Leonard A. Lauder, philanthropist and cosmetics heir, dies at 92

Boston Globe

17-06-2025

In 2013, he pledged the most significant gift in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a trove of nearly 80 cubist paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. Scholars put the value of the gift at $1 billion and said its quality rivaled or surpassed that of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.
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After the gift was announced, he added another dozen major cubist works, The New York Times reported in a profile of Mr. Lauder last year.
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Estée Lauder founded the company that bears her name in 1946 and would become the flamboyant public face of her empire, pitching its lipsticks, bath oils, face powders, and antiwrinkle creams with almost messianic zeal. Leonard Lauder, her eldest son, was the marketing expert and corporate strategist working in her shadow.
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In a business reliant on imagery and mythmaking, his mother, the daughter of a Queens merchant, had created a genteel Hungarian aristocratic past for herself and a name to go with it. Josephine Esther Lauter, the wife of a luncheonette owner, thus became the glamorous Estée Lauder.
Leonard Lauder joined his family's enterprise in 1958 after a formative hitch in the Navy and, colleagues said, was instrumental in devising its profitable strategies: developing multiple brands that effectively competed with one another; concentrating sales in high-end department stores as competitors focused on discount chains and drugstores; and driving expansion to untapped markets in Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
'My dream,' he wrote in his memoir, 'The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty,' published in 2020, 'was to make Estée Lauder the General Motors of the beauty business, with multiple brands, multiple product lines and multinational distribution.'
Estée Lauder's sales, which hovered around $800,000 a year when Mr. Lauder joined the company, soared to more than $16 billion for fiscal 2021, despite the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as he continued as senior member of the board.
The company markets products under some 30 brand names in 150 countries around the world. Shares were publicly sold starting in 1995, but by January 2025 about 85 percent of the voting stock was still owned by members of the Lauder family, along with about 38 percent of the total common stock.
Mr. Lauder became the company's president in 1972, was CEO from 1982 to 1999, and was named chair in 1995 and chair emeritus in 2009, when he retired. Along the way, he launched brands including Clinique, Aramis, Lab Series, and Origins. He also amassed a personal fortune of about $10.1 billion, according to Forbes, making him one of the 100 richest Americans.
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He began a lifelong pursuit of art at the age of 6, when he spent his nickel allowance on a postcard of the Empire State Building. 'I can see that postcard today,' he told The New Yorker in 2012, adding that it turned him into a collector for life. He eventually acquired 125,000 postcards -- not the kind tourists buy, but artistic cards with lithographs and vintage photos depicting celebrities from the worlds of sports and fashion as well as images of war and historical events.
'I'm interested in popular culture and that's where postcards come in,' he told the Times in the 2024 profile. 'I love that they're the predecessor for so many things: email, Instagram, social media.'
In 2002, Mr. Lauder gave the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a collection of some 20,000 Japanese postcards to complement the museum's collection of Japanese woodblock prints, considered the most important outside of Japan.
Eight years later, Mr. Lauder gave the MFA more than 100,000 postcards from the 1870s through just after World War II.
When considering whether to bid on a work of art, he told the Times last year, he heard his mother's voice saying, 'You only regret what you do not buy.'
Mr. Lauder for years quietly assembled a world-class collection with a focus on cubism, the movement that revolutionized modern art early in the 20th century.
He bought many pieces from the collections of writer Gertrude Stein, Swiss banker Raoul La Roche, and British art historian Douglas Cooper. His collection, given without restrictions, filled an artistic gap for the Met and placed Mr. Lauder in a class with cornerstone contributors such as the Rockefellers and Annenbergs.
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A trustee and later president and chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, he gave millions in money and art to the museum, including nearly 50 works by Jasper Johns. In 2008 he gave $131 million, the largest gift in the Whitney's history.
That gift transformed the Whitney 'from a provincial New York institution to a world-class museum known for its extraordinary holdings of American art,' Carol Vogel wrote in the recent Times profile of Mr. Lauder. When the Whitney moved from its Madison Avenue location to its current home in the meatpacking district, it named its new building after him.
Mr. Lauder, in New York in 1996. He would say of his relationship with his mother: 'It was so love-hate. I was her competitor, her senior partner, her manager."
CHESTER HIGGINS JR./NYT
Leonard Alan Lauter was born March 19, 1933, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the older of two sons of Joseph and Josephine Esther (Mentzer) Lauter. (The family name was changed not long after his birth.) His younger brother, Ronald, would serve as ambassador to Austria and run unsuccessfully for mayor of New York.
In the Depression years, his father owned a small chain of luncheonettes and a silk business. During World War II, he and a partner sold military-style post-exchange supplies.
His mother also worked, helping to sell an uncle's homemade face creams and fragrances in the 1930s.
His parents, who were divorced in 1939 but remarried in 1942, founded their company after the war and for years struggled to make it profitable.
After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1950, Leonard Lauder attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and received a bachelor's degree in 1954. He joined the Navy, served on two warships and became a lieutenant junior grade.
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After his discharge, he joined his mother's company. Although publicly deferential to her, he shared decision-making with her. She retired in 1995 and died in 2004 at 97.
'It was so love-hate,' he said of their relationship. 'I was her competitor, her senior partner, her manager. . . . I was able to identify what she did that was really good and build on her early success.'
Mr. Lauder married Evelyn Hausner in 1959, and they had two children: William, who is chair of the board of Estée Lauder Cos., and Gary, managing director of Lauder Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm.
Mr. Lauder, in 2024.
JINGYU LIN/NYT
Mr. Lauder's first wife died in 2011. In 2015, he married photographer Judith Glickman. She survives him, as do his sons, his brother, five grandchildren, two great-grandsons, and many stepchildren and stepgrandchildren. In addition to his home in New York, he had homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and Portland, Maine.
He was a co-founder and chair of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation and, with his first wife, a founder of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
For all his contributions to various causes, Mr. Lauder regarded himself as a frugal man with an eye on the bottom line.
'I use slivers of soap, I reuse paper clips, I use the backside of memos,' he told the Times in 2004. 'You can take the child out of the Depression, but you can't take the Depression out of the child.'
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