Reputations can fall swiftly in the world of art, sometimes in mysterious ways. But few have fallen so far and remained so hidden as William Merritt Chase. Art historian John Davis reports that in the 1880s, when Chase was just in his 30s, “he had come to dominate the American art scene.” Many Americans hailed him as their finest artist. Many Europeans agreed. But in the last hundred years since his death, almost all this adulation has dissipated. He is no longer a household name. Americans who know something about his contemporaries and friends James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent usually know nothing about William Merritt Chase. Patrons rarely rush to museums to see a Chase. Yet while the general public lost interest in Chase, the artist did keep special admirers...

In the late 19th century, everyone looked on Gustave Caillebotte as a leading painter of the Impressionists. He took part in five of the eight exhibitions that the Impressionists mounted. In fact, he organized and helped finance several of the shows. One displayed more than 25 of his paintings; another greeted visitors in the opening room with his stunning depictions of the new Paris. Caillebotte, a wealthy man, also purchased many paintings by his colleagues. He continually loaned money to an impoverished Claude Monet and paid the rent for his studio. Yet while the names of Impressionists like Monet and Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas have lodged in the minds of all students of art for more than a century, there has been little or no room for Caillebotte. As Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, puts it, Caillebotte "was left out of the early histories of Impressionism..."

When American millionaires bought paintings by Piero di Cosimo in the late 19th century, almost all the works were attributed to other Italian Renaissance artists. Piero, a painter of Florence during its golden age, was simply regarded as too obscure to produce such masterful works. It took many decades for Piero to emerge even partly from such shadows. Not until 1938 did the private Schaeffer Galleries in New York mount a small show of seven paintings all correctly attributed to him. But there was no other Piero exhibition anywhere in the world in the 20th century. Art historians, however, continued to study the fascinating case of Piero, discovering more of his works, many of the highest quality...

Museum exhibitions about the great artist Georges Seurat and his band of Neoimpressionists usually delve into the new scientific theories of light and color that made many painters in the late 19th century experiment with novel ways of applying paint to a canvas. Seurat and his friends used a technique known as pointillism — painting little dots of different color that were supposed to mix when they reached the retina of a viewer's eye. The best-known work is probably his monumental "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" from 1884 now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. All this emphasis on technique is turned upside down by an exhibition that just opened at the Phillips Collection in Washington...

In 1877, when he was 43, the French impressionist Edgar Degas began stopping by the studio of the 33-year-old American Mary Cassatt and offering her a point or two that might embolden her painting. Their relationship, a close one for a decade, is one of the best known in art history. What is not known is whether the relationship blossomed beyond a few pedagogical pointers into a secret romantic interlude. Each destroyed the letters from the other. Most historians doubt an affair. The artists seemed too strait-laced for that...

The celebrated Renaissance artist's watercolors, drawings and prints — many lent by the Albertina Museum in Vienna — are the focus of a new exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington. It is rare for a museum to lend the heart of its most prized collection to another museum, but the Albertina in Vienna has done just that by shipping almost a hundred watercolors and drawings by Albrecht Dürer to the National Gallery of Art here for an exhibition. Dürer, a German born in Nuremberg in 1471, is the great master of the Northern European Renaissance, akin to Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo of the Italian Renaissance. Dürer's greatness, according to Andrew Robison of the National Gallery, curator of the show, is based on his watercolors, drawings and prints, just as Da Vinci and Raphael are identified with painting and Michelangelo with sculpture...

The exhibition 'Shock of the News' at the National Gallery of Art in Washington looks at artists' real and figurative use of newspapers in their works, including those by Hans Richter, Ellsworth Kelly and Paul Sietsema. For a hundred years, artists have been using and abusing newspapers as a vital part of their works. Pungent examples include the Spanish painter Salvador Dali creating an absurd newspaper about himself, the German-born Swiss artist Dieter Roth making a sausage, complete with gelatin and spices, out of copies of the British tabloid Daily Mirror and the American Jim Hodges coating a Jordanian newspaper entirely in 24 karat gold. Little attention has been paid to this phenomenon by the world's museums in the past. But these examples and five dozen others now make up a novel exhibition called "Shock of the News" that opened recently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and will close Jan. 27. It goes nowhere else...

