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"View Slideshow\n\nEven within circles of the exceptionally well connected, few can name-check Andy Warhol, Joan Crawford, Mark Rothko, and Georgia O\u2019Keeffe in the space of mere minutes without coming across as . . . a bit much. Then again, few have the charm\u2014or the social stature\u2014of New Yorker Emily Fisher Landau, the venerated art collector and philanthropist. In her early 90s, impeccably coiffed, and literally wearing rose-tinted glasses, she regales visitors with her insider chestnuts. She was buddies with her neighbor Crawford, who was perpetually dressed for a movie premiere, and she met Rothko in his studio to select a painting just four days before his suicide. Warhol did her portrait not once but twice, the second time gratis; and when Landau visited O\u2019Keeffe in New Mexico, she was sure to bring her some clothes in the artist\u2019s favored summer shade: white.\n\nA Manhattan native and one of its classic characters, Landau has a weakness for Frappuccinos and cigarettes, the long, skinny kind that look like they were plucked from a Greta Garbo feature. \u201CI did give up smoking\u201D\u2014for about 40 years\u2014she says, \u201Cbut I could smell it in my dreams.\u201D She and her first husband, the late real-estate magnate Martin Fisher, discovered Palm Beach, Florida, a half-century ago; avid golfers, they were founding members of the Palm Beach Country Club, where Peter Lawford would play the course barefoot and where Rose Kennedy would go out for a round in the afternoons, but only with a pro. \u201CI was pretty good, too,\u201D Landau says.\n\nIn the late 1980s, with second husband Sheldon Landau (who died in 2009), she bought her current Palm Beach getaway, a seaside penthouse where she now spends her winters. The view and the loftlike architecture pack a one-two punch, according to her daughter, Candia Fisher. \u201CIt has a lot of good wall space and high ceilings,\u201D Fisher says of the four-bedroom residence, and the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Atlantic create the sensation of floating. \u201CYou feel like you\u2019re on a yacht or an ocean liner.\u201D\n\nUnsurprisingly for a collector of large-scale contemporary painting, Landau\u2019s taste in decoration tends toward clutter-free austerity. In 1999 she tapped James Aman to do the interiors, which he has just refreshed and refined. Aman &amp;amp; Carson, the Manhattan firm he runs with partner Anne Carson, has also designed Landau\u2019s sprawling Park Avenue apartment and a Santa Fe, New Mexico, ranch, which she has since sold; the team is now working on a Connecticut country house that she and her daughter share. Quips Fisher, \u201CWe do Grey Gardens better than most, Mother and I.\u201D\n\nIn Palm Beach, as with Landau\u2019s other homes, it was clear from the get-go that her phenomenal art collection would be the star. When the wall candy runs from Willem de Kooning to Ellsworth Kelly to Agnes Martin, as Aman puts it, \u201CWho\u2019s going to look at a piece of upholstery first? We try to make our interiors a beautiful backdrop to the collection.\u201D The designer suggested the apartment be almost exclusively white, and his client concurred. \u201CLet\u2019s be honest, art stands out best in a gallery,\u201D he says. And indeed, that\u2019s exactly what Landau\u2019s entrance hall continues to evoke today. Low tufted benches resting on a smooth limestone floor invite guests to sit and contemplate the works on view, among them an iconic Jasper Johns American flag painting hanging across from a Robert Rauschenberg canvas, a black-and-white Kelly, an Alexander Calder stabile, and a Warhol silkscreen.\n\nThe entrance hall opens onto the living-and-dining area, where brilliant-yellow silk curtains, a recent addition, frame the full-height windows. (His fondness for white notwithstanding, Aman agreed with Carson and Landau that a dash of color would be an improvement here.) Sliding glass doors lead to an oceanfront terrace, while a set of Japanese-inspired slatted doors off the dining area conceals a fitted stainless-steel kitchen by Bulthaup.\n\nThough the apartment was clearly conceived with entertaining in mind, the designers did not overlook Landau\u2019s private spaces. The custom-made lacquer four-poster in her master suite is draped with a luxurious cream-color silk; in her bathroom, a clever chain-mail curtain was installed to define a separate vanity area. Aman &amp;amp; Carson extended the same attention to detail throughout the apartment, from grand gestures, such as hand-polished Venetian plaster on the walls, to intimate touches, including the addition of embroidered octopi to the upholstered backs of 19th-century Swedish armchairs in the living area. The carpets were reevaluated as well. \u201CEmily felt everyone had sisal,\u201D Aman explains. \u201CWe got a wonderful white woven-leather rug, which is difficult to keep clean. But if anyone can do it, she can.\u201D\n\nTo be sure, Landau is something of a force of nature. When she took up collecting in her 30s, she did it with gusto. She caught on to cutting-edge artists like Warhol, Johns, Ed Ruscha, and Keith Haring early, and she bought deep. Last year Landau gave more than 400 works to the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she is a long-serving trustee. The sheer quantity\u2014one of the largest gifts in the museum\u2019s history\u2014is staggering, but Whitney director Adam Weinberg says it\u2019s the quality that has made the impact. \u201CThere\u2019s hardly an artist in her collection who\u2019s not of interest,\u201D he says, noting the rarity of that circumstance even among patrons of Landau\u2019s prominence. \u201CEmily is very intuitive. She\u2019s very, very smart, but she goes by her gut.\u201D\n\nThat discernment is on display not only at the Fisher Landau Center for Art, the museum she founded in Long Island City, Queens, but also in the Palm Beach residence. For many years a largely yellow De Kooning that Aman loved hung in the living area, but Landau, who enjoys swapping art in and out, recently mounted in its place a canvas by the artist with ribbons of red and blue. \u201CI agree with her,\u201D Aman concedes. \u201CIt looks great.\u201D As Fisher says, laughing at the adage to \u201Cshop your closet,\u201D it helps when that closet is stocked with some of the best art to come out of postwar America.\n\n\u201CNature gave me two gifts,\u201D Landau says matter-of-factly. \u201COne is my eye. I can walk into a gallery with work by one artist all around the room, and I can tell you which piece is the best. The other gift I have is tremendous, tremendous street smarts. That\u2019s something you\u2019re born with.\u201D\n\n Click here to see Emily Fisher Landau\u2019s exceptional home and phenomenal art collection."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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