Belle Linsky (1904–1987) was a businesswoman and philanthropist who was a

Swingline Swingline is a division of ACCO Brands Corporation that specializes in manufacturing staplers and hole punches. The company was formerly located in Long Island City, Queens, New York, United States, but the plant was moved to Nogales, Mexico, i ...

Inc. executive with her husband, Swingline's president Jack Linsky. In 1982, she donated much of her art collection, valued at $90 million, to the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

Life

Belle Linsky was born in Kiev in 1904 and came to the United States as a child. With her husband she owned 19 percent of the stock of the

corporation, based in New York City at the time, which they sold to American Brands Inc. in 1970 for $210 million. She was treasurer of Swingline at the time of the sale and Jack Linsky was inventor, president, and chairman. She lived in Palm Beach, Florida and New York, where much of her art collection was housed. She died in New York on Monday, September 28, 1987.

Philanthropy and art collection

In 1965, the Linskys endowed for $1 million a pavilion that has bears their names at the

Beth Israel Medical Center Mount Sinai Beth Israel is a 799-bed teaching hospital in Manhattan. It is part of the Mount Sinai Health System, a nonprofit health system formed in September 2013 by the merger of Continuum Health Partners and Mount Sinai Medical Center, an ...

Manhattan Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...

. She and her husband, Jack Linsky, started collecting art during

The Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

. After Mr. Linsky died in 1980, much of the art collection went into The Jack and Belle Linsky Foundation. In 1982, Mrs. Linsky decided to give some to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, as well as a dozen other American museums. The collection includes more than 1000 objects. The bulk of which is housed in the 3,980 square-foot Jack and Belle Linsky Galleries at the museum. At one point the Linskys had one of the largest

Fabergé egg A Fabergé egg (russian: link=no, яйцо Фаберже́, translit=yaytso Faberzhe) is a jewelled egg created by the jewellery firm House of Fabergé, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. As many as 69 were created, of which 57 survive today. Virtua ...

collections in America.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Linsky, Belle 1904 births 1987 deaths People from New York City American art collectors Women art collectors American women philanthropists People associated with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Philanthropists from New York (state) Emigrants from the Russian Empire to the United States