If you had called Lloyd Cotsen a collector, he might have corrected you and said that he was really an accumulator. With an eclectic eye, he accumulated Japanese bamboo baskets, small pieces of textiles, bronze Chinese mirrors and illustrated children’s books.
Collecting beguiled him as a child when he amassed baseball cards and matchbooks. The habit continued when he was a Navy lieutenant on layovers; an executive at Neutrogena, the skin and hair-care company his father-in-law founded; and a man of great wealth, after he sold the company to Johnson & Johnson in 1994 for $924 million.
“I buy things because they strike an emotional bell, they appeal to my curiosity, to the thrill of discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary,” Mr. Cotsen told The Denver Post in 1998. “They appeal to my sense of humor, and to my search for the beauty in simplicity.”
He added, “I decided I had a collection when there was no more space to put anything.”
By the time he died at 88 on May 8 in Beverly Hills, Calif., Mr. Cotsen (pronounced COAT-zen) had donated about half of the material in his collections to institutions like the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Princeton University and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M.