Emily Fisher Landau, contemporary art collector and important Whitney Museum benefactor, has died, aged 102

Emily Fisher Landau, a world-renowned up to date artwork collector, died on 27 March in Palm Seashore, Florida, at age 102. Landau was finest recognized to the general public because the creator of the Fisher Landau Middle for Artwork, a repurposed parachute manufacturing unit in Lengthy Island Metropolis, Queens, which displayed items from her huge assortment of over 1,200 works from 1991 to 2017. A longtime trustee of the Whitney Museum of Artwork in New York, she pledged nearly 400 items valued at almost $75m to the establishment in 2010.

Landau’s origin story as a premier artwork patron started unusually—with a heist. In 1969, burglars disguised as air-conditioner repairmen broke into her dwelling on the Higher East Aspect of Manhattan and stole the gathering of jewelry—together with a 39-carat blue white diamond solitaire—that her husband, actual property developer Martin Fisher, had purchased for her on particular events over time. When the insurance coverage settlement got here her means, Landau had a distinct route in thoughts for the funds. “I made a decision that I didn’t need the jewelry any extra,” she stated in an interview for a Whitney Museum catalogue revealed to accompany a 2011 exhibition of her assortment, and quoted in The New York Instances. “I now had seed cash for a group”.

Accumulating artwork had at all times been an curiosity of Landau’s, who had began sourcing artwork previous to the theft. Regardless of not having any formal artwork historic background, her discerning style and doggedly unbiased method to acquisition set her aside as an aesthete. Her first large artwork buy got here in 1968, when she purchased a three-foot-tall Alexander Calder cell, which she introduced again to her condominium on a crosstown bus and “carried up… like a Christmas tree”, Landau later recalled.

This ardour for Modernism led her to the work of Josef Albers. “Albers was my starting level as a collector,” she stated within the Whitney catalogue interview. “I’ve by no means collected one thing as a result of it was trendy. It was at all times about what I instinctively appreciated.”

Working intently with Tempo Gallery founder Arne Glimcher, Landau and Fisher amassed a trove of artwork by trendy artwork legends together with Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Louise Nevelson and Paul Klee between 1969 and 1976, the yr Fisher died. After taking a hiatus from gathering, Landau met theater designer Invoice Katz, whom she commissioned to redecorate her condominium on Park Avenue in 1980. Katz went on to grow to be her artwork marketing consultant, advising her to look past the extra traditionally inclined assortment she had constructed. With a watch on extra up to date fare, Landau grew to become a daily at artists’ studios within the Nineteen Eighties and 90s.

Landau grew to become a trustee on the Whitney, which named the fourth flooring of its Madison Avenue constructing in her honour in 1994, the yr she established an exhibition endowment for the museum. She additionally sat on committees on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork and on the boards of the SITE Sante Fe museum and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico. The French authorities named her a chevalier within the Order of Arts and Letters as recognition of her arts patronage.

The primary decade of the 2000s was a tough time for Landau. Her son Anthony and his spouse died in a aircraft crash in 2003, the identical yr one in all her grandchildren died in a automobile accident. One other son, Richard, died in 2006, and her third husband, Sheldon Landau, died in 2009.

Landau was born in 1920 in Glens Fall, New York, and grew up within the Washington Heights neighbourhood of Higher Manhattan. Her closing years have been spent in Greenwich, Connecticut, the place she battled Alzheimer’s illness.

“She typifies pre-2000 collectors who made an avocation out of refining their collections,” New York seller Barbara Gladstone informed the Instances. “She was not simply shopping for as a result of it will go up in worth. That’s a splendidly old school custom”.