Free Republic

ArtNews reports that the J. Paul Getty Museum has repatriated to Turkey a bronze funerary couch dated to 530 B.C. Provenance records suggest that the bed had been in several European collections from the 1920s through the 1980s, when the museum purchased the artifact from an antiquities dealer. However, Gökhan Yazgı of Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism and officials from the Getty Museum confirmed that the records had been falsified by a former owner. Recent research determined that the couch had been illegally excavated in the early 1980s in western Turkey's Manisa region, where Turkish archaeologists have excavated a...

LOS ANGELES – Charitable funds given to the J. Paul Getty Trust were improperly used to pay the travel expenses of the foundation's former chief executive and buy artwork for retiring board members, the California attorney general said in a report Monday. The investigation found some improper spending at the $9 billion trust, the nation's third-largest private foundation, but no fraud. However, an attorney who has served in key law enforcement posts was appointed to serve as an independent monitor of the trust – the first time in state history that someone will oversee the dealings of a charitable trust....