Tate Intrigue For Turner Art

The Tate went to remarkable lengths to gain the support of the government and the courts before paying out £3.1m to help recover two stolen Turner paintings, it has been revealed. The new details come in a dossier of documents, dated April 2000 and released this week, which relate the moves taken by Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota to regain the paintings. The documents show that the Metropolitan police and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport were both involved in the planning. More redolent of a thriller plot than the normally sedate world of museums, the process of finding the paintings involved secret bank accounts, code words, stashes of cash in briefcases and a German Dean Martin impersonator in whose garage one of the paintings was hidden. For the full story - click the title Irish Art