Lauder’s Vision

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

One day some years ago Ronald Lauder was the subject of a not entirely flattering front page profile in the Wall Street Journal that mentioned, en passant, that he had spent $10,000 of his bar mitzvah money to purchase a drawing by Egon Schiele. This provoked some hilarity around the newspaper office we were in at the time. But a few days later news crossed the wires that an Egon Schiele drawing had just sold for $1.87 million. On a hunch, we phoned the erstwhile ambassador to Austria and asked him whether the drawing he’d bought for $10,000 was the one that had just sold. No, we were told, but it was very similar.

We thought of that story when we read (on the New York Times Web site) Sunday evening that the heir to part of the Estée Lauder fortune has paid $135 million for Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. It may be the greatest amount of money known to have been paid for a single painting. But the bar mitzvah drawing reminds that the last time we heard someone laugh at Mr. Lauder’s preparedness to toss money at art he increased the value of his investment by something like 19,000%. And in the case of the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, the upside will go to the city of New York.

For the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer will be placed this summer in Mr. Lauder’s Neue Galerie at 86th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York’s Museum Mile. The acquisition will be celebrated with an exhibition of five Klimts. Klimt’s work has exercised a significant influence on modern art, not only because of his role in the Vienna Secession movement that brought together the leading lights of Austrian art nouveau around the turn of the twentieth century but also because Klimt was active in fostering the careers of talented young artists he encountered in his career, most notably Egon Schiele, whose works were influenced by Klimt’s.

Yet the bulk of Klimt’s publicly displayed works remain in Austria. Only a handful have been available to ordinary art lovers in America. This painting, not to mention the larger exhibit that will mark its arrival, will be a welcome change, bringing one of the artist’s most important works to a permanent home on a new continent. It won’t be the first time Mr. Lauder has had a big impact on a museum. He was chairman of the Museum of Modern Art. Beyond museums, he has been a leading voice for Holocaust restitution, although his strategic decisions during that period sometimes met with criticism from the editors who conduct these columns. Some works in the Neue Galerie are still clouded by uncertain provenance.

None of this has deterred Mr. Lauder from taking big risks, though the provenance of the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is not now in dispute. Until January, it was to be seen in Austria’s national museum, property of the Austrian government. It came to America earlier this year after a 90-year-old widow in Los Angeles, Maria Altmann, finally won her claim to be the legitimate heir of the owner from whom the Nazis stole the work in the 1930s. We are struck with the fact that the passage of the work and its siblings into private hands has not led to their concealment from public eyes. Ms. Altmann is said to have been adamant that any purchaser agree to display the painting in a museum.

Indeed, news reports of the transaction in the Los Angeles Times note that she is said to have turned down prospective buyers who might have been willing to pay even more than Mr. Lauder but who would not have been willing to commit to putting the work on display. The Austrians still have “The Kiss,” arguably Klimt’s most famous work, in their museum in Vienna. But the working of the private market has resulted, in this case, in the dispersal of other Klimt works to places where new audiences will come in contact with the art. Mr. Lauder is joining the pantheon of such American collectors as Frick, Mellon, the Cone sisters, and Getty, who used their private money to bring great art to the public.

And what a story. Mr. Lauder’s mother, Estee, was raised in Queens and started by selling handmade lotions to a single Manhattan beauty parlor during the Depression. Over the years, Mr. Lauder has applied his money both to art and politics. Serving his country as ambassador to Austria, he startled Europe by boycotting the inauguration of President Waldheim, who had worn a Nazi uniform during World War II. Returning to America, Mr. Lauder ran for mayor in 1989, only to be buried by Rudolph Giuliani. Mr. Lauder dusted himself off and launched a drive for term limits, resulting in a historic sweeping out of the City Council and paving the way for another larger than life figure from the private sector, Michael Bloomberg, to be elected mayor. For all that Mr. Lauder’s greatest impact on the city may turn out to result from the same instinct that led him to plunge $10,000 of his bar mitzvah money on a drawing in which he, way ahead of others, saw the value.


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