The grand and stirring exhibition of the works of Romare Bearden, which opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington last week, is far more than a retrospective. It is a celebration -- a celebration of the art establishment’s anointment of this African American painter and collagist into the highest ranks of American artists. There has often been a tendency to lump African American artists into a special and lesser place -- as genre painters of black life. Bearden, who died in 1988 at the age of 76, always called on his African American colleagues not to limit themselves in this way. “The Negro artist,” he said, “must come to think of himself not primarily as a Negro artist, but as an artist.” Yet, as Bearden often complained, the American art establishment did not think the same way. For those with influence in the art world, he said, “the Negro artist is usually not ... on the scene...”

American architect Daniel Libeskind is a master at relating the beauty of a building to its meaning and purpose. His works are a blend of space and story -- the reason he won the intense, highly publicized competition earlier this year to redesign the World Trade Center site in New York. It may take a decade before his exciting complex is complete. But Americans can see what may be in store for New York with his two earliest works in Germany: the acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin and the little-known Felix Nussbaum House in the northwestern town of Osnabruck. Visiting them is an emotional, even wrenching, experience...

Edouard Vuillard, the red-bearded French painter of small, intimate scenes and large decorative panels, stood at the height of the avant-garde in art during the 1890s. No one seemed more daring than Vuillard and his associates in Paris. But time -- and the likes of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse -- swiftly passed them by. As Vuillard’s friend and fellow painter Pierre Bonnard once wrote: “The pace of progress speeded up, society was ready to accept Cubism and Surrealism before we had achieved what we had set out to do. We were left, as it were, hanging in the air.” Vuillard was never really neglected. But art historians tended to look on him as a flash that flickered out before the end of the 19th century...

Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, toured the latest show in his museum 10 days before its opening. Workers were still adding the final touches as he made his way through the exhibition. In the last room, as he took in the paintings, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, a young woman with long blond hair, jeans and running shoes admiring a work by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. “Have you met the courier from Cincinnati?” called out Mark Leithauser, the gallery’s director of design. Powell, an outgoing man known to his staff and friends as Rusty, turned to greet the young woman. As he did so, Leithauser burst into laughter. Powell had been hoodwinked. The young woman was “Portrait of Kim,” an incredibly lifelike sculpture created by American artist Duane Hanson in 1996...

Painters such as Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró and architects such as Antonio Gaudí have given this city a reputation as a center of European art. Less known is its role as a musical metropolis. But Barcelona, the capital of the Spanish region of Catalonia, has produced as many virtuoso musicians as artists, and its three houses of music -- the Liceo, the Palau de la Música Catalana and L’Auditori -- are a delight to patronize, or merely to behold. The musical history is distinguished. Pablo Casals, the renowned cellist, founded and directed the Barcelona Symphonic Orchestra until the Spanish Civil War sent him into exile. Pianist Alicia de Larrocha debuted at the Palau de la Música Catalana, a showpiece of art nouveau architecture, at age 7. Until recently, when Madrid’s Teatro Real began staging operas, the Liceo served as the only major opera house in Spain...

Alfred Stieglitz is best known these days as an early genius of photography and as the husband of Georgia O'Keeffe. But historians regard Stieglitz, who died more than 50 years ago, as far more than that. Through his galleries, publications and persuasive palaver, the New Jersey-born Stieglitz was also guru, muse, promoter and impresario of modern art in America. In fact, Sarah Greenough, curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, describes him as "the single most important figure in American art in the first half of the 20th century." To prove this, Greenough has put together an exhibition that combines Stieglitz's photographs with the paintings, watercolors, drawings and photos of his American disciples and of the European masters that he championed...

[OPINION] Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator of Spain. For almost all Spaniards, there will be no mourning or commemoration. But there will be celebration, for the date also marks the 25th anniversary of the ascent of King Juan Carlos I to the throne and the beginning of Spain's transition from dictatorship to democracy. Spain's transformation into a democracy, one of the most remarkable evolutions in 20th-century political history, worked so smoothly that many have forgotten what a marvel it truly was. Spain first demonstrated to the world that apparently powerful institutions, no matter how frightening and repressive, can prove suddenly fragile and weak when they are not rooted in popular support. I was dispatched by The Times to Madrid a couple of months after Franco died to cover the turmoil that many outsiders and Spaniards expected...

