Emily Fisher Landau, a New Yorker who used a Lloyd’s insurance settlement from a spectacular jewel heist in her apartment to found what would become one of America’s premier collections of contemporary art, died on March 27 in Palm Beach, FL. She was 102.

From 1991 to 2017, Ms. Landau opened her collection of 1,200 artworks to the public in the Fisher Landau Center for Art, a repurposed former factory in Long Island City, Queens. In 2010, she pledged almost 400 works, then worth between $50-and-$75-million, to the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she had long been a trustee.

“I was devastated,” Ms. Landau said of the heist, but I decided that I didn’t want jewelry anymore. I now had seed money for an art collection,” thanks to the insurance settlement. In a way, the theft was one of the best things that ever happened to me, she said. Starting with a Calder mobile and works by Josef Albers, she went on to buy works by Matisse, Mondrian, Jean Arp, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Paul Klee, Louise Nevelson and Lucas Samaras.

Beyond the Whitney, she sat on committees at the MOMA and on the boards of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and SITE Santa Fe museum, both in New Mexico. For her support of its cultural institutions, the French government inducted her into the Order of Arts and Letters as a chevalier.

Outside the art world, she established the Fisher Landau Foundation for research on dyslexia and the Fisher Landau Center for the Treatment of Learning Disabilities at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx.

Her daughter, Candia Fisher, told The New York Times that whenever she spotted a woman wearing expensive jewelry, she would say, “That could be art on the walls.”