Ancient Art

If you have ever made shadow pictures on the wall of a dark room with your hands in front of a light, then you know a little something about shadow puppets. Shadow puppetry is an ancient art that began in Asia thousands of years ago. The puppet shown here was made recently in Java, an island in Indonesia. The character it portrays is Dewi Sri, the rice goddess of Java. Dewi Sri is very popular in Java because rice is the most important food there and across all of Asia.

An Italian court has upheld an order for the seizure of a masterpiece of the J. Paul Getty Museum's antiquities collection, finding that the bronze statue of a victorious athlete was illegally exported from Italy before the museum purchased it for $4 million in 1976. The ruling Thursday by a regional magistrate in Pesaro will likely prolong the legal battle over the statue, a signature piece of the Getty's embattled antiquities collection whose return Italian authorities have sought for years.

Major archeological discoveries from the Land of the Bible go on view Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in what supporters of the event are calling the largest and most important exhibition of ancient art from Israel ever to be shown in the United States. "Treasures of the Holy Land: Ancient Art From the Israel Museum" from Israel's national museum in Jerusalem contains nearly 200 antiquities covering the periods from 10,300 BC to the 7th Century.

Most weekends, 25-year-old Brad Meredith stands deep in the past, painting tiny lines that extend back to the candy-apple, rockabilly 1950s. By day, Meredith builds hot rods and custom cars with his father, Carl, at their 13-person shop, Carl's Custom Cars in Red Oak, Texas In his spare time, he immerses himself in the ancient art of pinstriping, "laying lines" with a fine brush down the sides of cars and on their trunks, hoods and panels....

Ogling the centuries-old Syrian artworks and artifacts ensconced in glass cases, archeologist Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati exclaimed: "We saw some of these things come out of the ground--it was so exciting!" Of course, not many viewers will have the same intimate relationship with the Near Eastern objects on display at the Natural History Museum through June 1. But the treasures in "Ebla to Damascus: Art and Archaeology of Ancient Syria" are still likely to draw close inspection.

If you ever wondered where the earliest concepts for the movies came from, Wednesday's performance of "Gilgamesh" by Italy's shadow puppet theater, Teatro Gioco Vita, would have provided some of the answer. In the continuing mix of workshops, exhibits and performances that crowd the Puppeteers of America's six-day international conclave on the campus of the Claremont Colleges, Gioco Vita's appearance at the Garrison Theatre offered a revealing marriage of ancient art and new technology.

On a moonless night the hungry black cormorant dives from a boat to catch fish that might find their way to the emperor's table. Six Imperial master fishermen practice the ancient art of fishing with the birds on the Nagara River in the central Japanese city of Gifu. They set out at night with their long-necked cormorants in boats with a lantern on the bow during the season from May to October.

In a part of Inglewood noted more for crime, poverty and drugs than for the arts stands a small gallery--a sanctuary, its owner says--where visitors can find refuge in the 16th Century. Gregorian chants in the background greet the ear at the English Brass Rubbing Centre, while the eye finds hulking, life-sized figures of medieval knights, ladies, friars and royalty.

Tiny ivory figurines recently discovered in the Swabian Mountains of Germany suggest that the first modern humans to make their way to Europe were "astonishingly precocious artists," researchers said Thursday. The three figurines -- a horse's head, a half man-half lion and a mallard-like bird diving into water -- were discovered by archeologist Nicholas J. Conard of the University of Tubingen at Hohle Fels Cave, about 12 miles southwest of Ulm.

Your journey begins in ancient Egypt: Note carefully the sarcophagus adorned with winged scarabs. Moving on to ancient Assyria, you find the monumental 4,000-pound stone reliefs. Iran is next, represented by a bronze horse bit from the Iron Age. Then comes early Grecian gold earrings. Finally, you reach ancient Rome, epitomized by a towering sculpture of the goddess Athena. Not a highbrow travel agent's itinerary, this cultural excursion may be taken at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Over the last five years, the J. Paul Getty Museum has earned a reputation as a leading reformer on a topic that has embroiled American museums in scandal for the past decade: the acquisition of recently looted antiquities. After evidence of the museum's longtime participation in the illicit trade was uncovered by Italian and Greek investigators, the Getty agreed to return 49 of its most prized pieces of ancient art, cultivated collaborative relationships with those countries and adopted a strict acquisition policy, setting a standard that has been adopted by museums across the country.

