The Collector: Emily Fisher Landau
The Collector01.14.2026
Emily Fisher Landau’s art collection was accelerated, ironically, by the disappearance of another treasure trove. In 1969, burglars disguised as air-conditioner repairmen broke into her Upper East Side apartment and stole an entire safe of jewelry. Luckily, the diamonds were insured, but when the settlement arrived, Landau had a new direction in mind.
“I was devastated,” Landau said of the heist in interviews conducted for a Whitney catalog, “Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection.” But, she added, “I decided that I didn’t want the jewelry any more. I now had seed money for a collection.”
“What I really wanted to buy was paintings,” she said, “so probably the theft was one of the best things that ever happened to me.” [1]
She’d made her first major purchase a year earlier, a three-foot-tall Alexander Calder mobile. “I didn’t have a car and driver in those days, and so I came back on the crosstown bus on West 86th Street and stood up and carried the Calder like a Christmas tree,” Landau said. “Nobody asked me anything.” [Ibid]
It was the work of Josef Albers, however, that crystallised her sensibility. She discovered the artist via a poster in the window of the Pace Gallery on East 57th Street. “It startled my eye — so minimal,” she said. “From the moment I saw that Albers, I knew I loved simplicity. Albers was my beginning point as a collector,” she said in the Whitney interview. “I’ve never collected something because it was fashionable. It was always about what I instinctively liked.” [Ibid]
Over the next four decades, Landau applied that discerning taste and amassed one of the largest private collections of contemporary art in the world. Landau and her husband, real estate mogul Martin Fisher, developed a friendship with Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher. He advised the couple on their first large acquisition, a trio of paintings by Picasso, Dubuffet and Léger, all leaning against the wall in his office.
The Picasso work, “Femme à la Montre” (1932), would become the centerpiece of Landau’s collection. Landau purchased the colorful portrait of the artist’s lover and muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, from Pace in 1968, supposedly for less than a million. The gallery had acquired it from Ernst Beyeler, the Swiss dealer and collector, who bought it directly from the artist’s studio in Mougins.
Between 1969 and 1976, the couple amassed works by Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Mark Rothko, Louise Nevelson, and Paul Klee. “I spent all the money on art,” Landau said. “Those were buy years.”
Fisher died in 1976. “After that, there was a big gap in the collection,” she said. “I stopped.”
During her break from collecting, Landau met New York theater designer and restaurant designer Bill Katz, whom she hired to redecorate her apartment in 1980. Katz became her art consultant and guided her through the emerging contemporary art market. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Landau could be found visiting artists' studios and exhibitions. Sometimes, she purchased the entire room, as she did with shows by Rodney Graham and Glenn Ligon.
Ed Ruscha commented that Landau was, “to the greatest degree… the friend of the artist. Some collectors would prefer not to meet the artist, and I can understand that they don’t want to crack the illusion about somebody whose work they are collecting… She’s different. She’s not afraid to know the artist personally.” [2]
Among the artists whom Landau befriended was Andy Warhol, whom she considered her “favorite artist,” saying, “What I recognized in him - or what I felt - was the influence he had on other artists.” [Ibid] She commissioned him to paint her portrait, and in an April 11, 1984 diary entry, Warhol noted that her impressive art collection encouraged him to revise the work: “I did her portrait but it never really looked good, and the reason I wanted to do it again was because she has all these great paintings like Rauschenbergs and Picassos and I didn’t want to have mine looking bad there.” [3]
Landau was a longtime trustee at the Whitney, where she sat on a variety of boards until she died in 2023 at 102. In 1994, the museum named the fourth floor of the museum, then located on the Upper East Side in a Marcel Breuer–designed landmark building, in her honor. That same year, Landau established an endowment for the Whitney Biennial exhibitions.
In 2010, Landau announced a historic gift to the museum – 367 works in all media by nearly 100 key figures in American art, including Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Warhol. The gift was estimated to be worth $50 million to $75 million, making it among the foremost gifts of collections to the Whitney. [4]
From 1991 to 2017, the collector also had a museum of her own, the Fisher Landau Center for Art. Housed at a former parachute-harness factory in Long Island City, New York, the private foundation was free and open to the public.
Landau suffered many personal tragedies in the first decade of the new millennium, among them the death of her third husband, Sheldon Landau, in 2009. These losses coincided with a changing art market, and Landau’s interest in collecting diminished.
Some things, however, never changed. “Whenever she spotted a woman wearing expensive jewelry,” her daughter, Candia Fisher, said, “she used to say, ‘That could be art on the walls.’” [1]
120 works from Landau’s collection were auctioned at Sotheby’s in November 2023. Among the masterpieces were Albers’ “Homage to the Square: Yellow Resonance” (1957); A 1986 Warhol self-portrait silkscreened in red, white and blue camouflage; and “Femme à la Montre,” which sold for $139.4 million. The sale drew a total of $406.4 million and became the most valuable sale devoted to a female collector in history. [5]
SOURCES
[1] Giovannini, Joseph. “Emily Fisher Landau, Art Patron Who Had Her Own Museum, Dies at 102.” The New York Times. March 28, 2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/arts/emily-fisher-landau-dead.html
[2] Mohammad, Arsalan. “Emily Fisher Landau: A Life In Art.” Sotheby’s. Sep 13, 2023 https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/emily-fisher-landau-a-life-in-art
[3] Warhol, Andy. The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett, Warner Books, 1989.
[4] Vogel, Carol. “Emily Fisher Landau Pledges 367 Artworks to Whitney.” The New York Times. May 6, 2010 https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/arts/design/07vogel.html
[5] Armstrong, Annie. “Sotheby’s Emily Fisher Landau Sale Is Most Valuable Ever for a Female Collector, Nets $406 Million.” Artnet. November 8, 2023
https://news.artnet.com/market/emily-fisher-landau-sothebys-results-2391881
Image: Picasso and Jean Arp, “Torse végétal” (1959/1961)
