Top 200 Collectors

A graduate of Harvard Law School, Aaron I. Fleischman was a prominent attorney Washington, D.C. for more than 35 years, specializing in communications law. Now based in Florida, he is an investor.

A major arts patron, Fleischman gave the Art Institute of Chicago, where he is trustee emeritus, $75 million in September 2024 toward its expansion. The gift is “the single largest naming gift in the Art Institute’s history,” according to the museum and the new building, which will house works from the Art Institute’s collection ranging from the 19th century to today, will be named after him and his spouse Lin Lougheed. “This converts what has been an aspiration into a reality,” AIC director James Rondeau told the New York Times.

Additionally, Fleischman is an honorary trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 2018, he endowed a curatorship of modern and contemporary art at the museum, with the aim to continue the Met’s “momentum on presenting and studying art of the 20th and 21st centuries,” according to then Met president and CEO Daniel H. Weiss. He has also previously served on the board of the Whitney Museum in New York and supported exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. 

On the collecting side of things, Fleischman focuses on American and European modernism and contemporary art dating from 1912 though the present. (Works from his collection are not included in the $75 million AIC gift.) Insiders tell ARTnews that his holdings include a number of top-quality paintings by artists like Mondrian, Picasso, Kandinsky, de Kooning, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Sheeler. He also collects many artists in depth, which, we are told, include stellar works by Donald Judd, Brice Marden, Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, Lucio Fontana, Robert Ryman, and Robert Gober.

A private person, Fleischman has been known to invite visiting museum groups, collectors, and scholars to tour his spectacular residences and art collection over the years.