The J. Paul Getty trust named a new museum director Tuesday, filling a job that had been open for more than two years and signaling its renewed commitment to acquiring world-class works of art. Timothy Potts, 53, will begin as director of the Getty Museum on Sept. 1, leaving the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in England, where he has served as director since 2008. In the U.S. he is best known for directing the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth from 1998 to 2007.

When Robert E. Hecht Jr. arrived at the loading platform of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the fall of 1972, he was carrying a large wooden box and was escorted by an armed guard. Inside the box was perhaps the finest Greek vase to survive antiquity, a masterpiece that would soon be making headlines around the world. The Met had agreed to pay a record $1 million for the ancient work. Hecht said it had been in the private collection of a certain Lebanese gentleman.

No verdict in art trial The trial of Robert E. Hecht Jr., the alleged mastermind of an international black market in ancient art, ended with no verdict this week when a three-judge panel in Rome found the time allotted for the trial had expired. The ruling brings an ambiguous end to a sweeping investigation that traced relics looted from tombs in Italy through a network of smugglers, dealers and private collectors before appearing on display at museums in the United States, Europe and beyond.

You could spend a solid year sniffing out cool spots for travelers in Venice, Santa Monica, Pacific Palisades and Malibu - scores of hotels, hundreds of restaurants and bars, more than 30 miles of coastline. But you're new to the scene, or you haven't visited in a while, and who has a year anyway? We offer the seventh installment of our yearlong series of Southern California close-ups - 11 micro-itineraries that will lead you to fresh fruit, ancient art, pub darts, magic, gymnastics, Venus on roller skates and J. Paul Getty on how to be rich.

In naming James Cuno president and chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust, its board members surprised many in the art world by choosing a staunch defender of the unfettered acquisition of ancient art to lead an institution that, after a decade of scandals, has all but abandoned the practice. Since 2001, when the Getty's former antiquities curator Marion True was charged in Italy with trafficking in looted art, the Getty has returned dozens of ancient masterpieces it concluded were found through illegal excavations.

Ellen D. Reeder, a scholar and archeologist specializing in ancient art, took over Monday as director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Reeder spent the last two years as deputy director for art at the in-the-news Brooklyn Museum of Art and the previous 15 years as curator of ancient art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. A show Reeder organized in 1995 at the Walters, "Pandora: Women in Classical Greece," laid the groundwork for her interest in the director's post.

It was an ugly and inappropriate nose, a bad Jimmy Durante appendage attached by some well-meaning latter-day restorer to an otherwise graceful Egyptian stone head. But conservators at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, confronted with the adulterated statue, did not immediately restore the work to its original state. Restore is a dirty word around the conservation lab.

The trial of former Getty Museum antiquities curator Marion True ended in a bureaucratic whimper Wednesday in Rome when a three-judge panel halted the proceedings, ruling that the statute of limitations had expired on criminal charges that she had conspired to traffic in looted art. The development is an ambiguous end to a legal saga that has had a profound effect on American museums. When True was charged by an Italian prosecutor in 2005, it sent shock waves through the art world and was the first time an American museum official had been criminally charged by a foreign government.

It's a banner year for Shanghai — the World Expo has just opened in the city, the first on Chinese soil and the most expensive and largest world's fair ever. Superlatives come naturally to Shanghai, a city that rapidly recovered its sense of mission after the downtrodden days of the Cultural Revolution. Skyscrapers pierce the sky, fashionable Western-style shopping malls abound. Of course, all this came from a legacy — a legacy of international trade and cosmopolitan sophistication that reached a peak in the 1930s.