An exciting survey at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. — 'Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape' — makes a spirited attempt to find and explore the artist's politics. Joan Miró, the great Spanish painter of dreams and symbols, lived through so many harrowing eras of the 20th century that critics believe his masterpieces surely reflect the tensions of political events in one way or another. But Miró's world of art was so special — with stars and moons, biomorphs and delightful dogs and sly monsters and wonderful color — that it has always been difficult to find much politics there. An exhibition that just arrived at the National Gallery of Art — "Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape" — makes a spirited attempt to find and explore the politics...

The first Kodak camera had a big influence on painting, as 'Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard' details. George Eastman introduced the first Kodak camera in 1888. It was a small wooden box covered in Morocco leather with a roll of dry film inside. You no longer had to be a professional carrying a tripod, heavy plates, a darkening cape and liquid developer to take a photograph. Any amateur could hold the box waist-high, aim at a subject like the family and press the button that released the shutter that covered the lens. The box — later just the roll — could be sent back to the company to develop the film. Kodak advertisements promised, "You press the button, we do the rest." The Kodak, continually improved by Eastman's American company, soon became a big seller. Among the enthusiasts were young painters in Europe...

[OPINION] Private pro-democracy groups funded by the U.S. have a troubling history. Now that seven American pro-democracy workers have been allowed to post bail and return to the United States, perhaps we can examine what the U.S. was up to in Egypt using reason instead of patriotic emotion. The Egyptian furor over such seemingly idealistic work may strike us as wild and idiotic, but in fact, the Egyptians have a right to be suspicious. America's attempt to promote democracy around the world through private organizations has unsavory beginnings and a sometimes troubling history...

The National Gallery of Art zooms in on the Pop artist's appetite for gaudy tabloid newspapers and their influence on his work. Andy Warhol, the guru of Pop art, reveled in a lifelong obsession with newspapers, especially tabloids and their garish headlines. As a teenager, he saved pages with photos of his favorite Hollywood stars. Throughout his life he packed hundreds of newspapers into boxes he called "time capsules" to whet the fancy of the future. He collected scores of fraying clippings about himself in 34 scrapbooks. But most important, he used newspapers, especially the front pages, to model and inform some of the most important works of his fine art. It is hard to imagine Warhol the artist without his headlines...

In a twist, the city's Museum of Art combines his earlier works with his 'School of Paris' contemporaries to reveal the artist in a communal phase. Marc Chagall was an enormously popular 20th century painter, revered by the public for his rooftop fiddlers, biblical lore, upside down lovers and fanciful visions of Jewish shtetl life in the old Russian empire. Art historians and critics, however, have always had difficulty placing him among the many currents of modern art; to them, he often seemed unique, special, one of a kind. Some also found him repetitive and sentimental. But Chagall was not always a loner. In an innovative exhibition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has decided to concentrate on his younger years when, far from unique, he and a band of mainly East European, mainly Jewish artists honed their craft in Paris...

Examining the violent histories of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. James Carroll's latest book is very ambitious. Invoking history, anthropology, social psychology, geography and theology, the author, a former Catholic priest, delves into the stories of the violence unleashed by the organized religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam throughout their existence. He anchors the book by describing how each has used the city of Jerusalem, holy to all three, as a symbol or metaphor or touchstone. The book's title and subtitle, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World," suggest that Carroll intends to demonstrate that the tumultuous past of these religions is vital in understanding why Jerusalem and, of course, Israel and the Palestinian territories have become a hotbed of political, nationalist and religious conflict and violence. But Carroll, a newspaper columnist, prolific novelist and the author of the popular "Constantine's Sword," a history of 2,000 years of Christianity's anti-Semitism, has something else in mind...

The French artist spun myths about himself and his exotic travels to boost sales. A new show in Washington, D.C., examines these tales and his work. Many artists and historians look on the painter Paul Gauguin as one of the founders of modern art. His work in the 19th century brimmed with innovation. He tried to paint with his mind rather than his eyes. He colored grass red and figures of Christ yellow. He played with perspective. His obsession with primitive peoples engaged and influenced Picasso. Yet, as Gauguin specialist Belinda Thomson points out, the innovations that excited everyone 100 years ago "are not necessarily those that have the strongest appeal" in the 21st century. Old innovations do not surprise anyone; they turn into clichés instead. Gauguin's paintings must be regarded differently now. They must be examined, Thomson says, for "their beauty and complexity"...

