club and ran two film societies to show the old movies. This was before VCRs, videos, Turner Classic Movies, mind you.” Leonard chose Penn “because of Wharton and because Penn was a great school then and it’s even better now.” As for his collecting: “I live a wonderfully schizoid art life. In the office, I have Minimalist and Pop Art, and at home, Cubist works by Picasso and Braque.”
It’s the hottest day of the year when I visit his younger brother, Ronald, in his 42nd-floor offices at Estée Lauder, a few blocks north of MoMA. Out the windows, hazy views of Central Park. On the walls, works by recent German artists — Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke. There’s Anselm Kiefer’s massive Heliogabal, looking like a set for the Immolation Scene in Die Götterdämmerung. It’s one of my favorite contemporary paintings and I’m glad to see it again, a decade after the Kiefer show at MoMA. When I ask Lauder to talk about collecting, he dispenses some advice for beginners: “Buy as many art books as your bookcases or financial position can sustain and just look at the pictures and train your eye to recognize the best of each artist, then determine those artists you really love, and whatever you buy make sure it’s among the artist’s best work.”
Then he reels off his three categories for works of art: “‘Oh,’ ‘Oh my,’ and ‘Oh my God.’ Only buy ‘Oh my God’s.” Last year he had the ultimate “Oh my God” experience when he bought Paul Cézanne’s Still Life, Flowered Curtainand Fruit for $50 million, the second highest price ever for a painting. (Another Penn alumnus, Walter Annenberg, W’31, Hon’66, still holds the record, shelling out $57 million for Vincent Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Cypresses.) Ronald and his wife, Jo Carole (who is active on several MoMA committees), concentrate on collecting Old Master drawings, 20th-century painting and sculpture, and medieval arms and armor.
As well as pictures, Ronald collects chairmanships — of Estée Lauder International and Clinique; Central European Media; the Central European Development Corporation; the Jewish Heritage Council; the Auschwitz-Birkenau Preservation Project; the Sakharov Archives at Brandeis University; MoMA; and the Commission for Art Recovery of the World Jewish Congress. His public persona is more serious than his brother’s. And he’s had a larger public presence than Leonard — notably as Republican candidate for New York City mayor in the 1989 primary against Rudolph Giuliani, and as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Austria in 1986-87. The prestigious Vienna post turned into a nightmare when, a few weeks after Lauder’s arrival, Kurt Waldheim was elected Austrian president, despite evidence that he’d participated in Nazi war crimes. Lauder refused to attend Waldheim’s inauguration, and stayed only a year and a half as ambassador.
The Lauders have donated tens of millions in paintings and money to the Whitney and MoMA and recently gave $1 million to start a $10 million endowment drive at the Bronx High School of Science, their other alma mater and part of the New York City public-school system. “What with all the budget cuts going on in the city,” Leonard said, “we decided to help them so they could invest in some computers.” In the past decade, New York City’s educational system, from kindergarten to the City University of New York, has gone through a series of profound and painful crises. Private gifts like the Lauders’ and public programs like the National Institutes of Health Bridges Program, which sends minority community-college science students to work in labs at four-year colleges, are a big help. As Leonard said at the press conference announcing the gift: “Any time you raise the bar of excellence, it brings everyone else along with it.”
The Lauder family has also been generous in its support of the University — most notably, perhaps, through the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies, to which they have contributed $20 million since establishing it in 1983. Named for Leonard and Ronald’s late father, the institute offers a two-year degree program that integrates an MBA from Wharton with an MA in international studies from the School of Arts and Sciences.
Where did the idea for the program come from? “At Wharton I always wanted to major in international business, but there was no such major,” explains Ronald. “By taking courses at Wharton and some international-relations courses at Penn, I created my own major. The Lauder Institute grew out of my original frustration and a conversation I had with my brother about the need to have a real international business school connected with Wharton.” Leonard calls it “one of the great joint-degree programs, copied by a number of other universities.”
