Tim Francis 1928-2016

Visiting exhibitions with Tim and Sherrah Francis could be a challenge. The first-stop-bookshop, quick look round the exhibition and then off for coffee routine was not for them. Infinitely curious and lovers of detail and history, they would stare down the works on show as if their lives depended on it. In Wellington there weren't many important openings or interesting talks (and some pretty uninteresting ones too) where Tim and Sherrah didn’t make an appearance. It is hard to believe we will never see them again as a couple coming up the stairs at 147 Cuba Street, standing around with the rest of us at openings or ushering us around their collection in Talavera Terrace. If that is a great sadness for us it must be almost unimaginable for Sherrah and a huge loss for his children and family.

Tim spent his professional life in the diplomatic service. He was one of a group of Foreign Affairs staff who from the 1960s understood the importance of culture in NZ's dealings with other nations and in particular the role the visual arts could play. The result was not only an important collection assembled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself, but a lifelong commitment to New Zealand art by many of its senior staff. The Corners, the Norrishes and the Francises all collected art as families and all had a close connection with the Wellington art dealer Peter McLeavey. His exhibitions year after year introduced this appreciative audience to works by Colin McCahon, Gordon Walters, Toss Woollaston, Rita Angus and more recently Julian Dashper, John Reynolds, Peter Robinson, Yvonne Todd and so many others. Wellington was certainly the richer for the support and sophistication of this generation of collectors.

Tim and Sherrah were always private in their obsession with art and their passionate support of New Zealand artists but their home was a revelation. Every evening with them ended for us with a leisurely circuit of paintings we came to know very well along with lengthy discussions of what was new, what was interesting, what had to be moved to make room for an addition. And always conversations about artists, about exhibitions in NZ and overseas, about books and history and what it meant to live in this place. Their travels were always focused on art whether it be to study collections they already knew well or to find new inspirations.

When Tim was Ambassador to the United States in the late 1980s, it was during the difficult period following NZ's declaration that it would be nuclear free. The United States was not at all happy and made sure that our ambassador knew this every single day. Tim quietly went about his profession and even spearheaded during this challenging period the presentation in the US of the exhibition Pacific Parallels. Thanks to his tenacity some of the greatest New Zealand paintings as selected by Charles Eldredge were secured for tour outside the country. In such a climate it was a remarkable achievement. Tim wrote in the preface of the publication of his hope that this exhibition would 'emphasize once again how many things our two peoples share, not only our language, a sense of justice, and belief in democracy but also an energetic and lively artistic tradition.' And that hat was pure Tim Francis, staunch, idealistic and a committed New Zealander.

Then there was his famous charm and self-effacing manner, always backed up with a resolve that was rarely thwarted. Put that together with Sherrah’s unbending determination and it was little wonder they so often managed to snag the very best works from some legendary exhibitions. To be part of the Wellington art scene and never again see Tim standing shoulder to shoulder with Sherrah is going to take some getting used to.

Peter’s place

Today we have loaded up some photos from 147 Cuba Street onto OTN STUDIO

A Requiem Mass will be held for Peter McLeavey in the Sacred Heart Cathedral, Hill Street, Wellington today at 2.00pm. It will be followed by a private interment at Taita Cemetery.

Peter McLeavey 147 Cuba Street

It was never hard to find Peter McLeavey, he'd be sitting at his desk at 147 Cuba Street. If you stayed for a few minutes in the first larger room looking at the exhibition, he'd get up from his desk and come in to talk to you, whoever you were. Everyone has their own Peter McLeavey story but they usually start with one of these conversations because Peter was, before anything else, the great salesman of New Zealand art. And Peter wasn’t just selling the art works he might have in the Gallery at the time, but the whole enterprise. It included the artists he didn't represent, as well as the ones he did, the exhibitions at public institutions, the other dealers, the writers, and the wildly different audiences art attracted. When he did sell work from his own stock or exhibitions it was always with great finesse, quietly revealing to collectors (prospective and actual) the potential of their own choices. And what choices we all had from the exhibitions we saw over the decades: Colin McCahon's Walk with me, the large Woollaston landscapes painted on a full sheet of hardboard, Peter Peryer’s portraits of his wife Erika, Michael Smither’s cross-shaped homages to Rita Angus, Robin White's incisive portraits of Sam Hunt, Jacqueline Fraser's remarkable string maze, Peter Robinson’s percentage works, Julian Dashper’s deconstructed frames, Gordon Walters' Korus,  Billy Apple’s interventions .... the list is long, it is extraordinary, and it is Peter's legacy.

