My partner Susan Loppert, who has died aged 81, was the moving force behind the development of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts in the 1990s. This pioneering programme, which Susan directed for 10 years (1993-2003), was a hugely innovative and imaginative project to bring the visual and performing arts into the heart of London’s newest teaching hospital.
As Susan wrote in an article for the Guardian in 2006, this was not about “the odd Monet reproduction or carols at Christmas … but 2,000 original works of art hung in the vast spaces of the stunning atrial building” as well as in clinics, wards and treatment areas – many of them specially commissioned. And on top of this, full-length operas, an annual music festival, Indian dancers in residence, and workshops by artists from poets to puppeteers.
Susan was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, to Phyllis (nee Orkin, and known as “Inkey” because of her dark hair), a lawyer and anti-apartheid activist, and her husband Eric Loppert, a manager. She was brought up in the liberal Jewish community in Johannesburg, and although she became a staunch atheist she never lost her cultural connection to Judaism – hers was a Jewishness of the jokes and the food, as she put it.
After studying English at the University of the Witwatersrand, she moved to London to start a postgraduate degree in the history of art at the Courtauld Institute, but she left before graduating, offended by the frivolity of its student culture compared with Wits. Her subsequent working life was self-made and variegated: not so much a linear career as a series of touchdowns in some of the 20th century’s most interesting cultural landing places.
After a spell as editorial assistant at the Paris Review, she worked for Robert Fraser in his Mayfair gallery, standing in for him as director when he was jailed in the Rolling Stones trial in 1967 (Richard Hamilton dedicated his poster Swingeing London to Susan). In the 1970s and 80s she worked for Sotheby’s in London and in Cape Town, and as a freelance art dealer and consultant.
In 1993 Susan became the first director of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital Arts, propelling it into the vanguard of the emerging arts in hospital movement and earning herself an international reputation. She had spent a good deal of her life in hospital after contracting polio in childhood, which caused lifetime damage to her spine and lungs. This made her determined to break down the artificial walls that compressed the richness of life lived outside hospital into the one-dimensional identity of “patient”.
She oversaw an ambitious and imaginative programme of art purchases and cultural activities, and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to fund them – not a penny was charged to NHS budgets. Her work was recognised by a series of honours, including a European Women of Achievement award (2004), a Creative Britons award (2000) and a Londoner of the Year award (1998).
Susan was a fearless activist and networker. Feisty, opinionated and demanding, she defended her vision and her artists like a lioness with her cubs.
She is survived by me (her partner of 25 years), and by her brothers, Max and David.
