Paintings

In the remote northeastern corner of Guatemala, archaeologists have found what appears to be the 9th century workplace of a city scribe, an unusual dwelling adorned with magnificent pictures of the king and other royals and the oldest known Maya calendar. This year has been particularly controversial among some cultists because of the belief that the Maya calendar predicts a major cataclysm - perhaps the end of the world - on Dec. 21, 2012. Archaeologists know that is not true, but the new find, written on the plaster equivalent of a modern scientist's whiteboard, strongly reinforces the idea that the Maya calendar projects thousands of years into the future.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — A South African art gallery that displayed a controversial painting showing the country's president with his genitals exposed announced Tuesday that it was closing its doors temporarily because of threats. The decision came after vandals defaced the artwork earlier in the day. Lara Koseff, spokeswoman for the Goodman Gallery, said there had been numerous threats made against the gallery after its display of "The Spear," by Cape Town artist Brett Murray.

Two paintings that the Nazis forced a Jewish art dealer to sell off in the 1930s have been returned to his estate, and its heirs said Wednesday they were working hard to recover hundreds more. The Max Stern estate is trying to recover all of the estimated 400 works sold off from Stern's collection between 1935 and 1937, estate representative Clarence Epstein said. Only 25 have been located thus far, he said. The returned paintings -- "Flight From Egypt," by the circle of Jan Wellens de Cock, and "Girl From the Sabine Mountains," by Franz Xaver Winterhalter -- will be loaned to art museums in Canada for display.

If you're headed anywhere near Jackson , Wyo., this summer, leave open a few hours for the National Museum of Wildlife Art , which turns 25 this month. The museum sits on a butte at the edge of Jackson, overlooking an elk refuge, and its collection includes paintings, sculpture and photography - a great way to glimpse nature in all four seasons, no matter when you're there. I was introduced to the place two years ago. Besides beholding many great images of critters, I learned that the folk artist behind the “Peaceable Kingdom” image (lion, lamb, etc.,  gathered in an idyllic rural setting)

Police in Marseille, France, recovered a Monet landscape and three other paintings that gunmen had stolen in August from the Museum of Fine Arts in Nice, judicial officials said. The paintings were discovered in a parked utility vehicle, the prosecutor's office said. Together, they are worth about $1.55 million, police have said. The paintings were Monet's 1897 "Cliffs Near Dieppe," the 1890 "Lane of Poplars at Moret" by fellow Impressionist Alfred Sisley and Flemish master Jan Brueghel the Elder's 17th century "Allegory of Earth" and "Allegory of Water."

Five paintings by U.S. pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were stolen from a museum close to Stockholm early Friday. Thieves broke into the Aaberg Museum in Baalsta outside the Swedish capital just after 2 a.m. and stole three Lichtenstein artworks and two Warhol paintings, museum Chief Executive Carina Aaberg said. The stolen pieces have a value of about $500,000, she said.

Italian police have recovered 10 masterpieces that were stolen in 2004 from an ancient religious complex in Rome, officials said Tuesday. Officers located the paintings in December. The works were wrapped in newspapers and hidden in the trailer of a suspected art smuggler, police said. Investigators believe the man was about to take the works abroad to sell them, Carabinieri paramilitary police art squad chief Gen. Giovanni Nistri said. The suspect is under investigation for receiving stolen goods but is not believed to be behind the theft.

I wasn't alive when the Neorealist movement shattered the staid cinematic conventions of post-WWII Italy. But ever since I fell in love with that style of filmmaking I've become aware that realism, as an aesthetic, always surfaces in times of difficulty and change. Yet war and panic also inspire escapist fantasies, abstraction and private, invented worlds. So I was pleased to see both tendencies in the fascinating paintings of Pierpaolo Campanini at Blum & Poe (blumandpoe.com, through April 5)

A curator at the Louvre in Paris has stumbled upon some unknown drawings on the back of a painting by Leonardo da Vinci that look like they might be by the Italian master himself, the museum said Thursday. The extraordinary find was made by chance, when Louvre staff unhooked Leonardo's "The Virgin and Child With Saint Anne" from the museum wall as part of a broad program of study and restoration of paintings by Leonardo. "The Virgin and Child With Saint Anne" was painted in the early 1500s and no one had previously noticed the drawings -- at least not to the knowledge of the Louvre.