Openings at 147 Cuba Street were a magnet to anyone keen on contemporary art. Peter would pour famously astringent wine and on occasion step up onto a small chair to deliver a brief speech usually concluding with his familiar self-deprecating grin. But we're not talking about a man lacking in self-confidence here. For all his much-admired eccentricities, Peter ran a very tight ship indeed. When you were buying a work on time payment, monthly invoices arrived exactly on time. The envelopes were most often addressed in green ink in the well-known McLeavey hand and the accounting, even when tracing the most complex arrangements, was always 100 percent accurate. As he might have said himself, that was the McLeavey Way.

The McLeavey Way was also about creating a sense of excitement and mystery around the work in the Gallery. A painting might be tucked away in the store room, but with the door left open just enough to give a tantalising glimpse. How often were paintings left leaning face against the wall taunting you to have a look after noticing Peter was conveniently in the next room. Countless collections reflect Peter's ability to coax great works out of the studio. 'I must do more for my artists,' he'd often tell Gallery visitors and the artists, knowing they had a champion, sent great works to Wellington.

Peter has been unwell for some time and we've witnessed him slowly withdraw from the world he so dominated for nearly 50 years. That his daughter Olivia has taken over the Gallery must have been a great delight to him for it was also a family affair. Anyone who visited the Peter McLeavey Gallery regularly would have come to meet his wife Hillary and his other two children Catherine and Dominic. We are thinking of them now and what never again seeing Peter at his desk at 147 Cuba Street means to us all.

1974. Peter McLeavey puts down the hammer, steps back and gives Colin McCahon's The Song of the Shining Cuckoo a long appraising look. Turning to a regular visitor watching him he says, 'Terrific isn’t it?' It was. And so was he.

Image: Peter McLeavey, September 1989. The painting is by Julian Dashper

Stories

Jill Trevelyn's book on Peter McLeavey steps out in a somewhat more conventional get-up when it's published into the UK market.
Images: left the NZ edition and right the UK

Lillian Budd sat here

At the City Gallery Robert Leonard has just put up the exhibition McLeavey sat here looking at artists looking at the dealer Peter McLeavey. One of the works features an amended photograph of Lillian Budd reclining on McLeavey’s chaise longue after it had been painted by the artist. As it happens one of us was with Budd when the painting was done and took the chaise pic. Robert’s show seems a good moment for a side-bar to the chaise story so we have written a brief account of what went on that day along with further pics and ephemera. You can read it in a new section we have added to OTN studio called Stories.  It’s on the far right of the menu bar or use this link to go there direct.

Black and white

At the Mike Kelley exhibition in LA thinking about lillian budd posing on Peter McLeavey's painted chaise.
Image: Mike Kelley, Odalisque 2010

By the numbers: Peter McLeavey edition

 
1.175    the number  in thousands of small canvases hung on one wall of the Peter McLeavey gallery for John Reynolds’s Looking West, late afternoon, low water

3          the price in thousands of dollars Peter McLeavey put on Colin McCahon’s Northland Panels the first time it was shown in the Gallery in 1968

4          the number of women on the current artist roster of the Peter McLeavey Gallery

10        the original weekly rental for the space on Cuba Street in pounds

10        the number of architectural features in the gallery censured by Billy Apple in 1979

21        the number of artists on the current Peter McLeavey Gallery roster

25        the number in thousands of dollars paid for the Northland panels by the National Art Gallery in 1978

45        the number of years of exhibitions held at 147 Cuba Street

68        the number of artists who have had solo exhibitions at the Peter McLeavey Gallery

74        the age of Lois White when she had her first ever solo exhibition at the McLeavey Gallery in 1977

78        Peter McLeavey's age in years

94        the number of pounds received for Peter's McLeavey’s first sale (a work by Tosswill Woollaston)

100      the number of dollars in thousands the BNZ allocated to Peter McLeavey each year to build its collection in the 1980s

147      the Cuba Street address of the Peter McLeavey Gallery

544      the number of exhibitions shown at the Peter McLeavey Gallery to date

1900   the year the building at 147 Cuba Street was constructed

All but a couple of these numbers were taken from Jill Trevelyan's excellent book Peter McLeavey: the life and times of a New Zealand art dealer. You can purchase a copy here. 

