Elizabeth Laverty didn’t just collect art, mourners hear
Melbourne philanthropist and art collector Elizabeth Laverty died in September aged 88. At her memorial service, Australia Council chair Wesley Enoch said she made a world around art. She and her late husband Colin built one of Australia's largest contemporary collections and gave generously to public institutions.
Melbourne philanthropist and art collector Elizabeth Laverty, who died in September aged 88, was celebrated at a memorial service in Melbourne.
Elizabeth Laverty didn’t just collect art, Wesley Enoch told mourners. Enoch, chair of the Australia Council, met her when he was the freshly appointed director of the Sydney Festival. “Liz did not merely collect art or attend the world of art. She made a world around it,” he said.
He described art, in her hands, as “a way of gathering people, of paying attention, of making conversation more interesting and life more expansive.”
Two calls a day
About five years ago, Enoch said, the two began speaking twice a day. “Those calls were not grand occasions. That is why they meant so much,” he said. He called them “a kind of shared geography between us.”
A childhood among paintings
Laverty grew up with a Frederick McCubbin on the wall, and more than one. Her grandfather's interest in painting gave her a lifelong love of art, which turned into collecting and supporting artists.
Portraits of her by Richard Lewer were finalists in the Archibald Prize four times. She was also known as Liz and Lizzie.
The Laverty collection
Her husband, Dr Colin Laverty OAM, a pathologist, died in 2013. He was best known for research into the human papillomavirus, which led to vaccines for cervical cancer.
The couple shared a love of galleries and artists. From the late 1980s they travelled to Indigenous art centres around the country. In 2013, Elizabeth recalled buying their first painting together, a Tony Tuckson, in 1984 for about $7000.
Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, which showed the collection in 1998, described the Laverty Collection as one of the largest and most diverse of contemporary Australian art.
In 2013, 266 works from it were sold, then valued at $4 million to $6 million. They included pieces by Peter Booth, Emily Kngwarreye, Ken Whisson, William Robinson, Rosalie Gascoigne, Richard Larter, Louise Hearman, Robert Klippel and Boxer Milner Tjampitjin.
“We love all our paintings. We collected from the heart, but there’s just so much work and so much of it in storage,” she said in 2012. “It’s time to set them free.”
Giving beyond the walls
The couple helped lift the profile of contemporary Aboriginal art. According to Candice Bruce, they raised money for kidney dialysis for Kintore (Walungurru in Pintupi language) in the Western Desert.
They also backed the Swimming Pool Appeal, which funded pools in Kintore and at Maningrida in Arnhem Land. They were early supporters of the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale and urged other collectors to give to it.
Elizabeth is survived by her daughter, Jane Kleimeyer, and her stepchildren Georgina Laverty-Bill and Sam Laverty.
