Emily Fisher Landau, world renowned contemporary art collector, deceased on March 27 in Palm Beach, Florida at the age of 102. Landau was best known to the public as the benefactor of the Fisher Landau Art Centera repurposed parachute factory in Long Island City, Queens, which exhibited pieces from her extensive collection of more than 1,200 works from 1991 to 2017. A longtime trustee of New York’s Whitney Museum of Art, she has pledged nearly 400 coins worth almost $75. m to the institution in 2010.
Landau’s origin story as a prominent art patron began in an unusual way – with a heist. In 1969, burglars disguised as air conditioner repairmen broke into her home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and stole the collection of jewelry, including a 39-carat blue-white diamond solitaire, that her husband, real estate developer Martin Fisher, had bought. for her on special occasions over the years. When the insurance settlement arrived, Landau had a different direction in mind for the funds. “I decided I didn’t want jewelry anymore,” she said in an interview for a Whitney Museum catalog published to accompany a 2011 exhibition of his collectionand quoted in The New York Times. “I now had start-up capital for a collection.”
Collecting art has always been an interest for Landau, who had started sourcing art before the flight. Although she has no formal training in art history, her discerning taste and stubbornly independent approach to acquisition set her apart as an aesthete. Her first major art purchase was in 1968, when she purchased a meter tall Alexander Calder mobile, which she took back to her apartment on a city bus and “carried…like a Christmas tree”, Landau later recalled.
This passion for modernism led her to the work of Josef Albers. “Albers was my starting point as a collector,” she said in the Whitney Catalog interview. “I never collected something because it was fashionable. It was always about what I instinctively liked.
Working closely with Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher, Landau and Fisher have amassed a treasure trove of art by modern art legends such as Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Louise Nevelson and Paul Klee between 1969 and 1976, the year of Fisher’s death. After putting her collection on hold, Landau met theater designer Bill Katz, whom she asked to redecorate her apartment on Park Avenue in 1980. Katz became her art consultant, advising her to look beyond collecting more history she had built. With an eye for more contemporary dishes, Landau became a regular in artists’ studios in the 1980s and 1990s.
Landau became a trustee of the Whitney, which named the fourth floor of its Madison Avenue building in her honor in 1994, the year she established an exhibit endowment for the museum. She has also served on committees at the Museum of Modern Art and on the boards of the SITE Sante Fe Museum and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico. The French government named her Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters in recognition of her artistic patronage.
The first decade of the 2000s was a difficult time for Landau. His son Anthony and his wife died in a plane crash in 2003, the same year one of his grandchildren died in a car accident. Another 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 in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. Her final years were spent in Greenwich, Connecticut, where she battled Alzheimer’s disease.
“She is typical of pre-2000 collectors who were dedicated to fine-tuning their collections,” New York dealer Barbara Gladstone told the Time. “She wasn’t buying just because it was going to go up in value. It’s a wonderfully old-fashioned tradition.”
