Museum news wire

A great art topic: 19th-century American landscape painting. The Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford has its great collection of Hudson River School paintings on display in a special "homecoming" exhibition: American Splendor: Hudson River School Masterworks From the Wadsworth Atheneum. More than 60 of the museum's best images, including Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, Sanford Gifford, and John Kensett. New York Times review [here].

London's Tate Modern announced plans for a very postmodern addition. Designed by the Swiss firm Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the architecture of the new wing seems to play with the idea of the gallery as white cube, and ancient Mesopotamian ziggurats. The price tag: $397 million. The Tate Modern plans to have it ready by the 2012 London Olympics.

The National Archives in DC has an exhibition -- Eyewitness -- that features "[t]reasures in the form of letters, diaries, photographs, and audio and film recordings, culled from the billions of documents in the holdings of the National Archives and its Presidential libraries, open new and unique windows onto well-known events." If you can't get to DC before it closes in January, the Archives has an on-line version [here].

One of the most important treasures looted in the ransacking of Iraq’s national museum three years ago has been recovered in a clandestine operation involving the United States government and was turned over to Iraqi officials in Washington recently. The artifact, a headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, was stolen from Iraq, taken into Syria, and came on the market. The backstory of the recovery remains a secret in order to protect future recovery efforts.

Images: Wadsworth Atheneum: Thomas Cole, View in the White Mountains, 1827. Oil on canvas. Bequest of Daniel Wadsworth, 1848.17; Angel Franco/The New York Times. A headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash, looted in the ransacking of Iraq’s National Museum three years ago, has been recovered.