is the largest in the museum's history. Through the Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund, he and his wife have also sponsored several exhibitions at the Whitney. The fifth-floor permanent collection galleries are named for the couple. In 1998, he told a reporter for The New York Times that his "dream job" was to be the Whitney Museum's director. Most recently, Lauder gave $131 million for the Whitney's endowment. A long-time supporter of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Lauder led the creation of a research center for Modern art at the museum, which he helped support through a $22 million endowment made alongside museum trustees and other benefactors. In April 2013, he promised his collection of 81 pieces of Cubist art, consisting of 34 pieces by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, 15 by Fernand Léger, and 15 by Juan Gris to the museum; together, they are valued at more than one billion dollars. It has been described by William Acquavella, of Acquavella Galleries, as "without doubt the most important collection any private person has put together in many, many years," Art historian Emily Braun, who co-organized the 2014 Met exhibition of Lauder's Cubist collection with Rebecca Rabinow, has served as Leonard Lauder's personal curator since 1987. Social causes Lauder is co-founder and chairman of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a trustee of the Aspen Institute, chairman of The Aspen Institute International Committee, honorary chair of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, and a member of the President's Council of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital. Along with his wife, Evelyn, he helped create the Evelyn H Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. In February 2022, he donated $125 million to University of Pennsylvania to establish a new tuition-free nurse practitioner program within Penn Nursing. Memoir Lauder's memoir, The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty was published in 2020. Awards and honors See also List of billionaires Lauder Institute References External links The Pleasure of Postcards in The New Yorker by Judith H. Dobrzynski Place of birth missing (living people) 1933 births 20th-century American businesspeople 20th-century art collectors 20th-century American naval officers 21st-century American businesspeople 21st-century art collectors American billionaires American chairpersons of corporations American cosmetics businesspeople American humanitarians American founders American people of Czech-Jewish descent American people of Hungarian-Jewish