The Nevin Art Collection

Mr Nevin, an attendant at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, stole 2,544 items from the 1930s to the 1950s, according to records recently released by the National Archives in the UK.
He stole prints, oil paintings, musical instruments, ceramics, lacquer boxes, 98 Japanese swords and two imitation 18th century French tables. About 100 of the recovered items were irreparably damaged. The thefts went undetected for years because the museum amazingly had not done an inventory. Police found over 2,000 items at his home. Nevin got three years in prison.

Art Failure

The proposed levy on the sale of European artwork will devastate UK dealers. The measure will give artists, and their descendants for 70 years after their deaths, claims upon a levy imposed every time one of their works is resold. Very fair, some will say. Yet in practice, it will simply cause owners of contemporary art to send to markets where the levy is not applied, notably Switzerland and the US.
It will deal a devastating blow at the London market, which today accounts for half of all European art sales. Experience in countries such as France, where a droit de suite already operates, shows that it is very costly to collect. It chiefly benefits not impoverished living artists, but the relations of rich dead ones.
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Irish Art

Orkney to Edinburgh

The extraordinary woman called Margaret Gardiner is now in her 100th year. She created one of the most important art collections in the UK - then gifted it to the Pier Arts Centre on Orkney. The collection is now on loan to the Edinburgh Dean Gallery giving an unprecedented chance to see a significant body of British modernism from one of the most important art movements of the 20th century.
The exhibition amply describes the development of St Ives modernism. The peerless simplicity of three seascapes by Roger Hilton, still-life works by Nicholson and the Wallis ship paintings, the priceless Hepworth Large and Small Form of 1934, Patrick Heron - pulsating Small Red Square of 1958, William Scott - 1956 Still Life. These, and world-class Hepworths are as good as anything in the Tate.
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Irish Art