Sitting in his Fifth Avenue office overlooking Central Park, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder speaks low and slowly as he grips the armrests of a caramel leather chair so worn by time and use that its ends look like burnt toast, blackened and cracking with a white puff of batting bulging out.
This is Lauder’s go-to chair for conversations, and he recoils at the suggestion he might want to re-cover it. Such collaborations are easy when your mother was makeup magnate Estée Lauder. The overall gift is seismic for the Met’s holdings of turn-of-the-century German and Austrian art, in the same way that John D. Lauder Neue Galerie moving forward. The merger is part of the quiet wind-down of a loud life. A former ambassador to Austria, Lauder has recently curtailed his giving to Republican candidates. But he’s selling off his World War II fighter jets, and he’s donated almost all the medieval armor that he started collecting in the 1970s, funneling most of the armor to the Met as well. “I don’t think he’s fully dealt with it. He’s part of a generation of baby-boomer collectors who have opened namesake private museums the world over and are wrestling with how to sustain them in perpetuity. Often, their children don’t share their same tastes or compulsion to collect, and even billionaire families are realizing how expensive it is to maintain them. He hopes Lauder will continue to personally welcome visitors at the entrance of every opening. Eventually, he will have to let them.
He considers the chair, made in Vienna in 1910, to be a work of art. So he treats it with the same reverence he does the estimated $1.5 billion collection of German and Austrian modern art he amassed and installed as the Neue Galerie a quarter-century ago on Museum Mile in Manhattan. Housed in a 1914 beaux-arts mansion, its stately rooms are adorned with pieces by Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Wassily Kandinsky and Otto Dix. The design shop features marvels such as a lipstick matching the exact hue of Austrian socialite Adele Bloch-Bauer’s lips as painted in Klimt’s gold-flecked 1907 portrait of her, displayed on the museum’s second floor. Now he’s decided, with his family’s nudging, to give it all to the Metropolitan Museum of Art , a landmark merger that will go into effect in 2028. The Met will take ownership of the building and the Neue’s roughly 600-piece collection, as well as other artworks given by Lauder and his heirs, including a Klimt portrait of a woman in a black hat that once hung in his mother’s bedroom. At 82, Lauder is still grappling with how to let it go. Rockefeller Jr. propelled the museum’s medieval holdings by funding the museum’s purchase of George Grey Barnard’s Cloisters in 1925. The Met says it has raised a nearly $200 million endowment to care for the renamed Met Ronald S. For now, the eight Klimts will be in their usual spots when the museum reopens on November 12 after several months of renovations. He’s still shopping regularly—including gold-ground paintings, Kunstkammer objects, Greek and Roman antiquities and memorabilia connected to the film ‘Casablanca,’ including over 100 vintage posters. When major collector Rosa de la Cruz died in 2024, her space in Miami shuttered and her heirs auctioned off much of her collection. At the Neue, expenses climbed from $14.3 million in 2021 to $25 million in 2024, exceeding revenues that year by $3.3 million, according to tax filings. In 2021, donations from Lauder and the Estée Lauder Charitable Trust amounted to 76% of the museum’s $7.7 million in contributions, filings show. When Lauder turned 80, it hit him that he couldn’t realistically run a museum into his 90s. Then his only brother, Leonard Lauder , died at 92 last year, and his daughter Aerin Lauder Zinterhofer told him the family needed him to settle the museum’s fate.
“I would never!” he says, revulsion melting into an exasperated grin. Turning over control is “very hard,” he says, “but I realized if I didn’t do something, there’s no chance it would remain the Neue. Lauder says he trusts the Met, but he doesn’t want anything in his museum to change: “The Klimts have to stay in the Klimt room. The Met’s director, Max Hollein, says the deal isn’t designed to be overly restrictive. “Technically,” he says, “the Klimts can move. A Met spokesperson says Neue will fall under the Met’s collection-management policies, though the Met agreed to keep Klimt’s ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I’ in situ. His longtime personal curator, Elizabeth Szancer, says Lauder and his wife, Jo Carole Lauder, are lending fewer pieces to other museums, wary of being parted too long from works they want to see daily. “It’s bittersweet,” Szancer says of watching him navigate this later life stage. “We wanted him to be part of it,” Lauder Zinterhofer says. She joined the Met board three years ago and says she believes Hollein will keep it as is. “It made sense,” she says, to give it to the Met under Hollein’s watch. Hollein says he intends to protect what stands out about the Neue, while allowing his bigger curatorial staff to dream up new exhibits. He says they’re already working on ideas. Lauder says he’ll show up as long as he’s able. “It’s to the Met’s advantage to preserve the Neue,” he says.