The brothers’ interest in international business has helped them expand the family company worldwide. During the Cold War, Ronald was often in Eastern Europe to open Estée Lauder companies. “I always said to myself that here was a region of enormous potential.” In 1989 he founded the Central European Development Corporation, to help identify investment opportunities there.
If this story is about two brothers, it is also about the art of this century — about modern art, contemporary art, and American art, and how the three intersect. Contemporary art is art created in our time. But defining modern art is a dicier proposition. Some scholars say it’s anything after the Renaissance. But most cite its birth in the late-19th century with the Post-Impressionists Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. With his concentration on the underlying structure of his subjects, Cézanne inspired so many 20th-century painters that he’s often called the Father of Modern Painting. The Museum of Modern Art, which opened in 1929 under founding director Alfred H. Barr, was the first museum to display modern art as a historical movement of unparalleled experimentation, encompassing Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Dada, and, later, Abstract Expressionism.
The story of modern art as told in MoMA’s permanent collection begins appropriately enough with eight oils by Cézanne, but for decades, its centerpiece was Picasso’s greatest masterwork, Guernica, painted in angry response to the 1937 Nazi bombing of the Basque city of Guernica. It hung at MoMA till the 1975 death of the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, when the artist had it sent to Madrid’s Prado. Guernica’s a hard act to follow, but, in its absence, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Max Beckmann’s The Departure, Henri Matisse’s The Dance, and the room devoted to Claude Monet’s giant canvases of Waterlilies fill the need for the big masterpiece.
For daring, however, for the shock of the new, Jackson Pollock’s One (Number 31, 1950) bids fair to replace Guernica. Even its size and color scheme of grays and blacks hark back to the Picasso. That the painter drank to excess and died in a car crash at 44 only adds to the painting’s violent presence. And just as the Pollock in some ways replaced the Picasso, One (Number 31, 1950) represents the moment when the capital of the art world shifted from Paris to New York — the New York School (Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning) supplanting the School of Paris (Picasso, Braque, Matisse).
From 1958 to 1968, Estée Lauder’s offices were across the street from MoMA. When Ronald started working at the family business after Penn, he would visit the museum in his spare moments two or three times a day. When I ask him to name a few favorites at MoMA, he smiles. “I have so many, they’d fill an entire issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette. On each wall in each room, I have them. I walk from room to room and look at them in the same way I meet close friends at a restaurant.” It’s an experience that is multiplied in millions of other lives every year. Walking through a blockbuster museum show, in fact, is one of late-20th-century urban life’s signature communal experiences. The year 1993 saw one of MoMA’s all-time feel-good exhibitions of a major and beloved artist, Henri Matisse, and three years later, hundreds of thousands flocked to the more difficult “Picasso and Portraiture.” Blockbuster shows like these are money in the bank for museums like MoMA and the Whitney.
If modern art began with Cézanne, when does it end? Probably sometime in the 1960s, with Pop Art, or the late 1970s, when people started using the term post modernism. An absolute final cut-off is surely the end of the century. And the Museum of Modern Art is readying itself to focus on contemporary art not rigidly tied to 20th-century modernism. That means buying and showing new art while continuing to display the old, which in turn means finding more space. After MoMA bought an adjacent hotel in 1994, the museum went through several years of public and private self-examination before, in December of last year, choosing Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi to execute a renovation and expansion.
The expansion has had major competition for attention with the completion of what many people consider the great building of this generation, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, an astonishing silver vision in the Basque city of Bilbao. The first thing you have to get over with Taniguchi’s plan is that it is not “Bilbao on 53rd Street.” The two architects had completely different assignments. Gehry started from scratch. Taniguchi was hemmed in by almost intractable midtown Manhattan real estate. In his plan, the hotel next door comes down. The main entrance moves a block north to 54th Street. The old entrance becomes the entry to MoMA’s expanded movie theaters. The Sculpture Garden — one of New York’s premier rendezvous, with its graceful, sheltering weeping beech, Rodin’s Balzac and Picasso goat — gets bigger. A larger education building brings generations of kids to new art. MoMA is reserving its new ground floor for contemporary art, with the higher floors for the permanent collection. Total pricetag: $650 million. Ronald Lauder, who was part of the committee that chose Taniguchi, says: “I have been part of each expansion at MoMA since the 1960s, but none has been greeted like the present one, with its hopes for the future.” Opening date: 2004.
