Emily Fisher Landau, a New Yorker who used a Lloyd’s insurance coverage settlement from a spectacular jewel heist in her residence to fund what would develop into certainly one of America’s premier collections of latest artwork, died on March 27 in Palm Seashore, Fla. She was 102.
Her demise was confirmed by her daughter, Candia Fisher.
From 1991 to 2017, Ms. Landau opened her assortment of 1,200 artworks to the general public within the Fisher Landau Middle for Artwork, a repurposed former manufacturing unit in Lengthy Island Metropolis, Queens. In 2010, she pledged virtually 400 works, then value between $50 million and $75 million, to the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, the place she had lengthy been a trustee.
Ms. Landau’s trajectory into the artwork world started unexpectedly on a spring afternoon in 1969, whereas she was out at lunch. Armed burglars disguised as air-con repairmen broke into her residence within the Imperial Home constructing on the Higher East Facet, sure the prepare dinner in a visitor closet and opened a ground secure hidden inside one other closet.
For birthdays, anniversaries and holidays through the years, her husband, Martin Fisher, an actual property developer, had given her parures — matched necklace, earring, ring and bracelet units holding emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds — together with a 39-carat blue white diamond solitaire. All have been stored within the secure.
“I used to be devastated,” Ms. Landau mentioned of the heist in interviews carried out for a Whitney catalog, “Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Assortment.” However, she added, “I made a decision that I didn’t need the jewellery any extra. I now had seed cash for a group,” because of the insurance coverage settlement.
“What I actually wished to purchase was work,” she mentioned, “so in all probability the theft was among the finest issues that ever occurred to me.” (The scene of the crime, Imperial Home, on East 69th Road between Lexington and Third Avenues, had been constructed by her husband’s firm, Fisher Brothers.)
Ms. Landau had aspired to develop into an artist earlier than her father, additionally a developer, despatched her to secretarial college. Later, with out ever having taken an artwork historical past class, she began amassing informally. Earlier than the jewellery theft, her first main piece was a three-and-a-half foot tall Calder cell, which she purchased in 1968 from its proprietor on Central Park West.
“I didn’t have a automobile and driver in these days, and so I got here again on the crosstown bus on West 86th Road and stood up and carried the Calder like a Christmas tree,” she mentioned. “No person requested me something.”
Ms. Landau quickly found the work of Josef Albers when, strolling alongside East 57th Road, she came upon a poster in a window for a present on the Tempo Gallery. “It startled my eye — so minimal,” she mentioned. “From the second I noticed that Albers, I knew I beloved simplicity. Albers was my starting level as a collector. I’ve by no means collected one thing as a result of it was modern. It was at all times about what I instinctively preferred.”
Her curiosity led her upstairs to Tempo and what turned out to be an extended relationship with the gallery and its proprietor, Arne Glimcher. “Initially I purchased artwork with my husband,” she mentioned. Their first massive acquisition was a trio of work — by Picasso, Dubuffet and Léger — that Mr. Glimcher had proven her, all leaning in opposition to a wall in his workplace. “Later I’d purchase alone,” she mentioned.
Her trajectory as a collector modified and accelerated after the 1969 theft. She went on to purchase works by Matisse, Mondrian, Jean Arp, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Paul Klee, Louise Nevelson and Lucas Samaras. “I spent all the cash on artwork,” she mentioned. “These have been purchase years.”
Tempo, together with the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan, remained a significant supply for her rising assortment, however Mr. Glimcher’s gallery associate, Fred Mueller, proved a task mannequin for integrating artwork, artists and a New York social life. She remembers a celebration in his spare Gracie Sq. residence the place Ms. Nevelson, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol circulated amongst their very own artworks with different visitors. “His instance really gave me the impetus to gather in depth,” Ms. Landau mentioned.
However then her husband died, in 1976. “After that there was a giant hole within the assortment,” she mentioned. “I finished.”
In about 1980, Ms. Landau met and employed the New York theater and restaurant designer Invoice Katz to redecorate her residence on Park Avenue, the place she had since moved. The fee morphed right into a long-term relationship through which Mr. Katz, additionally an artwork advisor, suggested her on amassing past the core modernists she already had.
