Gustave Courbet

In 1853 Alfred Bruyas, the son of a banker who used the family fortune to collect art, visited the annual salon in Paris, where the talk of the show was a large painting by Gustave Courbet called "The Bathers." The picture depicts a dark forest glade where a very large woman is stepping out of a shallow pool, her more than ample behind not quite covered by a towel. Critics applauded the young artist's bravura painting but not its content.

By coincidence, two unusually engaging museum exhibitions currently consider provocative notions about using the landscape as a subject for art. Like bookends, one considers the origins of landscape painting nearly 150 years ago while the other scans the field today. Surprisingly, an unexpected similarity emerges. The origin of the genre in 19th century France is the subject of "Courbet and the Modern Landscape," which opened last Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood.

By coincidence, two unusually engaging museum exhibitions currently consider provocative notions about using the landscape as a subject for art. Like bookends, one considers the origins of landscape painting nearly 150 years ago while the other scans the field today. Surprisingly, an unexpected similarity emerges. The origin of the genre in 19th century France is the subject of "Courbet and the Modern Landscape," which opened last Tuesday at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood.

In 1853 Alfred Bruyas, the son of a banker who used the family fortune to collect art, visited the annual salon in Paris, where the talk of the show was a large painting by Gustave Courbet called "The Bathers." The picture depicts a dark forest glade where a very large woman is stepping out of a shallow pool, her more than ample behind not quite covered by a towel. Critics applauded the young artist's bravura painting but not its content.

Expensive Flowers: "Flowers on a Bench," a luxuriant still-life painting by 19th-Century French realist Gustave Courbet, was sold Wednesday for $1.54 million. The sale surpassed the artist's previous record price of $1.44 million, set in 1990. An unidentified Swiss art foundation bought the record-setting painting in a Christie's New York auction from the estates of industrialists Palmer and Charles Ducommun.

For decades, modern artists belittled traditional academic skill. Now that revisionist conservatism is in the air, many want old-fashioned technique and find that it's not so easy to come by. Neo-Realist Richard Shaffer shows a score of oil-on-paper landscape studies executed on a recent Italian sojourn near Lake Como. They capture the general tone of 19th-Century American Manifest Destiny artists like Frederick Church.

For decades, art lovers believed the painting was lost, maybe even destroyed, a casualty of Red Army or Nazi looting in Hungary during World War II. But unlike so many other tales of plundered treasures, this one has a happy ending. Gustave Courbet's sensuous "Nude Woman Reclining" -- showing a tousle-haired, sleeping woman in white stockings and little else -- is on exhibit starting today at the Grand Palais.

Foul Play: John Miller's personal metaphor for late 20th-Century life is . . . excrement. True, he does provide a few small, guileless drawings of suburban interiors. (Are they meant to be tongue-in-cheek reminders of Paradise lost?

When a small but powerful 1826 painting by Corot of a craggy rock formation came up for auction three years ago at Sotheby's in New York, Getty curator Scott Schaefer was working with a museum trustee who wanted to buy it. When the trustee was outbid, Schaefer tracked down the winning bidders and was "absolutely shocked," he said, to find that they lived so close: Brian and Eva Sweeney, a Manhattan Beach couple who were quickly and quietly building...

The heirs of the Budapest-based Jewish banker Mor Lipot Herzog have filed a lawsuit in U.S. courts against Hungary and its leading national museums, seeking the return of what they have identified as more than 40 works of art looted from Herzog's collection during the Holocaust. The lawsuit values the artworks, including well-known paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, El Greco, Francisco de Zurbaran and Gustave Courbet, at more than $100 million. "This is one of the largest — if not the largest — restitution claims ever filed in U.S. courts by a single family against another nation," says Michael S. Shuster, the New York attorney representing the family.

They are like a vast shelf of sad, unfinished stories still awaiting a redemptive ending: artworks looted by the Nazis during World War II, now being sought by aged owners who escaped or survived the Holocaust, or by a new generation of heirs who are carrying on -- or initiating -- the quest for what was lost. But the compelling dramas of those searches often won't play out to a conclusion without an exhausting slog through an intricate tangle of arcane and conflicting law.