The history of art is, of course, intertwined with larger histories. As I write this, Ronald Lauder and MoMA are embroiled in a modern art saga that knots troubling strands of 20th-century history. It all began last fall, when the museum mounted a major show of the Viennese Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, bringing over 150 artworks from the Leopold Collection in Vienna. Schiele, who died at 30 in the influenza pandemic of 1918, was an emotionally raw artist, and many of his works are sexually explicit. It was a memorable show, but as it was about to close, it got more so. Two Jewish families sued to keep two paintings in New York — charging that the works had originally belonged to them but were stolen during the Third Reich. The Manhattan District Attorney seized the two paintings.
Lauder and Schiele go back a long way, to the beginning of Lauder’s career as a collector. “When I was twelve years old,” he says, “I absolutely fell in love with the work of Egon Schiele. The thrill I first had looking at his work I still feel today.” As he speaks I notice two Schieles on his office walls. Our eyes light up. “When I was 13 or 14, someone told me about a Schiele self-portrait that was for sale for $10,000.” He happened to have that amount from bar mitzvah gifts in his bank account. “I still remember the excitement of making that first purchase. I’m sure my relatives and friends would have been shocked to see how I’d used the money they gave me for my bar mitzvah. But, I’ve never regretted it.” It was a prescient purchase: A similar work recently sold at Sotheby’s for $1.6 million.
Lauder, who now owns more than 20 Schieles, funded half the costs of the MoMA show. As former ambassador to Austria, he knows most of the players in the controversy. And he’s chairman of a commission to help Jewish families reclaim stolen art. He has so many conflicts of interest, in other words, that they pretty much cancel one another out. Though he sees all the sides, he comes down on MoMA’s: The pictures should be returned to Vienna. “If people fear that pictures they lend to a show could be seized, there won’t be any more loan exhibitions.” No more Matisse and Picasso blockbusters, let alone Schiele shows. The Austrians, he believes, should consent to a public discussion about who owns the paintings “with an impartial jury to determine these types of things.” Meanwhile, the two Schieles remain in New York as the case works its way through judicial appeal.
If MoMA’s collection is the brainchild of founding director Alfred Barr, the Whitney’s is much more down home, or downtown. In the early part of the century, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1874-1942), an accomplished sculptor and astronomically rich Vanderbilt, began buying the work of artist friends such as William Glackens and John Sloan, members of what came to be called the Ashcan School, for their vivid portrayal of everyday life in the city. By 1929 she’d amassed a major collection of American art, over 700 pieces, and offered the lot to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which refused it as too modern. Undaunted, Gertrude Whitney bought four adjacent townhouses in Greenwich Village and opened the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931. The museum later moved next to MoMA, then in 1966 further uptown into Marcel Breuer’s modernist top-heavy fortress.
Like MoMA, the Whitney has long needed more space. Begun in 1994, its $300,000 expansion was completed this past April and occupies the entire fifth floor, formerly Whitney office space (which has moved to adjacent buildings). The new floor, called the Leonard & Evelyn Lauder Galleries, holds the first permanent galleries in the Whitney’s history, while the lower floors are devoted to changing exhibitions. The day I was there to see the new galleries, I fell in love with George Luks’s large oil painting of a celebration of the end of World War I, Armistice Night, 1918. The actor Ted Danson was also seeing the galleries for the first time, and we marveled at the Luks. The painting is so filled with merrymakers, we couldn’t figure out the location — City Hall Park? Times Square? When I asked him later, Leonard Lauder had the answer — midway between: Union Square.
