At the end of a wide-ranging interview one day last week, Leonard A. Lauder, the chairman of the Whitney Museum of American Art, leaned across the table in the museum's newly restored boardroom and said, "You didn't ask me about my fantasy."
Then he announced: "I'd love to be director of this museum." It is, he said, the best job in America.
Mr. Lauder is not really about to give up his day job as chief executive of the Estee Lauder Companies.
But with the ever-troubled Whitney potentially on the verge of a new era, given the April 4 opening of the first permanent collection galleries in its 67-year history and the recent resignation of its director, David A. Ross, Mr. Lauder was sending a signal. No matter who replaces Mr. Ross, who is leaving to become director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Lauder has no intention of reducing his involvement, which runs far deeper than that of most other museum chairmen.
In the previous hour and a half, besides playing docent in the new galleries, where works by Hopper, O'Keeffe, Calder and other artists were lined up, not yet hung, Mr. Lauder had outlined the museum's acquisition and exhibition priorities and said he wanted to hire a "superman," a curator, adminstrator and fund-raiser combined, as director.
But with Mr. Lauder regularly treading into territory that is usually a director's purview, what man or woman of steel would take the job? Who would argue with a chairman who not only gives generously (most recently, $5 million for the new galleries, plus dozens of works of art) but also personally raises vast amounts of money (87 percent of the $45 million capital campaign)?
Mr. Lauder is a man who, when asked about the legacy he wants to leave, a query that can easily fall flat, is ready with a three-part answer: more than doubling the museum's endowment to perhaps $100 million, adding more exhibition space and remaking its reputation.
"Oh, " he said in an afterthought, "and getting a director who can lead the museum and the staff and the trustees and the art world to greatness."
The Whitney, always a bad boy of the museum world, is the smallest of the Big Four in Manhattan. It is dwarfed in space, attendance and endowment by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Modern (where Mr. Lauder's younger brother, Ronald S. Lauder, is chairman). Even the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which is not that much larger, attracts nearly three times the visitors in New York and has a $47.7 million endowment, nearly 25 percent more than the Whitney's.
As they can and do encroach on its turf, the Whitney has constantly struggled to define its identity. Often, instead of playing to the "American Art" in its name, the Whitney has reacted by competing with avant-garde galleries or staging trendy or political shows that mainly attracted complaints.
As Mr. Lauder admits, he did not expect to be so involved when he was elected president of the board in June 1990, shortly after trustees dismissed Thomas N. Armstrong 3d as director. In early 1991 they settled on Mr. Ross, who admittedly had a rough time moving from the free-wheeling Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston to the much-larger Whitney. Mr. Lauder plunged in, providing management help. Mr. Ross, particularly at first, staged several exhibitions that reinforced the Whitney's reputation as a showcase for what is shocking but will not necessarily last, further alienating traditionalists.
"Does the Whitney still exist?" William A. Gerdts, an American art expert at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, said sarcastically when asked about the museum. "Once in a while Barbara Haskell does a good show, but otherwise it's become a horror." Ms. Haskell, a curator, specializes in art before 1950.
Mr. Lauder, who stepped up to chairman in 1994, has stood by Mr. Ross, who praises their partnership. While Mr. Ross has many supporters, some critics say Mr. Lauder has not not reined him in enough. Still, trustees and others in the art world generally praise Mr. Lauder's contribution, especially the management expertise he lent and the support he built in the corporate community.
Now, the new permanent collection galleries, which Mr. Lauder championed, might even assuage the naysayers. Situated on the museum's fifth floor, previously occupied by administrative offices and the library, they have been named the Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Galleries, wherein lies a tale about Mr. Lauder as fundraiser.
During the current capital campaign, he extracted multi-million-dollar naming gifts, as they are called, for every floor at the Whitney.
