Paintings

Fifteen years ago, Monique Prieto burst onto the scene with a series of squeaky-clean canvases that changed the way people thought about abstract painting in Los Angeles. Five years ago, she turned her back on the crisply composed monochrome blobs that had become her signature, ditched acrylics for oils and began painting pictures of phrases borrowed from the nine-volume diary of 17th century Englishman Samuel Pepys, in a style best described as caveman-graffiti. That stunning shift from hard-edge abstraction to messy image-and-text Conceptualism pales in comparison to the changes that have taken place between Prieto's earliest word paintings and her new ones at ACME Gallery.

Sticking around: "A Lady Writing," one of 35 surviving paintings by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, will be on view a week longer than expected at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. On loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the painting was to end its California appearance on Feb. 2, but the show has been extended through Feb. 9.

When William Wendt painted the California landscape in the first half of the 20th century, he did so the way a master cabinetmaker might craft a sideboard or a chest of drawers. Every brush stroke is flawlessly considered, every form crisp and well-honed. Every color is selected and composed with utmost care. The sense that landscape elements have been edited out as extraneous is as acute as it is with those necessarily included. The result, more often than not, is a handmade thing of beauty -- a painted object that radiates skill and attentive handling.

The Metropolitan Opera is using two giant Marc Chagall murals in its lobby as collateral on an existing loan, the latest example of how the nation's top fine arts institutions are struggling to cope with the economic downturn. Met spokesman Peter Clark said Monday that the nation's premier opera house was using the 30- by 36-foot paintings as collateral for "a long-standing loan." He declined to specify the loan amount or the appraised value of the works, "The Triumph of Music" and "The Sources of Music."

Philadelphia-born Edward Biberman was a Modernist painter through and through. From his earliest sojourns to Paris and Berlin in 1926 until his 1986 death in Los Angeles, after half a century as an artist and teacher in the city, he tweaked Modernism's familiar fascination with a machine aesthetic. Biberman developed a distinctive Industrial Age point of view. Sometimes it took shape as Social Realist analysis of the costs to human dignity and sometimes as simplified geometric forms of urban landscape.

Dutch police have recovered eight valuable paintings, including works by Renoir and Pissarro, 22 years after they were stolen from a gallery. Some of the paintings, which were stolen from the Noortman gallery in Maastricht in 1987, were badly damaged by being folded, the Dutch National Prosecutor's Office said. Prosecutors said police tracked down the works after an attempt was made to sell them. Two men and a woman were arrested.

To step into the fantastically jam-packed installation now at the Santa Monica Museum of Art is to step into another world: a nuanced universe suffused with compassion, sensuality and wisdom, a place so far removed from the cold calculations and multi-tasking distractions of life in Los Angeles that it seems you have to be a specialist (or very privileged) to go there. It's all too easy to see the 60-plus sculptures, 40-odd paintings, seven thrones and five wall reliefs by Ethiopian artist Elias Sime as an anthropologist would: ingenious artifacts from a fully formed culture fundamentally different from our own and probably part of a way of life being squeezed out by global consumerism.

Three 16th century paintings that have hung in the Hearst Castle in San Simeon for nearly 70 years will be returned to the descendants of Holocaust victims as part of a deal struck with California State Parks. The paintings will be handed over to the heirs of Jacob and Rosa Oppenheimer in a ceremony set for Friday in Sacramento. A spokesman for California State Parks said the paintings date from about 1500 to 1590 and originated in the area of what is now Venice, Italy. The spokesman declined to provide more details ahead of Friday's ceremony.

Francis Picabia never rose to the level of Picasso, Matisse or even Duchamp. And that's part of his charm. Unburdened by the heavy-duty seriousness that accompanies their works, his light-handed art invites viewers into an unsentimentally whimsical world of deft reverie, where lighthearted idylls often lead to unexpected discoveries -- some fun, some haunting and all fresh. It's easy to feel as if you're on a first-name basis with Picabia (1879-1953), whose casual urbanity is both gracious and bracing, out of step and up to the minute.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art continues to expand its Latin American holdings in a way both monumental and pertinent to the city. According to the museum's blog, Unframed, Roberto Matta's huge 1965-66 painting "Burn, Baby, Burn (L'escalade)" was acquired for the museum over the weekend by the Collectors Committee. The canvas is nearly 10 feet tall and 32 feet wide, which would likely make it the largest painting in LACMA's collection. The Chilean-born Matta (1911-2002) was famously expelled from the Surrealist movement in 1947 over a disagreement with Andre Breton.