The Luks hangs in the first gallery, designed to evoke the original Whitney Museum in Greenwich Village. Eleven more galleries take you through the American century in art, with one each devoted to three quintessential Whitney artists: Georgia O’Keeffe, Alexander Calder, and Edward Hopper. Leonard Lauder’s favorites in the Lauder Galleries? “Charles Demuth’s My Egypt, Charles Scheeler’s Ford Plant, Edward Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning, George Bellows’ Dempsey vs. Firpo, Georgia O’Keefe’s Summer Days and Florine Stettheimer’s Liberty.” Asked about what he’d like to add to the collection, he says, “You can never have enough great art,” and notes that the Whitney needs early-to-mid- career Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein and more abstract expressionist works and late 20th-century photography. “We’re in the process of buying the estate of Ad Reinhardt.”
I’m probably not alone in thinking that Calder’s Circus — a hypnotically delightful toy Big Top with wire acrobats, clowns, and animals — should be moved from the new gallery down to the main lobby, where for decades it set a tone of fun for the rest of the museum. The word fun applies to the Whitney in a way that it can’t to MoMA. Though some critics disparage the museum for poor preparation of shows, I don’t think it deserves the rap. The Whitney’s done many memorable shows — retrospectives on the surreal Ed Kienholz and 1980s art-star Keith Haring; an exhibition about African-American men, “Black Male”; another on the Beat Generation. And every other year, it mounts a museum-wide show representing the best or most cutting-edge American art of the previous two years. Every Whitney Biennial is controversial, mostly because someone will always disagree about the methods of choosing the art — but it’s always exciting to see hundreds of new works in one place, and there’s always gold amid the dross. And only the Whitney does it. A young African American Whitney curator, Thelma Golden, who presented “Black Male,” will curate the Biennial in 2000, which should set the museum moving and shaking into the third millennium.
Leonard was 13 when Estée and Joseph began the family business. Ronald was two. The younger encountered great personal wealth at an earlier age than his brother, and the museums they chair reflect that experience. Leonard has said, in The New York Times, that he loves the Whitney because “it’s everybody’s whipping boy and I love underdogs. And because they need me. If I were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they wouldn’t need me because they have a lot of people. Here, I bring not just my checkbook but ideas and access and a sense of destiny.” He aims to boost yearly attendance from 300,000 to 400,000. Shows like current and upcoming retrospectives on Andrew Wyeth and Mark Rothko should help.
Between the two museums, it’s a half-hour’s walk on Madison or Fifth or a pleasant hour’s stroll through Central Park. When you visit them in one day, you feel how complementary they are, telling the stories of modern art, American art, contemporary art. Like their chairmen, they’re in the same family — one more light-hearted, one more serious.
If you’re in New York City this fall or winter, both museums have blockbuster retrospectives that give a sense of the peaks of American art. From September 17 through November 29, the Whitney surveys the great abstract colorist Mark Rothko. Be prepared for transcendental experiences as you meditate on Rothko’s masses of light. Another show, running September 25 to January 3, takes us to the next generation to rediscover Bob Thompson (1937-1966), who mixed abstract expressionism, Renaissance painting, and African American motifs.
At the Museum of Modern Art, immerse yourself in the work of another master colorist, the French painter and printmaker Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) through October 13. Then, from November 1 to February 2, 1999, MoMA mounts an epochal Jackson Pollock show, the first New York City retrospective since 1967 of the painter whose work, more than any other, made New York the capital of the art world. Plus: All the films of Sergei Eisenstein. Nothing like experiencing his final masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible, on MoMA’s big screen.
Norman MacAfee, C’65, edited Museums New York magazine from 1994 to 1997. The Death of the Forest, an opera that he wrote using the music of Charles Ives, is being produced by the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts for performances in April and October 2000.