After making a fortune in financial services, he funded the arts and made historical artifacts and documents widely available to the public.
Leonard S. Polonsky, a philanthropist who funded the arts and helped make significant historical artifacts and documents available to the public, including Sir Isaac Newton’s early papers and a letter from Christopher Columbus’s maiden voyage, died on March 14 at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.
The cause was diastolic heart failure, his wife, Georgette Bennett, said.
Mr. Polonsky made his fortune in the financial services sector, when his company, Hansard Global, a successor to one he founded in 1970, went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2006, earning him a profit of 99 million pounds. But his philanthropy began earlier, in 1985, when he started the Polonsky Foundation, in an effort to support the arts.
Among its many beneficiaries was the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, where Mr. Polonsky was born. The theater, which specializes in preserving, performing and studying the works of Shakespeare, received a gift of $10 million in 2013, and its venue was renamed the Polonsky Shakespeare Center.
In 2021, Mr. Polonsky made a $12 million donation to establish a new permanent exhibition at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. Library employees spent three years sifting through 56 million artifacts in storage to identify 250 or so of the most awe-inspiring.
The resulting display, known as “The Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures,” resembles a gilded curio shop of priceless items — among them, George Washington’s copy of the Bill of Rights (with 12 amendments instead of 10); Thomas Jefferson’s annotated version of the Declaration of Independence; a Gutenberg Bible; an Andy Warhol painting of a Studio 54 ticket; and stuffed animals that inspired A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh.”
The idea for the exhibition — which, as of June 2024, had attracted some two million visitors — emerged from a 2016 meeting Mr. Polonsky had with Anthony W. Marx, the president and chief executive of the New York Public Library.