Paintings

Over the last 15 years, Patrick Wilson has painted some of the most physically resplendent paintings to come out of Los Angeles. His new ones make his old ones look tame, not quite clunky but nowhere nearly as sophisticated as his mind-blowing acrylics on canvas and paper at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Proj- ects. If Wilson were a professional athlete and his game had improved so dramatically, fans would surely think he was juiced. His paintings perform like champions, rising above the competition to do their own thing with such panache and dazzle that they are at once pleasurable and inspiring.

The Netherlands will return 13 paintings in national museums to the heirs of Jewish collectors persecuted by the Nazis, the Culture Ministry said. Culture Minister Ronald Plasterk said he would follow a recommendation by the Restitutions Committee to hand back 12 paintings, including Jan van Goyen's "Village in Winter Time," to the heirs of Hans Ludwig Larsen. The government also will return Thomas de Keyser's "Portrait of a Man," currently housed in a museum in Gouda, to the heirs of a Jewish collector named Richard Semmel, Plasterk said.

Meet Ray Bradbury, the illustrating man. The 89-year-old dreamer is renowned as a lion of literature, of course, but it's his longtime pursuit of the visual arts that will bring him to the Santa Monica gallery Every Picture Tells a Story at 4 p.m. Saturday. Bradbury will unveil a new giclee print of an evocative oil painting he completed in 1948 and has come to refer to as "Dark Carnival." "Painting has been part of my life since I was a child," Bradbury said. "My Aunt Neva went to the Art Institute of Chicago, and she took courses there and she took me to see the paintings.

Jennifer Steinkamp's five new pieces at ACME are so individually absorbing that a lot of time can go by before you notice the magnitude of her achievement. She almost single-handedly transforms the medium in which she works -- projected digital imagery -- from a one-at-a-time, one-after-another setup into an all-at-once immersion in a stimulating environment that leaves you with more freedom than you came in with. I love it when that happens. Here's how Steinkamp, who has been exhibiting projected imagery for more than 20 years, makes it work: She treats each of her meticulously engineered animations as if it were a painting.

The Norwegian Supreme Court on Friday increased the sentences of two men convicted in the theft of Edvard Munch masterpieces "The Scream" and "Madonna" and ordered a new trial for a third convicted man. The paintings, which are considered priceless, were stolen in August 2004 in a daylight raid on Oslo's city-owned Munch Museum. They were recovered by police nearly two years later and are undergoing repairs for scrapes, punctures, loose paint and moisture damage. All three men appealed their April 2006 sentences from a lower court last month.

In times of war, they have proved safer than radios, more nimble than humans, more fuel-efficient than aircraft. Depending on the price of birdseed. Their exploits, though, have tended to go underappreciated here in London, where Mayor Ken Livingstone's long-running war with the lowly pigeon over who controls the territory of Trafalgar Square has tended to obscure the otherwise heroic stature of the ubiquitous waddlers. No more.

Stephen Colbert was denied last year when he tried to run for president in South Carolina. Now, after lobbying for it on his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report," the fake TV pundit is getting some love from the city of his birth. His portrait was hung Wednesday at the Smithsonian Institution's National Portrait Gallery in Washington for a six-week showing in what the museum considers an "appropriate place" -- right between the bathrooms near the "America's Presidents" exhibit.

A three-part painting by Francis Bacon was sold to an anonymous buyer for more than $51 million this week, Christie's auction house said. "Triptych 1974-77" was the last in a series of haunting works Bacon painted after the suicide of his lover, George Dyer, in 1971. Bacon, who died in 1992 at age 82, is considered one of Britain's most important 20th century artists.

Two masterworks stolen from a Zurich art museum last week were found in good condition in an unlocked car outside a psychiatric hospital, police said, but two other paintings are still missing. The recovered paintings, Claude Monet's "Poppy Field at Vetheuil" and Vincent van Gogh's "Blooming Chestnut Branches," were found by a parking lot attendant Monday. Police said they had a combined value of $63 million. Still missing are "Ludovic Lepic and his Daughters" by Edgar Degas and "Boy in the Red Waistcoat" by Paul Cezanne.

Danica Phelps makes abstract paintings that are utterly rooted in the concrete. Her art incorporates the practical, logistical and banal, and yet manages to be poetic. The work is transformative in the highest sense, for it alters conceptions of categories presumed to be fixed. After some time spent considering her enterprise, those polarities no longer make sense. Abstract and concrete become false distinctions. Same with the practical and the poetic. Phelps' art arises from her everyday life, and it feeds -- simply, beautifully -- into ours.