Art Thefts

With their floppy ears, shiny brown eyes and whimsical grins, they were the faces that launched a legal battle extending from Paris to Beijing. On Monday, a French judge ruled that the 18th century Chinese bronze heads depicting a rabbit and a rat can be auctioned off this week at Christie's in Paris as part of the estate of the late designer Yves Saint Laurent.

For more than 25 years Joseph Chapman has made his living, in part, by breaking into museums. "I walked through the museum like I was a visitor and then at the end of the day I went into a men's room stall and hid there," said Chapman, 60, a ruggedly built man who speaks about art with reverence. The story he was telling took place in 1965 at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, Tex. "At 5 o'clock I heard the toggle switches go and everything got dark and quiet," he said.

In the tiny Texas town of Whitewright, hard on the Oklahoma border, a scandal is brewing in which a man who raised prize orchids and ran a hardware store before his death 10 years ago may have been the perpetrator of one of the largest art thefts ever recorded. His name was Joe T. Meador, by all accounts a quiet, unassuming man who served honorably in World War II and ended his service stationed in what is now East Germany in 1945.

Villazon to sing again Star tenor Rolando Villazon says he will make his comeback at the Vienna State Opera in March after recovering from throat surgery. The singer announced in April that he needed surgery to remove a cyst on his larynx and has been resting his voice in order to make a proper recovery. Villazon said on his website Monday that he will perform the role of Nemorino in Gaetano Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'Amore" -- known in English as "The Elixir of Love" -- in the Austrian capital on March 22. It will mark his first public appearance after surgery and will be followed by more stints in a slew of other cities, including Berlin, Paris and Zurich.

An armed man in a "ninja-style" mask tied up a part-owner of a Van Nuys art agency and distribution house, then escaped in the company's van with artworks reportedly worth more than $1 million, police said Tuesday. The robber, who police said might have had accomplices, took more than 1,000 artworks, including three oil paintings and hundreds of lithographs and serigraphs from Eagle Limited's warehouse near the Van Nuys Airport.

The thief, or thieves, was either very smart or very, very lucky. The side door of the home in the hills of Encino was unlocked on the Saturday morning in late August. The elderly owners were in a back room, otherwise occupied. The maid had stepped out. So the thief stepped in -- and made quick work of the wealthy real estate investors' multimillion-dollar art collection. Marc Chagall's "Les Paysans," gone. Diego Rivera's "Mexican Peasant," a blank spot on the wall. Arshile Gorky's "Cubist Still Life," ditto.

Bill Martin's case file reads like an Erle Stanley Gardner sampler. There is the Case of the Crafty Sword Swiper, the Unmasking of the Unscrupulous Pawnbroker, Mystery at the Ebell Club. These are not the recollections of a worn and crusty private detective or a crime novelist. They are recent cases of stolen art that Martin handled as the Los Angeles Police Department's art-theft specialist, working in a world of exotic locales and twisting plots.

News that Italian police are investigating the possibility that a classical Greek statue recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum might have been smuggled out of Sicily a decade ago has caused an international uproar. (On Friday, an Italian magistrate said he believed the Aphrodite sculpture bought by the Getty for $20 million was not stolen from Sicily as indicated in earlier reports this week, but the case there is awaiting final evaluation.

Like critics trying out adjectives to describe a perplexing canvas, investigators and art experts are looking at the theft this week of two Maxfield Parrish paintings from a West Hollywood gallery and straining to understand. Most find the thief's work "sophisticated." But they also label the $4-million disappearance "disturbing," "puzzling" and "weird." Parrish, whose works of vibrant color and billowing clouds have fetched auction prices as high as $4.

The wood-paneled offices are tucked away on the fourth floor of the Explorers Club in Manhattan--a nice bit of symbolism--and serve as a central clearing house in the international search for stolen art. When the phone rang on Monday, it was no surprise that the FBI was on the other end of the line.