Image: Peter McLeavey with a painting from Julian Dashper's exhibition in September 1989

Paging Gavin Chilcott

Everyone talks about how social media are central to the future of art museums and Te Papa has certainly setting the pace using its blog to muster help on getting a crowd to help transcribe the 41 diaries of photographer Leslie Adkin. Now the City Gallery is at it too with their new senior curator Robert Leonard on the search for some Gavin Chilcott drawings. They were made after Chilcott joined the line of artists unceremoniously dumped from the Peter McLeavey Gallery in the eighties. Chilcott didn’t take it lying down and reproduced McLeavey’s good-bye letter in a series of drawings. To spread the word and increase his chances of snagging one of these rare birds, Leonard (robert.leonard@wmt.org.nz) has used the Gallery’s Facebook page (quick view here). No bites yet by the look of it but other art-related pages have shared it around so still in with a chance.

Are you being served?

Let’s hear it for some of the unsung heroes of Jill Trevelyan's book on Peter McLeavey - the gallery assistants. Over years of checking out exhibitions at 147 Cuba, we got to meet some pretty distinctive people working in the gallery. One of the most memorable was Allen Maddox who during a lull in visitors covered the walls of the main gallery with large white cards he found in shoeboxes with each taped around the four edges and cancelled with a black cross. The effect was like walking into the skeleton of one of his paintings. Allen would also (famously) allow the odd person to peer into the mythical McLeavey storeroom.  

Others who worked with McLeavey included Graham Glover, the intriguing Derek Cowie who showed with Peter and was his assistant from ’85 to ‘89 and, of course, Ivan Anthony who both showed at the gallery and later went on to start his own McLeavey-like space in Auckland. All these guys were able to show you work and even give a price, but somehow it was always Peter who sold you on it, one way or the other.

Images: top, Ivan Anthony helping to hang a Julian Dashper painting and below, Derek Cowie unpacks an earlier Dashper exhibition.

McLeavey sat here

A big crowd turned up at the Matterhorn in Wellington last night. They were there to be with Peter McLeavey for the launch of Jill Trevelyan’s biography of New Zealand’s longest serving art dealer published by Te Papa Press. McLeavey who started selling art in 1966 has put 47 years into the business a stretch that is unmatched in Australasia.

Trevelyan told the crowd that McLeavey had given her free rein and did not ask her to change anything substantive. This is McLeavey’s story as shaped by his relationships with artists and elaborated by Trevelyan’s meticulous research in letters and interviews. The list of artists touched by McLeavey is remarkable. Richard Killeen is there being wonderfully florid describing the artist Merit Gröting painting McLeavey’s chaise longue white as “one of those mafia type, horse-head-in-the-bed sort of situations.” The chaise longue is something of a leitmotif with many people photographed on it from McLeavey himself (both sitting and lying and standing by it with his wife Hilary) to Michael Smither and Derek Cowie.

The chaise longue also poked its nose into the artist dealer relationship when Billy Apple asked to use it in 1990. “I do not wish this piece of furniture to be touched at this stage” was McLeavey’s response. Later that year he wrote again to Apple abruptly terminating their 11-year relationship. The book is full of beginnings and endings, emotions and commitment, supreme confidence and paralysing uncertainty. Colin McCahon is there in his full emotional glory and so too are Toss Wollaston and Gordon Walters and many others.   

Peter McLeavey: the life and times of a New Zealand art dealer is not a hagiography, and more power to McLeavey for letting the cracks show and to Trevelyan for not papering them over. But enough of this, we’ve got some reading to do.

Image: Peter McLeavey and the chaise longue sometime prior to Saturday 20 June, 1922

Spam

unvarnished facts, reckless guesswork, insinuations and possible inventions that have arrived at overthenet.blog@gmail.com snakepit closes mid show as bulldozers circle • word on the street puts the price of the gursky photo purchased by the auckland art gallery at around $800,000 • as the sole agency battles heat up ivan anthony instructs peter mcleavey to stop selling liz maw and andrew mcleod and to return their unsold works to him in auckland • in the meantime derek cowie has returned from london to front the peter mcleavey gallery for a while • the building that used to house the aag’s new gallery is going food court on the ground floor • hopkinson cundy have nailed a berth at frieze new york in 2013 • te papa also stumps up $86,000 for allen maddox’s painting ‘wanker’ at the les and milly paris auction • any missed details, indignant denials or additions gratefully received, and any that makes us laugh out loud rewarded.

Gate series

Since graffiti was invented in Wellington the doorway entrance to Peter McLeavey’s Gallery has been a prime location. As it was never cleaned up the site just kept on encrusting. Sometimes it was brilliant, most times it was ... like a graffitied doorway. Now a strangely suburban iron gate has been installed to stop the street artists from applying their trade. Will it work? Watch that space.

