Peter McLeavey 1936 - 2015

New Zealand's revered art dealer Peter McLeavey has passed away. He will be missed!

Biography on art dealer Peter McLeavey wins book of the year award

Jill Trevelyan's biography of legendary art dealer Peter McLeavey, the charismatic, pioneering art dealer who since the 1960s has shaped New Zealand art, has won the 2014 New Zealand Post Book of the Year Award. The finalists for this year's award included Eleanor Catton's Booker Prize winning novel The Luminaries. Read more...

Review of The Life and TImes of New Zealand Art Dealer

You can read a review of Jill Trevelyan's biography of art dealer Peter McLeavey here.
Image: Peter McLeavey

The life and times of a New Zealand art dealer

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa has released Jill Trevelyan's much-anticipated biography of legendary art dealer Peter McLeavey, "the charismatic, pioneering art dealer who since the 1960s has shaped - even transformed - New Zealand art." Read more...

The Man in the Hat

Luit Bieringa's documentary on legendary art dealer Peter McLeavey will screen at cinemas around the country in the 2009 New Zealand International Film Festival. This is Bieringa's second film with producer Jan Bieringa and follows ANS WESTRA: Private Journeys/Private Signposts, which premiered in the 2006 New Zealand International Film Festival.

"There's an airy spirit of existential enquiry running through Luit Bieringa's lovely portrait of Wellington art-dealer Peter McLeavey. A fundamental biographer's question - what makes this guy tick - is quietly turned back on us: McLeavey seems to live a highly ordered life in a state of perpetual curiosity about what makes any of us in this corner of the world tick, himself included. Starting out as an a dealer from his bedroom flat in 1966, McLeavey was already championing Toss Woollaston, Colin McCahon and Gordon Walters as purveyors of vision informed by New Zealand experience. Forty years and 500 or so exhibitions later, he's still there. Cinematographer Leon Narbey follows the dapper man in a hat from his home in Hill Street on the circuitous scenic route he takes each morning to work. Bieringa intersperses this lyrical picture of McLeavey's Wellington with readings from his correspondence and frank, revealing conversations with the man himself." New Zealand International Film Festival

Credits: Luit Bieringa (Director), Jan Bieringa (Producer), Leon Narbey (Photography), Lala Rolls (Editor); Plan9 (Music); Sam Neill (Narration)

Image: Film still, The Man in the Hat