Leonard Lauder, 87, is an heir to the Estée Lauder Companies fortune. He been on ARTnews’s annual Top 200 Collectors list since 1990. In 2013, he promised his Cubism collection to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has been a major donor to the Whitney Museum. The following is an an excerpt from his newly published memoir The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty.
I’ve always had the soul of a collector. Ask any collector how it all began, and you’ll hear stories about childhood fascinations ranging from bottle caps to beetles to baseball cards. I was no different. I started early and have been building collections ever since.
I was first bitten by the collecting bug when I was eight years old and attending a boarding school in Miami Beach. My fellow students used to collect and trade postcards of the beautiful Art Deco … Read the rest