Sacking Colin McCahon

Let’s hear it for Hessian. Last week in Peter McLeavey’s gallery, we were swept back in time when looking at the framing of Colin McCahon’s 1962 painting Was this the promised land. Peter McLeavey purchased the work shortly after it was painted and had it framed, with McCahon’s agreement, onto a hessian covered board. He later sold the work to allow him to carpet the new gallery he had moved into on Cuba Street. When we saw it last week the painting was back on sale and Peter and his new Gallery Manager Olivia McLeavey were checking out new carpet samples (sisal, a Central American cousin of jute) for the Cuba Street space, spooky. 

Although the Promised land painting was on hardboard, hessian was one of the favoured materials of the time. It was cheap and readily available (bolts of canvas were still a rare commodity) and gave a satisfyingly textured surface to work on. McCahon used the material (often catalogued as unstretched jute canvas) for his great series Landscape theme and variations with the width of the hessian rolls giving the paintings their distinctive format. Up to the late seventies artists like Philip Clairmont used hessian and it was also widely employed as a covering for display screens, doors (laid flat on concrete blocks for the display of ceramics) and walls. How often in the history of art is it the small practical limitations that shape how things are seen and remembered.

Image: The corner of the McCahon painting showing its hessian covered backing board frame

Robinson meets McLeavey 2

What a difference 912 days make.

Images: top, last night. Bottom back then

Different times

One of the great things you used to be able to do as the director of a small public art museum was, once in a while, put on your dream show. It had been eight years since the Colin McCahon survey show had toured New Zealand when in 1980 at the Dowse Art Gallery (as it was then) we gathered together some of his greatest large paintings and put them together in one room simply titled Colin McCahon at the Dowse Art Gallery.

The 16 panels of The Second Gate series were still in Peter McLeavey’s upstairs store waiting for a buyer. We wrapped each panel in a rug, carried it downstairs, and loaded it into the rental van we had hired for the day. We also borrowed Practical religion. This very large work was rolled up to transport and then - impossible to believe now - hung by two people, one up on a ladder and the other feeding the painting over her shoulder as it was progressively nailed to a batten attached to the wall.

At that time the main gallery of the Dowse was still clad in grey concrete blocks and paintings were hung on two parallel rails that snaked round all the walls. Billy Apple came to give a talk on his 1979 Alterations tour, but as an über white cube guy the grey blocks were too much. His judgment? “It’s like being inside a sheet of graph paper.” To try to get some distance from the graph-like walls we sometimes hung works floating in mid-air from nylon fishing line. The large Milan Mrkusich corner painting owned by Les and Milly Paris was hung that way and floated like some sort of spiritual portal to another world. You can see in the photograph that McCahon’s Landscape theme and variations (series B) was hung that way because the banners had already been stuck to board by the Arts Council (what McCahon dryly called “their more official treatment”). Our trapeze-like hang was probably the least of their worries! Thanks to the ever-generous Peter McLeavey, one of The five wounds of Christ paintings he had recently commissioned from McCahon was also included. Although it only took a few weeks to organise and install, the McCahon show was a great success based on two factors: a simple idea and extraordinary work.

Images: Both images were taken during the 1980 Dowse Art Gallery exhibition. Top, The Second Gate series. Bottom, in the foreground is Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha with Landscape theme and variations (series B) hanging in front of the back wall.

Snap

We were gob smacked to find the iconic Peter McLeavey Gallery couch in a New Plymouth wine bar. It’s the same make and model that et al. blonded in 1992 thus ending the shortest artist relationship with the Wellington dealer yet recorded.

Walk with me

Last night The Man in the Hat, a documentary about art dealer Peter McLeavey, screened at the Wellington Film Festival. Founded on religious metaphor, the fight for cultural recognition, a bunch of great artists and a couple of rooms in Cuba Street, the Peter McLeavey Gallery helped promote New Zealand art here, and abroad, through the collections of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Recently a couple of academics, replying to a charge that they had ignored Peter McLeavey’s role in the Mrkusich story responded, “It did not cross our minds to devote any of the text to an analysis of his role as Mrkusich's dealer. Ultimately, he was just that - Mrkusich's dealer. What is there of interest about that?” A quick look round New Zealand public and private collections and a viewing of The Man in the Hat would put a silver bullet into that one.
Image: Peter McLeavey speaks at the screening of The Man in the Hat

147 Cuba Street

Since March 1971 when we moved to Wellington, once a month, like clockwork, an envelope often hand-addressed by Peter McLeavey has arrived in our mailbox announcing his next exhibition. Toward the end of the month for many, many years, an invoice or statement with what we owed in our laborious part payments would follow.