[OPINION] Mexicans once had a unique system for picking a new president: A president ruled like a czar for six years and then personally picked his successor. The outgoing president, in fact, was the only voter who counted in Mexican elections. He was, as political cartoonist Eduardo del Rio once put it, "the Big Finger." As soon as the Big Finger pointed at someone, the happy target was anointed as the new president of Mexico. Succession was clear-cut. Yet, despite the monopoly enjoyed by the president, the air crackled with politicking. Influential Mexicans refused to sit back and wait for the Big Finger to point. Instead, they did all they could to push the Big Finger this way and that. Mexicans tried to persuade the president that their man was a dynamo and all his rivals ninnies or blackguards. The maneuvering metamorphosed into a comic cockpit, and I found myself right in the middle of it a quarter-century ago, when I was The Times correspondent in Mexico City...

Except when they hid behind playful masks, designers Charles and Ray Eames usually posed for photographs in exuberant smiles, beaming with optimism. The pose was fitting. This husband-and-wife team, headquartered in Los Angeles, excited the world of design in the heady years after World War II when Americans looked ever upward and onward before Vietnam and racial violence and the homeless gnawed at the nation's conscience and dampened good feelings. Charles and Ray Eames designed the form-fitting chairs that are so ubiquitous now we forget how dramatic and modern the invention once seemed. They housed their offices in an old auto garage on Washington Boulevard in Venice, encouraging the new fad for transforming factory lofts into galleries and studios. They influenced modern architecture by building a boxlike steel and glass home on the Pacific Palisades. And they manipulated a host of different media to bombard the public with images and ideas about a streamlined, modern world anchored in science and technology...

Ingres chronicled an era with his luminous portraits of the rising bourgeoisie, but he didn't exactly relish the thought. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the classical French master of the 19th century, professed to abhor the painting of portraits. "I cannot stand them anymore," he wrote a friend in 1841. "It is not to paint portraits that I returned to Paris." "Cursed portraits!" he wrote another friend six years later. "They always prevent me from undertaking important things..." Yet he could not resist the appeal of power, wealth, friendship, beauty and fashion, and he spent much of a long lifetime crafting with painstaking care a series of astounding portraits that chronicle the era of bourgeois ascendancy in France for the six decades between the rise of Emperor Napoleon I and the decline of Emperor Napoleon III...

You can hear the moments of boredom tick away whenever you tell Americans that no other industrialized democracy has the same dispiriting problems as the United States--not the crime, not the guns, not the homeless, not the unschooled, not the poor, not the racism, not the ugliness. Listeners may mimic interest for a short while, then their glances roll up and away. They may not doubt me but, content in smugness, they do not care. After 21 years as a foreign correspondent, I returned home late last year to a country bristling with astonishing problems, most left untended. Yet many Americans persist in believing that their country has a divine mission on Earth, a model for all others. Ignorance about the rest of the world seems total. Our son set off for high school the other day in a T-shirt emblazoned with a bust of Lenin. I jokingly warned him to be careful. “Don’t worry,” he said, cynically not jovially, “no one at school knows who he is.” Few if any peoples can boast as much democracy and energy as Americans. These are wondrous gifts that foreigners can hardly fathom. Yet I often wonder now to what purposes they are put...

Riot police swinging truncheons rushed into the Bank of France before dawn Wednesday and forced aside a mass of striking workers to lead two besieged bank officials out of the venerable building. The show of force, which, ironically, came on a day when workers throughout France were electing representatives to traditional courts that try to settle labor disputes peacefully, infuriated French labor unions and seemed to harden the nine-day-old strike. It also reflected the poor state of relations between the labor unions and the conservative government of Premier Jacques Chirac. Jacques de Larosiere, the former director of the International Monetary Fund who is now governor of France’s government-run central bank, said he had called on the police because the strikers were holding two bank officials against their will...

Only one restaurant in all Paris prohibits smoking. Only a handful, mostly American fast-food outlets, have nonsmoking sections. Premier Jacques Chirac rarely talks to reporters without waving a cigarette for emphasis. A stranger can always identify the high school in any Paris neighborhood by the cluster of teen-agers outside puffing awkwardly on cigarettes. The French government spends far more every year on promoting smoking than on discouraging it. There are other countries where smoking is more prevalent. Anyone who has ever listened to the raspy voice of a bartender in Madrid or choked at breakfast in a Polish coffee shop knows that. But few countries are as puzzling as France in their attitude toward smoking...