Controversy continues to swirl around the collection of paintings Georgia O'Keeffe donated to Fisk University in Nashville. In March, a judge permanently banned any sale of the 101-piece collection -- which not only includes works by O'Keefe but also Picasso, Renoir and Cezanne -- and set an October deadline for Fisk to retrieve the artwork from storage and put it on display. The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in New Mexico had sued to gain the rights over the collection because of the school's attempts to sell paintings and because they weren't currently on display.

Howard Terpning paints how the West was lived and lost more than 120 years ago. His subject is 19th century Native Americans, although he is not their descendant. Some of his canvases aim to capture the courage, dignity and desperation of the fight to keep their land. Many are carefully detailed depictions of the ways of life they fought to save. "Tribute to the Plains People," now at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park, is the biggest solo show of Terpning's career - a retrospective that covers 35 years and documents his standing as the acknowledged leader of a popular but not universally admired movement in which paintings become time machines into the Old West.

Visitors to the Golden Gate Bridge often pose a strange request: They want some of the bridge's International Orange paint. During construction, consulting architect Irving Morrow chose the color. He thought it would reflect nicely off the waters of the Golden Gate Strait below and blend well with the Marin headlands to the north. "I get asked all the time, 'Can I have a little bit of that paint? I want to paint the fence in front of my house,'" said Mary Currie, public affairs director for the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District, which operates the bridge.

As its 75th birthday fast approaches, the Golden Gate Bridge is getting a little birthday present. Even though about 40 million vehicles cross it each year and visitors come in droves daily to admire and photograph it, the spectacular span has never had a visitor center. That is, until this month. "The bridge experience up to this point has just really been self-guided and a photo opportunity," said David Shaw, vice president of the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. "Now there's this bridge pavilion, which is a really nice welcome center.

PHILADELPHIA - Copies of famous paintings are everywhere: on dorm-room walls, on computer screens and lately pouring forth from Chinese art factories, which can churn out a hundred passable Rembrandts in a week. Architectural copies, on the other hand, remain rare, especially at full scale. Las Vegas and the original Getty Museum aside, it's not often you see an important building, in whole or in part, rebuilt in one location to match the original in another. The Barnes Foundation, in moving its spectacularly deep collection of postimpressionist and early Modern art from suburban Merion, Pa., to the center of Philadelphia, will on May 19 open a high-culture, high-stakes experiment in the second kind of duplication.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — That painted stretch of hardwood that sits below the rim is a mighty concern for anyone who plays Memphis. The Grizzlies averaged about 45 points per game during the regular season in that area, the fifth-most in the NBA. In Game 1 of their Western Conference first-round playoff series here Sunday, the Clippers, well aware of Memphis' prowess in the paint, won that category, 54-38, and, you guessed it, the game as well, 99-98....

Is a strain of recent abstract painting obsessed with revitalizing the celebrated tradition of the 1950s New York School? A peculiar new show at the Museum of Contemporary Art says yes, proposing that a vigorous revival of Jackson Pollock's drips, Mark Rothko's luminous clouds of color, Franz Kline's muscularity of forms and other painterly concerns from a half-century ago is underway - albeit with a notable twist. The old abstraction recorded the singular hand of the artist at work in the studio.

Two portraits whose authenticity was in doubt have been verified as real Van Goghs, the museum named for the Dutch master confirmed Friday. One portrait is the face and torso of a woman in a hat. In the second, a lady sits with gloved hands folded in her lap. Because the themes were so common in the 19th century and the paintings had little similarity to the rest of the work by Vincent van Gogh, their authorship was in doubt, said spokeswoman Natalie...

ELDON, Iowa - Beth Howard sits at her kitchen table on a Sunday morning and pulls back the curtain to peer at a group of rosy-cheeked youths taking pictures on her front lawn. They pair off to stand side by side in the pose familiar to millions - the dour farmer with a pitchfork, the unsmiling woman beside him in front of the white house. No one notices the woman in flannel pajamas sitting inside. "People seldom know that people live here, much less that there's someone watching them from the other side of the curtain," says Howard, who rents the house made famous in Grant Wood's painting "American Gothic.

BOGOTA, Colombia - Honored here on his 80th birthday last week with a congressional medal and dinner with the president, Colombia's most famous artist, Fernando Botero, says he'll keep working until he keels over with "a paintbrush in my hand. " But the politically attuned artist, whose themes have included mass murders, vicious drug capos and torture as well as his trademark "volumetric" nudes and whimsical reworkings of old masters, is skeptical that he will live to see the peace his countrymen so desperately want.