Top Philanthropic Donors: Frances Lasker Brody

Frances Lasker Brody, was an American arts advocate, collector and philanthropist who influenced the development of Los Angeles' cultural life as a founding benefactor of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and later as a guiding patron of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Gardens.

Mrs. Brody, who died on November 12, 2009 at 93, was the wife of Sidney F. Brody, a real estate developer who died in 1983, and the stepdaughter of Mary Lasker, a philanthropist and champion of medical research who died in 1994. The Brodys lived in a modernist house in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles that was designed by the architect A. Quincy Jones and the decorator William Haines to show off the couple’s collection.

Brody was born May 27, 1916, in Chicago to Flora and Albert Lasker, who built the advertising firm of Lord & Thomas. Lasker was legendary in the advertising world for campaigns that popularized Kleenex tissues, Lucky Strike cigarettes and Sunkist orange juice. She studied political science, English and history at Vassar College, where she graduated in 1937.

After college, she worked briefly as a model and saleswoman at a swank dress shop near Chicago. During World War II, while serving in a volunteer ambulance corps, she met Sidney Brody, a decorated Army lieutenant colonel who flew missions in Europe. They were married in 1942.  After the war, the couple moved to Los Angeles, where he built a fortune as a developer of shopping centers. He died in 1983.

Ms. Brody, who was 93 when she died in November 2009, bequeathed about $110-million to the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, in San Marino, Calif., where she was a member of its Board of Overseers for 20 years.

The donation came from the proceeds of the sale of her art collection, which included significant works by Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso (including Picasso’s landmark “Nude Green Leaves and Bust”); her midcentury modern home in Los Angeles, which was designed by A. Quincy Jones; and miscellaneous valuables.

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