Peter was selling work from his flat on the Terrace for a couple of years before opening at 147 Cuba Street where he still puts up 10 or so exhibitions a year. He once told an interviewer his reason for setting up shop in Wellington and, "not in Aussie, not in downtown Dusseldorf. Not going into Madrid on a Friday night, but here,” was because, “there wasn't any Prado in this neck of the woods. There wasn't any Bayreuth on the other side up the Hutt Valley. There was no British Museum here. There was no Met here."

Like many dealers Peter McLeavey is hooked on discretion. There is no tittle-tattle about who’s bought what from the latest show, but now there is an unexpected opportunity to become an insider. Luit Bieringa with photographer Leon Narbey has produced a film on McLeavey called The Man in the Hat giving an hour plus ten look at McLeavey’s world. You can catch it at the International Film Festival. Check out your local screening times by entering The Man in the Hat into the search box here.
Image: Peter McLeavey hanging a painting by Julian Dashper in September 1989.

Other OTN Posts about or around Peter McLeavey
Where in the world is Peter McLeavey
McLeavey: Give us a sign
Hans and Martha Lachmann
McLeavey sighting

Where in the world is Peter McLeavey?

In Alan Wright and Edward Hanfling’s book Mrkusich: the art of transformation we noticed some revisionism that could do with an airing. The authors declare that “In Mrkusich’s paintings small things matter” so in that spirit we began a search for Peter McLeavey.

Peter McLeavey sold his first work by Milan Mrkusich in 1966, his first year in business, and held a one-person Mrkusich exhibition in the first year he opened his gallery at 147 Cuba Street. In all, McLeavey had 20 Mrkusich exhibitions between 1969 and 1990 and sold a large number of Mrkusich paintings into public and private collections.

Taking into account this substantial relationship, it is odd that there is only a single reference to McLeavey in the text. Compare this to five page references for Ikon Gallery (three Mrkusich exhibitions), 12 for Barry Lett Galleries (four exhibitions), six for Peta/James Gallery (three exhibitions) and nine page references for Sue Crockford Gallery (19 exhibitions).

Mrkusich’s dealer history is well covered for Lett, Vuletic, Data and Crockford but ignores McLeavey mentioning only a single sale. What’s going on? The incident that resulted in McLeavey and Mrkusich parting may well still smart for the protagonists, but we’d have thought it should not be allowed to distort the history of the artist, his work and his longest-serving dealer. But there’s more.

The “Selected Exhibition History” at the back of the book is indeed selected. The last Mrkusich exhibition at McLeavey’s recorded in the book takes place in 1983. In fact the final exhibition was held in 1990, seven years later, with the result that six of the McLeavey Mrkusich exhibitions are simply vanished. This decision has also eliminated any critical writing done over that period by the likes of Ian Wedde who we assume reviewed a number of McLeavey’s Mrkusich shows. What ever the differences artist and dealer may have had, the job of the historian and critic is to try to tell as complete a story as possible. From the role of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a major Mrkusich collector to his championing of Gordon Walters, no history of New Zealand’s brush with modernism could be accurately told without Peter McLeavey and his Gallery as key players.

In the meantime, if you want to find Peter McLeavey, he's where he always is, 147 Cuba Street.

Images: Top, the now famous photograph of Peter McLeavey and Lenin (McLeavey can be seen standing next to the podium to the right of Lenin – click image to enlarge). Bottom, the same photograph as manipulated for the Russian people after McLeavey's disgrace.

Hide and seek

If we were to make a list of the most compelling spaces in New Zealand, right up there would be Peter McLeavey’s stock room. What was in there was the subject of many, many conversations and only a rare few were allowed to squeeze in and check it out. Add the stock room upstairs that nobody ever seems to have entered and the sense of mystery was complete. Guessing what was in Peter McLeavey’s stock room or pretending to have insider information about it became part of an elaborate game with Peter and his artists playing centre court.
We were reminded of this experience and the allure of the unknown at the Basel Art Fair as we watched selected collectors ushered into small backrooms constructed in some gallery booths. More than stock rooms many of them were private selling areas. Not all dealers used the mystique of the back room to entice sales though. Larry Gagossian, one of the most powerful people in contemporary art, spectacularly did his business from a desk in the front of his booth, in full view of anyone who walked by. But then, that has a mystique all its own.
Images: Larry Gagossian where everyone can see him. Right, backrooms.