[OPINION] The corps' celebrity and size may have diminished, but its longevity is a testament to its importance. In some ways, the Peace Corps, which celebrates its 50th anniversary Tuesday, is a shadow of what it once was. It had so much pizzazz in the early days that newspapers proclaimed the names of new volunteers as if they had just won Guggenheim fellowships. Now, the number of volunteers — 8,655 — is about half of what it was at its highest in 1966, and not everyone knows the Peace Corps still exists. The first director — the irrepressible, inspiring Sargent Shriver, who put the program together in six months — made the cover of Time in 1963. The current director — Aaron Williams, a former volunteer with decades of experience in international development — barely gets his name in the papers. At a panel discussion at George Washington University a couple of years ago, Christiane Amanpour, then chief foreign correspondent of CNN, listed factors that had contributed to American worldwide popularity in the past. "There was a Peace Corps," she said. Yet the Peace Corps, despite its loss of celebrity and size, has improved a great deal during its 50 years...

A comprehensive new biography of the ousted Iranian leader finds him 'a tragic figure.' It was uncanny to read the closing chapters of this splendidly detailed biography of the last shah of Iran while tumultuous and jubilant crowds in Egypt drove Hosni Mubarak from power. The parallels were so close they seemed to come out of some fanciful fiction. Like Mubarak, the shah—in power for 37 years—was blinded by a megalomania and a thirst for power that isolated him from the needs and demands of his people. Like Mubarak, the shah, spurning the advice of others, refused to initiate reforms until it was too late to satisfy his critics. Like Mubarak, the shah, who fled Iran in 1979, had maintained a facade of strength and stability that lulled the United States into believing that the iron-clad strength of its Middle Eastern ally was in no danger of cracking. But the biographer Abbas Milani, the head of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University, is not trying to depict the life and downfall of the shah as a model for political upheavals in the Middle East...

'Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture' celebrates gay and lesbian work, some created when it didn't dare truly expose itself. In 1989, the private Corcoran Gallery of Art, battered by threats from Congress and worried about future federal grants, canceled an exhibition by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe that included male nudity and homosexual scenes. The controversial banning made the Washington art establishment seem philistine, intolerant and spineless. Times and attitudes change. Now, a Washington museum is pioneering a show that celebrates gay and lesbian art and delineates its place in the history of American painting and photography...

Spanish painted wooden sculptures of Christ, many of which have never before left their churches, are in an exhibition in Washington. Any tourist quickly senses something different in the churches of Spain. Unlike the pure idealized figures of Christ in most of the rest of Europe, those of Spain seem to bleed. The skins show bruising, the eyes droop in anguish, the feet gnarl in pain. Spain's realistic sculptures of Christ and Christian saints usually leave their churches and monasteries only once a year. They are placed on massive floats and carried by strong men in the processions of Holy Week. Hooded penitents walk behind barefoot, some striking their backs with the cords of a whip. The painted wooden sculptures, most created in the 17th century, are regarded as some of Spain's finest works of art. But, still venerated for their religious power, they are seldom seen in a museum...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has had the late Frenchman's landmark work as part of its permanent collection for 40 years, marks the anniversary with a greatly expanded exhibition. Marcel Duchamp served for many years as both a prince and court jester to modern art in the 20th century. While creating some well-known works, he also punctured pretensions with jokes, pranks, aphorisms and a perpetual hunt for new byways of art. Then he announced he was abandoning art, giving it all up to play chess. But he was not telling the truth. He worked in secret for 20 years, assembling a huge, fanciful and puzzling diorama. When he died in 1968, only a few people knew about his secret. A year after his death, the Philadelphia Museum of Art installed the secret work and displayed it to the public. While some patrons were shocked by its sexuality, it soon became a magnet for young artists looking for new paths to take their own work. Duchamp's masterpiece, known as "Étant donnés," a shortened form of its French title, is now regarded as one of the most powerful and dynamic influences on contemporary art...