“‘Emily, if you wish to have a look at youthful individuals’s work, it could change their lives, and be an attention-grabbing expertise for you,’” she recalled him telling her.
On studio visits in New York’s heated artwork world of the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, Ms. Landau centered on up to date works, typically shopping for the entire room, as she did with a Rodney Graham present.
“She had the temperament to maneuver ahead with the zeitgeist,” mentioned the New York artwork adviser Amy Cappellazzo. “She grew to become nicely often called a significant collector, and I believe her tastes inspired that second by the ’80s and ’90s. Others adopted.”
By the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Ms. Landau had develop into a trustee on the Whitney, the place she sat on a succession of boards for almost 25 years. The fourth ground of the museum, then positioned on Madison Avenue on the Higher East Facet, was named in her honor in 1994, the yr she established an endowment for the Whitney Biennial exhibitions.
“She in all probability has been one of the crucial vital trustees in Whitney historical past,” mentioned Leonard Lauder, chairman emeritus of the museum.
By the mid-Nineteen Eighties, with the artwork market swelling in New York and museums increasing throughout the nation, Ms. Landau occupied an more and more distinguished place inside New York’s artwork ecosystem, supporting artists personally and museums institutionally.
Past the Whitney, she sat on committees on the Museum of Trendy Artwork and on the boards of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and SITE Santa Fe museum, each in New Mexico. For her help of its cultural establishments, the French authorities inducted her into the Order of Arts and Letters as a chevalier.
Outdoors the artwork world, she established the Fisher Landau Basis for analysis on dyslexia and help to dyslexic youngsters — she herself was dyslexic — and the Fisher Landau Middle for the Remedy of Studying Disabilities for youngsters, adolescents and adults on the Albert Einstein Faculty of Drugs within the Bronx. She additionally had a seat on the board of the Metropolitan Opera.
Within the late Nineteen Eighties, Ms. Landau discovered a 25,000-square-foot former parachute-harness manufacturing unit in Lengthy Island Metropolis to accommodate her assortment — a non-public museum that might be open to the general public at no cost. Max Gordon, a minimalist London architect contemporary from his conversion of a paint manufacturing unit into the Saatchi Assortment in London, remodeled the Queens plant, a three-story concrete construction, into the Fisher Landau Middle for Artwork.
“Together with her personal museum, she was a fantastic instance of the premier collectors in historical past who acquire not only for themselves however for posterity,” Mr. Lauder mentioned. “She was shopping for extra for tomorrow than at this time.”
Emily Lanzner was born on Aug. 23, 1920, in Glens Falls, N.Y., close to Lake George, and grew up within the Washington Heights part of Manhattan, residing in Emily Courtroom, a constructing her father, Samuel Lanzner, developed and owned, naming it after his daughter. Her mom, Cecilia Lanzner, was a homemaker.
After a quick marriage, she met and later married Mr. Fisher, on the time the younger landlord of an residence through which she was residing in Forest Hills, Queens. She had three youngsters with him, Richard, Anthony and Candia. In 1978, after Mr. Fisher’s demise, she married Sheldon Landau, a retired clothes producer. Her son Anthony and his spouse, Anne, died in a aircraft crash in 2003. That very same yr, her grandson Andrew died in an vehicle accident. Richard, her older son, died in 2006. Mr. Landau died in 2009.
Along with her daughter, Ms. Landau is survived by 9 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren.
With the succession of tragedies in her speedy household — all coinciding with altering markets within the artwork world within the 2000s — Ms. Landau’s curiosity in amassing diminished.
“From about 2004 to 2008, a whole lot of hedge fund individuals speculated,” the New York gallerist Barbara Gladstone mentioned. “They have been a unique breed, and Emily was blissful to step apart. She typifies pre-2000 collectors who made an avocation out of refining their collections. She was not simply shopping for as a result of it could go up in worth. That’s a splendidly old style custom.”
Ms. Landau’s Middle for Artwork remained open to the general public till 2017. In her final years, she struggled with Alzheimer’s illness and lived primarily in Greenwich, Conn.
“Every time she noticed a lady carrying costly jewellery,” her daughter, Candia Fisher, mentioned, “she used to say, ‘That may very well be artwork on the partitions.’”
