"If someone likes these pictures of horses jumping over rivers, then I'm not the right person for the job," says the pioneer of hotel art

This 76-year-old is a force of nature. She hurries across the six-lane Park Avenue in high heels, even though the traffic light has just turned red. She nonchalantly pushes her way to the front of the line at the Met Opera bar—she knows the waiter. After a few hours with Elizabeth Weiner, it's no longer surprising when she says she tells artists what kind of work they should create. Does she do that often? "Oh, all the time—I do it all the time."

The tour zigzags through Manhattan, with a brief stop at the "Four Seasons" in Midtown. The paintings here are small-format and muted in color, she says, to emphasize the grandiose architecture all the more. And she should know, because she selected these works herself. The luxury hotel is one of dozens worldwide that Elizabeth Weiner has furnished with art. The trained art historian and former gallery owner has been curating hotels for almost forty years. She says she is the first to begin providing this service at a high professional level in the late 1980s.

Elizabeth Weiner's art selection usually begins before a hotel is even built. With the help of architectural plans, and equipped with a budget of typically several million dollars, she says it's important to have a theme. With a guiding principle in mind, she explores the surrounding museums, galleries, and studios. "I think it's important to work largely with artists from the region." But she also enjoys mixing well-known and unknown, cheap and expensive, local and international works. "I love combining, for example, a David Hockney with someone nameless."

And sometimes, previously undiscovered objects are discovered there—and expensively. When, for example, she chose a sculpture by glass artist Dale Chihuly for the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Millenia in Singapore in 1996, it was unusual: "Glass art sculptures were extremely unusual in hotels, especially those by Dale Chihuly." His works have since increased in value many times over.

One of Weiner's open secrets is that she dares to tell artists in whose talent she believes exactly what she wants. She rarely buys existing work; she prefers to commission art—custom-made for the respective hotel. It sounds something like this: "Why don't you make it a little bigger, put a lot of paint on it, and then draw around the edges?" Or she tells a painter to make a sculpture. And if the other person hesitantly objects, which she often hears in this situation: "But I've never done that before," Elizabeth Weiner tends to give a 50 percent advance with the encouragement: "You can do it, I'll take it no matter what." Resistance is futile.

Curating a hotel takes about two years—with a lot of back and forth, numerous relocations, adjustments, and refinements. Elizabeth Weiner's work actually begins even before she gets her hands on the hotel plans: She sits down with the hotel owners to gauge their taste. "If someone likes those pictures of horses jumping over rivers, then I'm not the right person for the job."

She would never select art for others that she doesn't like herself. To get a good idea of ​​what her clients want, she goes through numerous art books with them. "I ask them to say yes or no—yay or nay—to each image. Then I go to their homes, observe what kind of clothes they wear, and how they live."

Elizabeth Weiner lives in an apartment inside a hotel. It's like being in an art cave. Minimalism, apparently, is the order of the day here, rather than the rule: the limited space is filled to the ceiling with colorful, abstract paintings. A yellow lamp, a bright red Dalí lip sofa, stacks of art books, memorabilia, and photos. There she is with the artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude—"We were friends"—and there hang photos of Andy Warhol: "When I visited him at his Factory with my uncle as a child, I said, 'Uncle Lenny, let's get out of here. Everyone's sick, they constantly need injections.'"

Whether art appeals to her or not is intuitive, she says, a pure gut feeling. She learned to appreciate it through play as a child. Her uncle, Leon Kraushar, owned the largest Pop Art collection in the US during his lifetime; Elizabeth Weiner was a frequent visitor to his home on Long Island, where she also grew up. But hardly anyone was interested in Pop Art back then, she says. But her uncle firmly believed in this art from the very beginning.

She picks up a magazine article and recites a quote from him with gusto: "Renoir? I hate him. Cézanne? Bedroom paintings. It's the same with the Cubists, the Abstract Expressionists, with all of them. Decoration." There's no satire, no today, no fun. That's for the old ladies, all the people who go to auctions—it's nothing, it's dead. Pop art, on the other hand, is the art of today, of tomorrow, and for all time to come.

Elizabeth Weiner, too, believed in Pop Art when, after studying art history, she opened her first gallery on Madison Avenue in New York as a young gallerist. But her environment wasn't quite ready yet. The neighbors had written a letter of complaint about the "battered junk car in front of the door" – a work by John Chamberlain that is now worth millions. Elizabeth Weiner's reaction: She bought a second such "junk car" and placed it next to the gallery.

But New Yorkers frustrated her back then. "They didn't love what I loved." A few years after her father bought her the five-story townhouse where she ran the gallery downstairs, lived upstairs, and rented out space even further upstairs, she sold it and bought a Pan Am ticket around the world. "After a few months, I came back, realized I still didn't like New York, and bought another ticket around the world."

One of her greatest adventures was a trip to Iran, where she procured American art for the Shah's Niavaran Cultural Center. She had barely left the country when the hostage crisis struck, followed by the coup. "I was terrified and never went back."

On her world travels, Elizabeth Weiner visited museums and galleries at every stop. She was particularly drawn to Asia, where she still spends a lot of time today, especially Singapore. She also particularly likes Switzerland. In Geneva, she curated the Hotel President Wilson and the Mandarin Oriental. She's toying with the idea of ​​opening a gallery there. Or perhaps she'll have her autobiography written. Or provide material for a film. She has many more plans.

Only her dream of returning to New York with all her favorite works of art, her Warhols and Lichtensteins, has been dashed for the time being. The large apartment she had bought, with its mirrored ceilings and walls, began to collapse shortly thereafter. The mirrors fell off the walls, revealing shoddy workmanship and mold. Many other plans are still open. "I keep fit at the Athletic Club, where I regularly swim a mile." Elizabeth Weiner is a force of nature.