Suits of armor were once so finely wrought that an attacking lance would glance off their smooth metal harmlessly. But then, as the Middle Ages moved into the Renaissance, European kings demanded that the craftsmen finish the armor with elaborate decoration. All the engraving and embossing upset the surface of the armor. A lance would no longer slip away. But that did not matter. Decorated armor was for show, so that the kings would look majestic and powerful and indestructible, especially in portraits by great painters...

Ancient artifacts secretly kept in a bank vault in the war-torn country, safe from marauding militia, looters and the Taliban, are now on a museum tour for all the world to see. In an act that provoked worldwide outrage, the fundamentalist Taliban rulers of Afghanistan in March 2001 destroyed the monumental statues of Buddha that had been carved into the rock cliffs of Bamiyan 1,600 years ago. The shocking destruction was not an isolated event. As part of the same campaign, the Taliban sent hordes of militants into the Kabul Museum to smash every statue, no matter how small, that depicted a human figure or any other creature... But the museum did not die. Unknown to outsiders, museum director Omara Khan Massoudi and his assistants had packed the finest treasures of the museum during the 1980s and placed them in the vaults of the Central Bank in the presidential palace. "What kept them safe," says Hiebert, "was the code of silence"...

For much of the 19th century, scores of French painters, laden with knapsacks and portable easels, trekked through the Forest of Fontainebleau to capture the shifting wonders of nature with their brushes right on the spot. Some came for weekends; some stayed for a lifetime. Pioneers of the new art called photography, laden with even more equipment, made the pilgrimage as well. So did the young Impressionists. Together they all raised the art of landscape to new heights in France. A generous sampling of this work is on display in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art that celebrates a place rather than a painter. Called "In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers From Corot to Monet," the show closes June 8 and goes on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in July. The place celebrated is a forest that was once the hunting grounds for the royal chateau in the town of Fontainebleau...

A talented, ambitious woman whose judgment is clouded by intense loyalty. In late August 2005, Condoleezza Rice stepped into a Broadway theater to see the musical "Spamalot." At the end, when the lights came on, some in the audience noticed the secretary of State. Evidently angry about both the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, they stood up and booed. A careful, well-documented new biography, "Condoleezza Rice: An American Life," will not dissipate such anger. Elisabeth Bumiller, who covered the White House for the New York Times during most of George W. Bush's presidency, has labored to present an evenhanded look at Rice. She shows some sympathy for her subject and even more understanding. But, in the end, this is a portrait of a talented, ambitious woman who has allowed intense loyalty to cloud her judgment and good sense...

In a Washington exhibition, the British painter's wide-ranging influence is seen through the swirls and mists of his search for the sublime. A dramatic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966 set the way many Americans still look at the works of the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. By then, Turner had been dead for more than a century -- hardly a conventional subject for a temple of Modern art. But, by concentrating on his later paintings, filled with swirls of color and light and mists and fire and storm, the museum hailed Turner as a godfather of French Impressionism and, even more important, a precursor of American Abstract Expressionism. The show prompted abstract painter Mark Rothko to joke, "That guy Turner learned a lot from me!" Now, another major exhibition, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is trying to put Turner in better perspective...

Smithsonian exhibition explores a world trader's legacy. In the 1400s, decades before the voyages of Christopher Columbus, sailors from little Portugal braved the oceans to map the world, carry back spices and other treasures, spread Christianity and set down an empire that would extend in the next two centuries from Africa to India to China to Brazil. The impact was enormous. Europe was inundated with images and objects from the outside world. And, from then on, the rest of the world would never escape the influence of Europe...

John Singer Sargent put portraits aside to capture the workings of an ethereal city... John Singer Sargent was the most popular portrait painter of his day, but the tedium of the work often oppressed him. In letters to friends, he liked to mock his lucrative success in what he called "paughtraits." He found it a nuisance "to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched." When he took time off from the portraits, he would say, "No more mugs!" Accompanied by friends and family, and armed with oils and watercolors, he would leave his London studio every year for a long vacation, usually to the Alps in the summer and then south to Venice in the fall...

