2023-10-28 16:08:54
“Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” sang Marilyn Monroe in 1953. Martin Fisher must have thought that too, because the New York real estate entrepreneur gave his wife Emily jewels for every birthday, anniversaries and just because. Valuable jewelry sets, necklaces, rings and bracelets set with emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds, including a 39-carat solitaire.
However, the enthusiasm for jewelry came to an abrupt end when, on a spring afternoon in 1969, armed robbers broke into the Fishers’ apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, tied up the cook, broke into the safe and stole all the jewelry. After that, diamonds were no longer an issue for Emily Fisher.
But the robbery – or more precisely: the substantial compensation from the insurance company – was the spark for a new passion. It should now be contemporary art. She had already collected them before (her first large piece was a mobile by Alexander Calder), but with the sudden windfall she was now able to get serious about her new hobby.
Emily Fisher Landau (1920 bis 2023)
Those: Dario Cantatore/Getty Images
Emily Fisher was particularly fond of paintings. Maybe because she wanted to become a painter herself. However, her father enrolled her in a secretarial school instead of the art academy.
Years of spending spree
The geometric-abstract paintings by Josef Albers that she saw at the Pace Gallery were the initial spark for collector Emily Fisher. She soon developed a close business relationship with the gallery owner Arne Glimcher – who immediately gave her three pictures by Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet and Fernand Léger.
Years of spending spree were to follow, she later said. Fisher bought works of art by Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Hans Arp, Mark Rothko, Jasper Johns, Franz Kline and Louise Nevelson. Through the abstract sculptor she became acquainted with the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.
Robert Rauschenberg, „Sundog“, 1962
Source: Sotheby’s/© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
The death of her husband in 1976 interrupted her passion for contemporary art for a few years. Around 1980, Emily Fisher met designer Bill Katz. He encouraged them not only to collect the now classic abstract expressionists, minimalists and pop artists, but also to turn to younger artists. And so it happened.
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Fisher, who married clothing manufacturer Sheldon Landau in 1978, became increasingly interested in the personalities behind the art. She began to transform from an art buyer to a patron, supporting artists such as Ed Ruscha, Mark Tansey and Glenn Ligon, as well as public museums.
She sat on the acquisitions committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art for decades, and in 2010 she donated approximately 400 works of art from her collection to the museum. From the 1980s until 2017, she also showed exhibitions at her own Fisher Landau Center for Art in Queens.
Jasper Johns, „Flags“, 1986
Source: Sotheby’s/© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
Plagued by family misfortunes and Alzheimer’s disease in the last years of her life, Emily Fisher Landau died on March 27, 2023 at the age of 102. 120 works from her collection are now being auctioned by Sotheby’s in New York.
1932 – Picasso’s “wonderful year”
The auction house has also owned the Breuer Buidling, which was once home to the Whitney Museum, for a few months now. From 2025 it will become the headquarters of Sotheby’s. The fourth floor of the building, designed by Marcel Breuer, is named after Emily Fisher Landau. Bringing your legacy under the hammer comes with great expectations from the world’s oldest auctioneer.
One work of art in particular is the focus of attention: “Femme à la montre” by Pablo Picasso, for which a bid for less than 120 million euros would probably be a bitter disappointment. Why? The painting dates from 1932, when Picasso was not only particularly productive in terms of quantity, but also at the peak of his creative power in terms of quality – 1932 was the “annus mirabilis”, as Picasso biographer John Richardson called it. And it’s not just auctioneers who keep hoping for miracles.
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Picasso was 50 years old, the most famous living artist, brimming with self-confidence. And he once again had a new “muse”. Her name was Marie-Thérèse Walter and she was portrayed by him almost every day. Picasso painted them, drew them, modeled them in clay and plaster, in all the styles he knew how to do. He painted his lover lying down, sleeping, with a book, at the desk, lost in thought and sometimes at twenty minutes to five.
Pablo Picasso, “Woman with a Watch”, 1932
Source: Sotheby’s/© Succession Picasso/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023
Marie-Thérèse appears in striking, geometric curves in the picture “Femme à la montre,” painted in August 1932. Her gaze is directed at the viewer. Her face, depicted half en face, half frontal, suggests the sun and moon at the same time. Against the bright blue background and the bright red of her armchair, she appears like a Madonna – with a watch.
The Basel Beyeler Gallery acquired the painting from Picasso itself in 1966 and sold it to New York’s Pace Gallery two years later. Emily Fisher bought it there in the same year – probably as one of the three works of art that once ignited the fire of her passion for collecting. The total estimate of the lots that will be auctioned on November 8th and 9th, 2023 is a good $400 million.
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