Mystery death of ‘world’s leading expert on Lowry’
DAD-OF-ONE WAS FOUND DEAD IN BULGARIA
MOVING tributes have been paid to an art dealer who was the ‘world’s leading expert’ on LS Lowry and whose death at his Bulgarian holiday home remains shrouded in mystery.
Dad-of-one Ivan Aird, 57, from Stockport, was found dead at the apartment in the resort of Sunny Beach last June.
A post-mortem was inconclusive and a coroner has ruled she is unable to say what caused his ‘sudden’ and ‘unexpected’ death. Ivan, born and raised in Cheadle, was an art dealer, like his father George Aird, who was friend and agent to Stretford-born artist Lowry.
Ivan would regularly spend time with Lowry as a child, which sparked a lifelong passion for and love of his work. When he became an adult he set up his own art dealership and was highly thought of in the art world where he was considered the world’s leading authority on Lowry.
His heartbroken wife Louise has now paid tribute to her husband who she said ‘lived life to the full.’
An inquest at South Manchester Coroner’s Court heard that last summer Ivan had travelled over to stay at the flat the family owns in Nessebar Fort Club on the coastal Sunny Beach resort.
The hearing was told Louise last spoke to her husband on Monday, June 19 and that the last known contact anyone had had with him was at 3pm on Tuesday 20, when he had told the person he spoke to that he was ‘really worn out and needed a rest.’ After this time, the family was unable to contact him.
The family asked a friend, who was also in the country, to check on him. When they visited, on Thursday, June 22, they were forced to break into the property and found him unresponsive on the sofa.
The local police concluded there were no suspicious circumstances, and a post-mortem was carried out when his body was repatriated to the UK. It was unable to determine a cause of death.
The hearing was told he had suffered a neck injury in a serious car accident in the 1990s, and Louise said he had been diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2022, but was in remission with all his recent test results clear.
However, the pathologist said neither of these had caused or contributed to his death. She said he might have suffered a sudden cardiac arrest due to an arrhythmia but that there was insufficient evidence for her to conclude definitively on this.
Senior Coroner Alison Mutch recorded a narrative conclusion that Ivan ‘died suddenly in Bulgaria, where the cause of death could not be established at post-mortem, but police in Bulgaria didn’t find any suspicious circumstances.’
Louise, Ivan’s wife of 28 years, told the Manchester Evening News following the hearing: “He was funny. He was helpful - he always wanted to help people. He lived life to the full.”
Ivan had said some of his earliest memories were of goying to LS Lowry’s house in Mottram, Tameside, with his father, George.
Ivan, who was 10 years old when Lowry died in February 1976, was “the world’s leading expert on Lowry,” Louise said. “He was too humble to say that about himself but he was.
“He was absolutely besotted with him and adored his work. He was everything to him.”