'Designing a New World: 1914-1939' shows how a movement moved a century function forward. Exhibition showcases the legacy of Modernism's breakaway style. When portions of "Ulysses" first appeared in a literary magazine from 1918 to 1920, its Irish author, James Joyce, wanted the world to know that he had created a new kind of novel, resembling nothing that came before. When Igor Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" premiered in Paris in 1913, the Russian composer's music was so dissonant, new and shocking that the audience rioted. Other artists such as the painter Pablo Picasso, architect Le Corbusier, designer Marcel Breuer and filmmaker Fritz Lang wanted to do the same: break completely with the past and re-create their form of art, taking it to new and different heights...

An exhibition highlights the golden age of Mexican printmaking. In the wake of a long revolution against dictatorship, Mexican artists vowed in the 1920s to create works that would instruct and enrich the masses. They even signed a manifesto proclaiming, "We repudiate so-called easel painting and every kind of art favored by ultra-intellectual circles." Out of this mood came the great murals of modern Mexico, especially the monumental works of Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros. But the mood also spawned a lesser-known burst of creativity — an enormous production of prints for 30 years. Unlike paintings that would likely be savored by rich families in their homes, the multiples of these woodcuts, linoleum cuts and lithographs could reach many people...

George Washington the man, the myths and even the teeth make up the new Mount Vernon experience. The private organization that runs Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington, will soon open an opulent and dramatic visitors complex that will try to fill a need spawned by the growing ignorance of Americans about their own history. There was a time when most visitors came to the 18th century estate and lovely grounds in northern Virginia already full of facts and insights into the life and times of the first president of the United States. But this is no longer so — a lack of knowledge that first attracted notice in the 1990s...

[OPINION] Historians are hailing accused 19th-century spy Alfred Dreyfus as a hero, not a simple victim of anti-Semitism. In 1899, a broken Alfred Dreyfus accepted a presidential pardon — and its implication that he had committed treason against France. It was a matter of life or death, for Dreyfus feared that he would not survive the notorious penal colony on Devil's Island, where he had been sent after a military court convicted him of betraying his country. Those who believed that he was innocent and had called for his exoneration were deeply disappointed. "We were prepared to die for Dreyfus," said poet Charles Péguy, "but Dreyfus was not." His decision to accept a pardon is one of the cornerstones of a long-standing French perception that Dreyfus is the model of a submissive victim. But on the eve of the 100th anniversary of his exoneration in 1906 and the official end of the tumultuous affair that convulsed France for a dozen years, that view may be changing. Indeed, some historians see Dreyfus the patriot, not Dreyfus the victim...

The movement of "very calculated nonsense" that influenced contemporary art gets a striking exhibition. It is hard to take seriously a group of grown men and women who submit a store-bought urinal to an art show, declaim meaningless sounds as poetry, stage mock trials of novelists they dislike, wear a string with two empty tin cans as a bra, provide an ax for dissatisfied art connoisseurs, call their movement Dada, and then proclaim proudly, "Dada means nothing". Yet these artists of shock from World War I and the 1920s have now been taken seriously enough for the National Gallery of Art to mount a striking and didactic exhibition of their work...

[OPINION] AMERICAN POLITICIANS have urged U.N. reform for decades. Lately, the cries have become so loud and incessant that it is hard to imagine what will satisfy the critics. Abolish the veto for all nations save the United States and elect John Bolton as secretary-general? Strange as it seems, even those steps might not be enough -- not for critics whose demands for reform mask a deeper goal. They will not be satisfied unless the U.N. submits to the will of the United States. I do not doubt that the U.N. needs reform -- just look at the scandal in the U.N.'s oil-for-food program for Iraq. But let’s put this into perspective...

In the last years of the 16th century, Emperor Akbar, the illiterate Mughal ruler of India, ordered his finest calligrapher and his workshop of artists to craft a luxurious edition of one of the great works of Persian poetry, known as “The Pearls of the Parrot of India.” The book had 31 full-page illustrations painted with delicacy and beauty. For many years, looking at most of them has been a private experience, limited mainly to scholars. That, after all, is the nature of a rare book. Now, for the first time, 29 of the miniature paintings are separate and on display in a show at the Walters Art Museum called “The Pearls of the Parrot of India: The Emperor Akbar’s Illustrated Khamsa, 1595-98.”..

