Art Patron Emily Fisher Landau Dies at 102, Heidi Horten’s $150 M. Jewelry Collection Heads to Auction, and More: Morning Links for March 29, 2023

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The Headlines

EMILY FISHER LANDAU, the influential art collector and patron, died on Monday at the age of 102, Joseph Giovannini reports in the New York Times. Landau famously got her start as an art buyer after thieves broke into her Manhattan apartment and made off with a trove of jewelry. She plowed the insurance funds into art, acquiring key modernists and then contemporary figures. Her holdings came to include well more than 1,000 pieces, and she donated nearly 400 to the Whitney Museum in 2010. Landau, a mainstay on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, was a longtime supporter of the institution, and also created an endowment for the Whitney Biennial. From 1991 to 2017, her Fisher Landau Center for Art in Queens showcased selections from her revered collection. “She was not just buying because it would go up in value,” dealer Barbara Gladstone told the Times. “That’s a wonderfully old-fashioned tradition.”

EMILY FISHER LANDAU, the influential art collector and patron, died on Monday at the age of 102, Joseph Giovannini reports in the New York Times. Landau famously got her start as an art buyer after thieves broke into her Manhattan apartment and made off with a trove of jewelry. She plowed the insurance funds into art, acquiring key modernists and then contemporary figures. Her holdings came to include well more than 1,000 pieces, and she donated nearly 400 to the Whitney Museum in 2010. Landau, a mainstay on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, was a longtime supporter of the institution, and also created an endowment for the Whitney Biennial. From 1991 to 2017, her Fisher Landau Center for Art in Queens showcased selections from her revered collection. “She was not just buying because it would go up in value,” dealer Barbara Gladstone told the Times. “That’s a wonderfully old-fashioned tradition.”

The Digest

A Gustave Courbet landscape in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, will be returned to the heirs of a Jewish engineer who held it in Paris until around 1940, after a British advisory panel determined it had been looted by the Nazis. That prior owner, Robert Bing, had fled the city right before its invasion. [The New York Times]

Photos have appeared of leaks at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra being addressed with buckets and towels, which the Brisbane art dealer Philip Bacon termed “a national disgrace, and I don’t use that term lightly.” The museum has said that it needs AU$265 million (about US$177.6 million) over 10 years to fix up its home. [The Sydney Morning Herald]

The artist Ann Wilson, who made inventive abstractions on quilts, died earlier this month at 91. Wilson was the last living member of the storied gang of artists who lived and worked on Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan in the mid-1950s, including Robert Indiana and Ellsworth Kelly. [The New York Times]

Artist Tracey Emin has officially inaugurated her new art school and studio in Margate, England. The artist has been battling cancer and is “a good halfway . . . to getting the all-clear,” Jonathan Jones reports. Emin said, “One good thing that cancer does: when you get through the other side you really appreciate life.” [The Guardian]

After a showdown of some two years, the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore signed a deal with its employees that will clear the way for them to form a roughly 90-member union. The two sides had disagreed about what form that collective-bargaining arrangement should take. [The Baltimore Sun]

The 2022–24 Max Mara Art Prize for Women has gone to sculptor and installation artist Dominique White, who works between Essex, England, and Marseille, France. White will have a six-month residency in Italy and do a 2024 show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London that will travel to the Italian Republic. [Ocula and The Guardian]

The Kicker

PRESENTNESS IS GRACE. Journalist Ari Shapiro, the co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered, shared with Bloombergsome of his travel favorites: his Victorinox black quilted vest, a hotel that loans yoga mats, and buying flowers for the room. Also, he relayed the advice that an unnamed curator at the Met once gave him about how to approach a gargantuan art museum. “Stroll through the galleries until you see something that you can’t look away from,” she told him, “and then stop in front of that thing and spend a full five minutes just looking at it.” A very wise approach. [Bloomberg]