When the U.S. and Soviet leaders meet this week in Washington, Western Europe will be looking on like a bashful cheerleader, too nervous to cheer very loudly but too loyal to let the side down. This ambiguity has led to some confusion. In public pronouncements, all the West European leaders welcome the summit meeting and endorse its probable main achievement--the signing of a treaty to eliminate American and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear weapons, the kind that could strike at the Soviet Union from Europe and at Europe from the Soviet Union. But many European government officials in private, and many newspaper and strategic analysts in public, say they are resigned to the treaty and express worry about where it will lead...

Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former ruler of Cambodia now in rebellion, and Premier Hun Sen, the leader of its Vietnam-supported government, signed an agreement Friday that could lead to a negotiated end of the long civil war in their country. Much depends on whether the Khmer Rouge, the powerful partner in Prince Sihanouk’s rebel coalition, will heed the call of Sihanouk and Hun Sen to join them in future negotiations. The agreement, signed with great ceremony before television cameras, does little more than set the ground rules for future negotiations. But there was an optimistic air in the secluded chateau in Fere-en-Tardenois, 75 miles east of Paris, where the 65-year-old Sihanouk and the 36-year-old Hun Sen signed the document after meeting over the last three days...

Two opponents at war, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former ruler of Cambodia, and Hun Sen, the present premier of Cambodia, met Wednesday in a secluded hotel in eastern France for negotiations aimed at leading their small Southeast Asian nation out of its bloody morass. The talks, which many Cambodians described as historic, were the first such negotiations since Vietnam invaded Cambodia nine years ago. After the session ended almost seven hours later, there was muted optimism. No agreements were announced, but both sides said they will meet again today and perhaps on Friday. They also announced that they will hold another round of negotiations sometime in the future at Sihanouk’s home in Pyongyang in North Korea...

Premier Jacques Chirac of France faced bitter condemnation from Britain and growing suspicion within France on Tuesday over his deal with Iran for the release of two French hostages in Lebanon. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, commenting on the French concessions that brought the two hostages home, told the House of Commons in London that “treating with terrorists only leads to more kidnappings and more violence.” “That is the way we will not do it,” she went on. “The best defense against terrorists is to make clear that you will never give in to their demands.” Even before Thatcher spoke to Parliament, an aide to Chirac said in Paris that “we are a little astonished” at reports of the fury of Thatcher and British Foreign Minister Geoffrey Howe and at editorials in London newspapers that accused France of “betrayal” and of “a cynical compact with terror...”

James Baldwin, a renowned writer who spent a lifetime in literature trying to explore his identity as a black and as an American, died Monday night at the age of 63 in his home in St. Paul de Vence in the south of France. His death from cancer was announced Tuesday morning by Bernard Hassalle, a longtime companion and secretary. The eldest son of a Harlem preacher, Baldwin, a small, slight man, was looked on for much of two decades both as a distinguished young American novelist and as a black essayist with the extraordinary, almost uncanny power of making his black experience meaningful to a white audience. But, after the 1950s and 1960s, his reputation waned, perhaps because he had become too strident a black for white audiences, perhaps because he failed, like other American novelists of the 20th Century, to maintain the excitement and freshness of his earlier work...

The French government allowed Wahid Gordji, the Iranian official suspected of helping terrorists in Paris, to leave the besieged Iranian Embassy and return home to Iran on Sunday as part of an obvious trade for two French hostages released by their captives in Beirut two days ago. The office of Premier Jacques Chirac, in a carefully worded statement, also held out the hope that Iran would now use its influence to help arrange the release of the three other French hostages in Beirut. The departure of Gordji, holed up in the embassy for five months, also appeared to signal an end to what the French press had called “the war of the embassies” and could signal an early resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries...

Premier Jacques Chirac, welcoming two former hostages home to France from Lebanon, acknowledged Saturday that their release represents an improvement in France’s relations with Iran but denied as “a pack of lies” a report that ransom had been paid. The report had appeared only hours earlier in the influential and usually authoritative newspaper, Le Monde. In a front-page story, Le Monde said, “The payment of a ransom contributed to the liberation of the hostages.” But Chirac used strong language in denying the report at a news conference at Paris’ Orly Airport. “I deny as emphatically as I can the pack of lies that claims France paid a ransom,” Chirac said. The controversy over how France gained their release did not dampen the emotional welcome at the airport for Jean-Louis Normandin, 36, a television lighting technician, and Roger Auque, 31, a free-lance photographer...