Coming upon a remote Romanesque church from almost 1,000 years ago is one of the pleasures of traveling through the countryside of Europe. But these structures, put up when the tribes that had destroyed the Roman Empire were emerging from their Dark Ages, are almost bare, their sculptures, reliquaries and manuscripts often squirreled away in diocesan and regional museums in distant towns. It is hard to get a good sense of this unusual art. Until this year, France -- which claims the richest collections -- had never organized a major national exhibition of Romanesque art. The Louvre Museum in Paris has finally erased that neglect with an impressive show of more than 300 works titled “Romanesque France: In the Time of the First Capetian Kings (987-1152),” which runs through next Monday...

It may seem excessive, but there are three museums commemorating the life and work of Salvador Dali in the northern area of Catalonia not far from the French border, but what was his life if not excess? The museums are a little off the main American tourist routes in Spain, but they are well worth the trouble to find. The three brim with art and kitsch and reflect the many sides of the artist. Here is a look at them. The Dali Theater-Museum is in Figueres, fitting because the artist was born here in 1904 and died here in 1989. Port Lligat - Dali’s home, which attracts 90,000 visitors a year, is about 20 miles from Figueres -- but it can take an hour or more to drive there. The castle at Pubol tells us a great deal about Dali’s love for Gala...

IN the last years of the 19th century, Montmartre, a poor Paris neighborhood high on a hill, burst into a frenzy of popular song and dance, creative art and decadent high jinks -- a frenzy with wonderful imagery that still lingers in our minds. We owe most of those images to the works of the diminutive and doomed artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Toulouse-Lautrec was a painter and lithographer of extraordinary appeal. Museum-goers and buyers of reproductions love his paintings, prints and posters of cancan dancers and caustic singers and depressed prostitutes and bourgeois men on the prowl. This is demonstrated once again by the crowds that now stream into the National Gallery of Art for its extensive exhibition “Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre...”

The life of Amedeo Modigliani is the stuff of cliched myth and operatic tragedy: A handsome Italian artist weakened by too much hashish and alcohol, Modigliani died penniless in Paris of tuberculosis in 1920 at the age of 35. His last love leaped to her death from a fifth-story window a day later. While alive, he never sold enough to exist without the charity of friends. Yet, from the moment of his death, the fascination for his life and his work has soared. Now he is one of the world’s most popular artists. Only last November, Sotheby’s auctioned his last portrait of Jeanne Hebuterne, the mistress who killed herself, for $31,368,000, a record for a Modigliani. Although the drama of his life and his popularity after death have driven up the value of his paintings, they have done far less for his reputation...

Berthe MORISOT was one of the first French Impressionist painters, the only woman to exhibit at their initial show in Paris in 1874. Her name and talent, said Edgar Degas, who helped organize the rebellious exhibition, “are just too important to us for us to be able to manage without her.” Yet, ever since, she has remained in the background of Impressionism, overshadowed by her renowned male counterparts, including Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In the United States, she has been overshadowed as well by Mary Cassatt, the American painter living in Paris during that era. When Americans talk about women and Impressionism, the name that usually comes to mind first is Mary Cassatt, not Berthe Morisot...

The Prado is a difficult museum for a visitor to manage, for it is filled with spectacular mountains of great art. No other museum in the world can rival its enormous collections of Spanish artists such as El Greco, Velazquez and Goya and even of foreign artists such as Hieronymus Bosch. It is easy to get lost in one of the mountains, spending a magnificent afternoon with Velazquez, for example, and having no time left for anyone else. If you have no more than an afternoon to spend at the Prado museum, you can feel a little regretful for missing so much. But curator Javier Portus has come up with an extraordinary special exhibition that leaves you with a wonderful sense of completeness. This exhibition, “The Spanish Portrait: From El Greco to Picasso,” draws on the great riches of the Prado, adds stunning loans from elsewhere and combines them to tell a coherent and satisfying story...

