The Lauder Brothers Are a Throwback to World Class Art Collectors like Frick, Mellon, Morgan, Lehman and Annenberg

Let us celebrate the business and cultural achievements of Leonard and Ronald Lauder. They took over the successful perfume business begun by their extraordinarily perspicacious mother Estee Lauder and built it into a global empire that made Revlon look like a scruffy second rate operation. All along both billionaire brothers used their fortunes to acquire amazingly disciplined collections of the objects their love and "eye" made possible. Last week we celebrated the gift by Leonard Lauder to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York of priceless Cubist paintings and sculptures by Picasso, Braque and others. A coup for the Met which has a multitude of Old Masters from Robert Lehman and magnificent paintings from the sugar trust baron Henry Havemeyer, just to name two of the collections drawn to America's most famous and visited museum. By comparison Ronald Lauder, who was at one time Ambassador to Austria, has located his quite amazing collection of German Expressionists and unusually exotic paintings by Gustav Klimt and others in the Austrian School that are on display at the Neue Gallery-- owned by Lauder himself-- and only a few blocks north of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue. In 2006 Ronald Lauder spent $135 million-- at that moment perhaps the highest amount ever paid for a single painting fort what he calls "our Mona Lisa," a magical portrait of a wealthy Viennese beauty, Adele Bloch-Bauer by Klimt. The Lauder brothers' collections may not have the breadth of collections made in earlier times at lesser prices when there were fewer super-wealthy patrons of the arts such as J.P. Morgan,(he built his own museum), Frick, who put his glorious Renaissance and English portraits in his own elegant townhouse on Fifth Avenue, or industrialist Norton Simon, who built his own museum in southern California-- or J.Paul Getty, whose mediocre paintings were overshadowed by Roman and Greek sculpture and 18th century French furniture, purchased on the cheap. You can't buy that many masterpieces anymore without paying staggering prices for them-- as there are so many more multi-billionaires who must have their own art collection to appear cultured and civilized. One hears of Cezannes in Swiss collections going for as much as $250 million. Private equity entrepreneur Leon Black paid well over $100 million for a Charles Munch "Cry" and is reputed to have paid nearly $50 million for a drawing by Raphael, the Renaissance master. To own hugely expensive art also makes you a celebrity. I'm thinking of the much embattled Greenwich hedge fund king, Steven Cohen, who is on the edge of an investigation into "insider trading" without being charged yet of any crime. Cohen just acquired a magnificent Picasso for the record price of $155 million. So, you can understand just how difficult it is going to be for would-be Walter Annenbergs (whose collection is split between the Met and the Philadelphia Art Museum) to again master a broad range of art from several different periods, ranging from Old Masters like Rembrandt to Impressionist painters like Cezanne, Manet, Monet and Van Gogh-- and then to the moderns like American painters such as John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, and the Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, whose prices have also skyrocketed as the newly wealthy, real estate tycoons and hedge fund billionaires all flex their wallets in the auction rooms of Sotheby's and Christies.

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