http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/arts/design/in-the-shadows-of-archaeological-swashbucklers.html 2014-10-10 01:23:00 In the Shadows of Archaeological Swashbucklers Exhibitions, books and films turn their gaze to archaeological sites in the Middle East and the people who explored them. === Historians, curators and moviemakers are delving into the histories of Middle East archaeological sites, some now destroyed or inaccessible in war zones, and resurrecting the stories of swashbuckling characters who dug there. The early 1900s archaeologist and diplomat Gertrude Bell, a daughter of a British baronet, will soon be the subject of a Werner Herzog In 1926, two days before her 58th birthday, Bell was found dead in Baghdad after an overdose of sleeping pills. Her family preserved her papers, and Newcastle University owns the More of her memorabilia may have been left behind in Iraq. “We’ve heard some tantalizing things about archives there,” Ms. Oelbaum said. Footage commissioned by Bell herself may also have survived. “In her letters, she describes hiring a cameraman,” Ms. Krayenbühl said. Ms. Oelbaum and Ms. Krayenbühl have gathered more than 900 vintage film clips of sites that Bell visited, and they search for Bell in the backgrounds. Few images of her exist. In her own photos, Ms. Cooper said in an interview, “you can see her shadow in the foreground,” silhouetted with a full skirt and a billowing scarf. “Discovering Tutankhamun,” a show at the Ashmolean In 1951, Mr. Phillips, a charismatic Californian from a modest background, briefly persuaded Yemeni authorities to let him uncover ruins about 3,000 years old. But he and his team soon had to flee from violent militants. They managed to smuggle out movies and photos of their work. Mr. Phillips’s 1955 memoir, “Sheba’s Buried City,” warns that explorers should be prepared to face lying bureaucrats, looters, snipers, kidnappers, scorpions, “split lips, swollen tongues, frozen fingers, dysentery, fever, heartbreak and monotony beyond compare.” Mr. Phillips later became an oil tycoon, traveling the world, and he died in 1975, at 54. Massumeh Farhad, the Sackler’s chief curator, said that although Mr. Phillips had never returned to Sheba’s trail, “he always wanted to go back.” FABRICS OF ISLAM “Medieval Morocco: An Empire From Africa to Spain,” an Medieval Europeans bought and stole metallic fabrics from Muslim lands and sewed them into royal robes, church vestments and wrappings for saints’ dried body parts. Quran verses are woven and embroidered into the cloth. Slices from a 12th-century crimson fabric, patterned with peacocks and Arabic blessings, have turned up in a Toulouse church and at museums in Yannick Lintz, the Louvre’s Islamic art department director, said that textiles in the show needed further scrutiny, to compare dyes and stitching patterns. Other little-known Muslim fabrics are stashed away in religious buildings around Europe. “We have to do a real inventory of the smaller churches,” she said. Next year, Yale University Press will publish a WITCHES AND PEASANTS William Mortensen, a Hollywood photographer, fell into obscurity decades before his death in 1965, at 68. New shows and books will reveal his self-doubts, as well as scornful reviews. Feral House Mr. Mortensen destroyed thousands of his early prints, “in a self-critical frenzy,” he wrote in the memoir. When he displayed work in his studio windows on Hollywood Boulevard, he “anxiously scanned the faces of passers-by for reactions,” he wrote, but no one paid attention. He does not much mention his complicated personal life. The authors of “American Grotesque” report that he was a serial adulterer during his two marriages, to Courtney Crawford, a librarian, and Myrdith Monaghan, an actress. He was also accused of seducing teenagers, including the actress Fay Wray. His favorite photography topics included witches, demons, dancers, peasants, ecstatic nude women, Shakespearean actors and freak-show performers. He borrowed props and costumes from Hollywood sets, and he reworked prints again and again to achieve gauzy effects in a style known as pictorialism. “Me and Mortensen: Photography With the Master” ( Various galleries are exhibiting Mr. Mortensen’s work in the next few months. At a show that opens Oct. 15 at the Stephen Romano