Mau Mau burst upon the imagination of the world half a century ago, when newspapers and magazines published lurid photos accompanied by accounts of crazed savages slaughtering white settlers and their families in the Arcadian and romantic British colony of Kenya in darkest Africa. The images of an irrational black onslaught were reinforced by the publication in 1955 of Robert Ruark’s bestselling novel “Something of Value,” which was made into a movie starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. To European and American ears during the 1950s, the words “Mau Mau” conjured up chilling terror. Historians and academics have chipped away at these images ever since. Carl Rosberg, a UC Berkeley political scientist, and John Nottingham, a former British colonial officer, published their pioneering work, “The Myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya,” in 1966. More studies have followed over the years. The two latest books, remarkable and lucid accounts by British and American academics that are brimming with new evidence, surely smash the myth and images for good...

The oldest museums in America have their storerooms full of paintings that were the rage in art more than a century ago but are now out of fashion. This gloomy repose is often the fate of the 19th century Barbizon painters of France. Their paintings were once prized by collectors all over the world, but the Barbizon painters had the misfortune to work just before the Impressionists came on the scene. These younger painters eclipsed them long ago. A Barbizon show is thus a rare and pleasant chance to look closely at a group of wonderful landscape painters whose work paved the way for the now more famous Impressionist artists. Curator Simon Kelly of the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore has dipped into his stores and those of the Baltimore Museum of Art to help put on that kind of show. Of the 48 works in the show owned by the Walters, 34 have not been exhibited for decades. Called “The Road to Impressionism: Landscapes from Corot to Monet,” the exhibition runs until Jan. 17 at the Walters. There are no plans for the exhibition to travel. Kelly has assembled 70 works from the most distinguished painters who lived or worked in Barbizon, a village on the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau 35 miles south of Paris...

For almost a half-century, the American sculptor Alexander Calder and the Spanish painter Joan Miro looked on each other as good friends. When apart, as they often were, they sometimes exchanged a letter or postcard of greeting. “A good smack on the butt for you,” wrote Calder in French in 1934. “A hug, kisses, and see you soon, you big stud,” wrote Miro in Spanish in 1945. They liked to embellish the postcards. Miro, for example, added underarm hair to the portrait of a Spanish dancer. But one thing they never did. Their correspondence has no discussion of theories or techniques or movements of art. This lack of serious art talk makes sense. There are strong similarities in the work of Calder and Miro. Both artists have an impish quality, a sense of play, a love of adventure and a penchant for creating colorful spheres and biomorphs. But they did not try to imitate each other. Nor did they try to compete. They were simply at ease, like good buddies, and their art somehow fit together. There was no need for pronouncements. This interplay of Calder and Miro is displayed in an unusual exhibition -- brimming with some of their finest mobiles and paintings -- that opened Oct. 9 at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

In an era when American newspapers and television bristle with images of Islamic terrorism, another side of Islam is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington -- a show devoted to the calm and mesmerizing beauty of Islamic art. The exhibition, “Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Victoria & Albert Museum,” was not put together for political reasons. It has a more mundane genesis. The Victoria & Albert in London has closed its Islamic rooms for reconstruction. While the revamping goes on, the museum has agreed to send a small but exquisite portion of its 10,000 Middle Eastern objects on a worldwide tour. The first stop is Washington, where the exhibition opened July 18 and will close Feb. 6. The 150 pieces in the Washington show include some of the Victoria & Albert’s finest holdings...

During the last years of the 20th century, scholars managed to break the code of the hieroglyphics of the ancient civilization of the Maya people. Perhaps 85% of the writing on Maya artwork and monuments can now be deciphered. The new knowledge has led to new understanding. A Maya exhibition, which just opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is one of the first gifts of the new scholarship. “Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya” places some of the finest pieces of Maya art into a coherent and focused story about the life of the kings and courts that ruled the splendid city-states in what is now Mexico and Central America during the height of Maya civilization from the years AD 600 to 800. Maya art has long been admired for its beauty and scenes of realistic action. “There is a poignancy about Maya art that reaches into your heart and soul,” says Kathleen Berrin of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, a curator of the exhibition. “There is an elegance and beauty that appeals to Western taste.” The exhibition, which displays more than 130 pieces, includes some of the finest samples of this appeal...