But unlike the other floors, which can be reconfigured to accommodate the needs of special exhibitions, the fifth floor is split into 11 small, permanent galleries that are named for additional donors. In effect, Mr. Lauder sold the same floor twice (but dared do so only with the floor that he first sold to himself).
The new, 8,000 square-foot galleries start with a lobby space evoking the 1910's, when Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder, launched the Studio Club, a forerunner of the museum. To the left begins the series of galleries that tell the story of 20th-century American art before 1950. Iconic paintings are everywhere. "I like the way they are hanging them," he said. "As you walk through, you see at the end Hopper's 'Early Sunday Morning' right there."
Mr. Lauder, who started collecting when he was 6 with postcards of Art Deco hotels in Miami (which he still has), bought his first artwork, a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, while in his 20's. Today he is known as a collector of Cubist works, notably Picasso, Braque and Gris -- not Whitney fare. But his office, he said, is filled with American art by Agnes Martin and Richard Serra, among others.
"This is my favorite room," he said in the second gallery, where the works going up include Charles Demuth's "My Egypt" and Joseph Stella's "Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme." "I happen to like Precisionism," he explained. "It talks to me because I collect Cubism."
Another work, a New York scene by Florine Stettheimer, is "an intended gift," Mr. Lauder said, promised by William Kelly Simpson. "I first saw it at our Stettheimer show, and I fell in love with it." That was in 1996. "I asked Mr. Simpson if he'd donate it," he continued, "and he said he wasn't ready for that yet."
Mr. Lauder persisted. Making no progress, he asked Mr. Ross to write to Mr. Simpson. "Then I called and said there's still a hole on the wall for it," Mr. Lauder said. Recently Mr. Simpson gave in. "New York/Liberty" arrived in mid-March.
Here and there, as Mr. Lauder stopped to point out works, with no wall labels yet in sight, he made a mistake. Ever aware, he parried the issue. "Thus far," he said to a passing curator who provided help, "I haven't gotten a 4.0; I've gotten a 3.8."
But he was intimate with the museum, and many people might relate to his loyalty. When he joined as a Friend of the Whitney in the 1960's, he said, he "wasn't far-seeing enough to pick a museum" and had no grand strategy to become a patron. "Our company was a small company," he said, "and I had limited means. And when I tried to buy an artist like Jasper Johns, I wasn't permitted to buy because I wasn't in the big leagues. But I felt welcome here." He became a trustee in 1977.
As chairman, Mr. Lauder has set some ambitious goals, beginning with the endowment. Though it has grown from $21 million to $39 million since 1994, he feels it should be "$60 or $70 million, or even closer to $100 million." He wants to wipe out the Whitney's $1.4 million operating deficit, in part by luring more visitors, now nearly 300,000 a year. "Our attendance should be 350,000 to 400,000," he said.
Reaching that goal requires more popular programming. So, beginning on May 28, the Whitney will show Andrew Wyeth's landscapes. The exhibition was, Mr. Lauder insisted, Mr. Ross's idea. "The trustees were urging David to bring more balance to the Whitney program," Mr. Lauder said, "and he was responsive, and thus the Wyeth."
There are also holes in the collection, and Mr. Lauder knows which ones he wants to fill. "We missed a good part of Abstract Expressionism," he said. "We do not have enough depth there. We want to enhance our holdings of late 20th-century masters like Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein. We're in the early stages of putting together a great late 20th-century photography collection. The hole is so great there you could spend all day talking about what's not there. We need to enhance our print collection of some major artists."
What about today's cutting-edge artists? "In artists of the 80's and 90's, we are very strong," he said, "but you can never have enough."
Though he is 65, Mr. Lauder sees no point at which he would want to leave the board, and several trustees said they did not want him to. "I have a passion for this institution that is boundless," he declared.
His reason? "Because it's everybody's whipping boy, and I love underdogs," he said. "And because they need me. If I were at the Met, they wouldn't need me because they have a lot of people. Here, I bring not just a checkbook, but ideas and access and a sense of destiny."