Paintings

She is a beguiling Eve with a profusion of corkscrew curls and an earful of bad advice from a wily serpent. He is a befuddled Adam who holds forbidden fruit in one hand and scratches his head with the other. Life-size and all- but-nude, they have been standing under the biblical Tree of Knowledge -- on the brink of original sin -- since German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder painted them nearly 500 years ago. And they are a big reason art lovers go to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

Spain's Prado Museum has teamed with Google Earth for a project that allows people to zoom in on the gallery's main works -- even on details not immediately discernible to the human eye. The initiative, announced Tuesday, is the first of its kind involving an art museum. It involves 14 of the Prado's choicest paintings, including Diego Velazquez's "Las Meninas," Francisco de Goya's "Third of May" and Peter Paul Rubens' "The Three Graces." Google Spain director Javier Rodriguez Zapatero said the images now available on the Internet were 1,400 times clearer than what would be rendered with a 10-megapixel camera.

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.