Frances Lasker Brody

Frances Lasker Brody (1916–2009) 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 (LACMA) 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. The Brody collection was a huge success, totaling $224.17 million. Picasso painted several canvases of Marie-Thérèse Walter that year, including Le Rêve, (The Dream), which belongs to the casino owner Stephen A. Wynn. The Pissarro is the object of a long-running claim for restitution for Nazi-looted art. The Pissarro had been acquired by the Nazi appraiser Jackob Scheidwimmer from Lilly Cassirer and her husband Otto Neubauer, seized by the Gestapo, and auctioned at a Nazi auction before being smuggled from Germany to California and sold at the Frank Perls Gallery. The Brodys resold the Pissarro via Knoedler in 1952 and, after more transactions it ended up via the Stephen Hahn Gallery in the collection of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza.

House In 1949, the couple commissioned a modernist house in Holmby Hills by architect A. Quincy Jones and interior designer William Haines. The house combined two fashionable contemporary styles: California mid-century Modernist architecture and sophisticated Hollywood Moderne décor. The house became a gathering spot for a cross-section of the city's elite, from old Los Angeles families such as the Chandlers to Hollywood icons Gary Cooper and Joan Crawford. Matisse eventually created a 12-by-11-foot ceramic-tile wall mural for the courtyard. It was later donated to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The home at 360 South Mapleton Drive, next door to the Playboy Mansion, sits on and includes a tennis court and a pool with a guesthouse. It was designed with a modernist décor that includes a floating staircase and floor-to-ceiling glass windows that create an indoor-outdoor living space considered cutting edge at the time. In 2014, Ellen DeGeneres bought the house for $39.888 million in an off-market deal.