During the Renaissance, the city of Florence was infatuated with the biblical story of David and Goliath. Florentines liked to think of themselves as youthful and strong and ready to defend their home against the power of larger Italian city-states. Rich and prominent citizens decorated their palaces and public buildings with wonderful statues of David. The most famous, of course, is Michelangelo’s colossal marble sculpture. But there were other great ones as well. One of the finest -- older, smaller and crafted in bronze -- was made by Andrea del Verrocchio in the late 1460s for the powerful Medici family. Americans have a rare chance to see this work in a restored state and an altered pose. In exchange for financial help in restoring the statue, the National Museum of the Bargello in Florence has sent it on display...

THE U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have ignited so much confusion, controversy and cant that myriad books are sure to descend upon us for many years, all promising to shed light on the morass. Here are three of the first, all very different. The most surprising is “Allies: The U.S., Britain, and Europe in the Aftermath of the Iraq War” by William Shawcross, a British journalist who established himself in 1979 with the publication of “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia,” an attack on U.S. intervention in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. The intervention in Iraq does not bother him at all. In fact, he hails President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and their allies as “courageous in their determination finally to confront a regime that was an intolerable burden to its own people and an unacceptable affront to the world.” If you view the invasion as a misguided adventure, as I do, yet admire Shawcross enormously, as I do, the book may make you feel like the little boy in front of Shoeless Joe Jackson...

[OPINION] If Saddam Hussein had few or no weapons of mass destruction, why did he act as if he possessed arsenals of them? Why did Iraqis harass U.N. inspectors, bar their entry into certain buildings and sneak trucks out the back gates of compounds if there was nothing to hide? Analysts have been quick to suggest reasons. A prevailing view is machismo -- Hussein was trying to conceal his weakness, not his strength. Some experts, such as former weapons inspector David Kay, have said that scientists, seeking to enrich themselves with funds for phony projects, hoodwinked Hussein, not the inspectors. But one factor, just as important as the others, has been overlooked. U.N. inspections were undercut from the start by U.S. policy.

[OPINION] A little more than 50 years ago, the United States signed a pact with Generalissimo Francisco Franco allowing U.S. military forces to use air and naval bases in Spain. The agreement was a momentous event for Spain, and its repercussions still matter. For Americans, however, the pact, though significant, was a minor moment in the Cold War. U.S. historians barely mention it. The 50th anniversary passed in September with hardly any notice in Washington. Yet, the event should not be overlooked, especially at a time when the president proclaims his commitment to whip up democracy throughout the Middle East. The pact is a bald and astonishing example of how easily the United States can abandon a commitment to freedom -- even one for which almost 300,000 American soldiers died during World War II. What counted more in 1953 -- and probably still does -- was stability and the U.S. perception of what is best for the United States in the short term...

The small genre masterpieces of the French painters of the 18th century are so frothy, so delightful, so charming and sometimes so naughty that it is hard to associate them with such weighty themes as philosophy and revolution. But an extraordinary exhibition of these paintings, currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, makes the persuasive case that these great artists, no matter how frivolous their subjects often seemed, reflected the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment that coursed through France during these decades and laid the groundwork for the French Revolution. A visitor does not need to know all this to savor these wonderful works, but the historical dimension adds a special flavor that helps bind the artists together...

In the 1990s, while I was covering the United Nations for the Los Angeles Times, Madeleine Albright approached my table at a banquet in New York. My wife hugged her warmly, exclaiming: “Madeleine, you’re doing a wonderful job as U.N. ambassador!” “Yes,” Albright replied, “but Stanley doesn’t think so.” I grinned foolishly. I kept recalling that encounter as I read this engaging memoir of a remarkable foreign-born woman who came here as a refugee child and later negotiated the political thickets of Washington to become this nation’s first female secretary of State. No one could accuse Madeleine Albright of timidity; she is always blunt and direct. Perhaps more important, the remark reflected a troubling reality: Although I admired and respected her, I often found her words and actions as U.N. ambassador and secretary of State disappointing. I was not alone. She faced a barrage of criticism from reporters, foreign policy wonks and State Department professionals throughout her tenure. This book is her spirited defense...