'Big picture' look at NZ art scene

This is a gorgeous soft-covered book to look at and hold, with its wonderful maniacal image of the subject by John B. Turner in 1969, about the time we should have been buying up works by McCahon and Woollaston.

We would all be rich if we had bought into McLeavey's vision.

McLeavey launched our most important modern artists on the market, and in the case of Woollaston even exhorting him to paint bigger, which he did to great effect and profit.

He has handled Len Lye, Milan Mrkusich, Gordon Walters, Michael Illingworth, Richard Killeen, Robin White, John Reynolds, Yvonne Todd, Jeffery Harris, Laurence Aberhart and many others from his upstairs gallery in a decaying old Cuba St, Wellington, gallery.

Cultivating collectors, he singlemindedly created an environment in which artists did prosper.

Jill Trevelyan has made New Zealand artists her specialty, and done them great service in recording in detail their lives and productions. Here she takes the opportunity through artists' correspondence and interaction with McLeavey to give us a big picture of the New Zealand art scene.

Many people have a lot of love and respect for McLeavey, and the letters are there to prove it, but I did not need so much stuff about his growing up in railway towns and the disappointments of his parents. The ordinary can become extraordinary in the telling, but the drollness and wit of the man does not emerge in these pages. McLeavey (or Peter, as the author refers to him) remains for me a rather earnest, unguarded fellow.

At the back of the chronologically ordered book, there is an impressive list of exhibitions 1968-2013 and thorough author's notes, bibliography and index.

- Peter Goodwin is an ODT subeditor.