Islamic extremists, citing assurances of an impending change in France’s policy toward the Middle East, freed two French hostages in West Beirut on Friday. Jean-Louis Normandin, 36, a television lighting technician, and Roger Auque, 31, a free-lance photographer, were released from separate cars outside the seaside Summerland Hotel, about 50 yards from waiting French Embassy officials and Syrian secret servicemen. The cars sped away quickly and the two men were rushed to the French Embassy in Christian East Beirut in bulletproof vehicles, with journalists and photographers racing behind. Normandin later told ABC News he was imprisoned with two Americans. “I was with two Americans--Joseph Cicippio and Edward Tracy--since the 12th of February,” he said. He gave no indication as to whether the kidnapers planned to release the Americans...

The region of Burgundy was once an independent state, a powerful rival of France, boasting the most elegant and fashionable court in Europe. But all that power dwindled away half a millennium ago, leaving Burgundy with little more than memories and wine. Since then, Burgundy has had its ups and downs. In his 1934 novel, “Tropic of Cancer,” Henry Miller described Dijon, the ancient capital of Burgundy, as “a hopeless, jerkwater town where mustard is turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and cute-looking little jars.” Its past glories as the seat of a great duchy were lost on him. Today, no one can accuse Burgundy of wielding imperial power. But its wine--prized throughout the world at breathtaking prices--has made Burgundy one of the richest regions of France...

Hardly a week passes nowadays without a new political scandal in France. The air is charged with accusation. There are so many smears, in fact, that it’s hard for all of them to stick. The sound and fury is actually the unofficial opening of the campaign for next spring’s presidential election. The most serious scandal--or, as the French prefer to call it, affaire-- has echoes of the U.S. Iran-Contra furor because it involves illegal sale of arms to Iran. By all logic, that affair should have damaged the political standing of President Francois Mitterrand. But Mitterrand, a Socialist, seems to have wriggled out of the affair somewhat easily, leaving behind a trap for his conservative arch-rival, Premier Jacques Chirac, who in turn seems to have slipped the trap...

History hangs on most Spaniards in ways Americans can hardly understand. That difference is at the heart of the repeated failure of Spanish and U.S. officials to negotiate a new treaty allowing the United States to keep its military bases in Spain after May, 1988. After the seventh round of talks ended in failure early this month, an American spokesman insisted that U.S. negotiators understood the problems posed for Spain by a treaty dating back to the days of late dictator Francisco Franco. But when pressed by journalists to amplify this understanding, the American protested, “Look, you’re talking about something that happened just two years after I was born.” Americans do not like to look back...

The people of this North African country are quietly proud these days of what seems like a revolution without pain, their ability to end the long reign of elderly Habib Bourguiba without bloodshed, without fanfare and without panic. “It was a great historic event,” Khemais Chamari, long known as an opposition leader, told a group of American journalists Sunday, “but it has passed as if it were no event at all.” “People are very proud,” said an international foreign aid specialist who knows the Tunisians well. “For years, everybody was worried about what would happen to Tunisia after the end of Bourguiba. Now they know, and they are happy...”

Zine Abidine Ben Ali, a 51-year-old army general serving as premier, took over the presidency of Tunisia smoothly and peacefully Saturday after removing an aging President Habib Bourguiba at dawn from the nearly absolute power he had held for 31 years. Citing a report by a medical commission that the octogenarian Bourguiba was senile and ill, Ben Ali, appointed premier by Bourguiba only a month ago, announced to the nation that the politician who had led Tunisia to independence in 1956 was “absolutely incapable of assuming the duties of president of the republic.” A few hours later, Ben Ali was sworn in before Parliament as the new president of Tunisia. The Tunisian constitution provides for the premier to succeed to the presidency upon the death, resignation or physical incapacity of the president, but it lays down no rules for determining that incapacity...

Spanish and U.S. officials failed again Friday to reach agreement on a new treaty to keep U.S. military bases in Spain, sending their negotiations into a critical final phase that will determine the bases’ fate. Both sides sought to minimize their failure and emphasized that they have decided to meet next month for an eighth round of talks on the bases, which grew out of a joint defense agreement signed in 1953, when Gen. Francisco Franco was the chief of state. But Spanish officials said they will formally notify the United States by letter next week that they do not want the present treaty automatically extended for another year when it lapses next May 14. That, in effect, sets a six-month deadline for the two sides to agree on a new treaty...

No one can be sure whether Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev has the will and imagination to quiet the deep, long-standing fears and suspicions that many in the world have about the Soviet Union. But there is little doubt that Gorbachev, with great charm and tact and flair, has managed in a relatively brief time to push Western diplomats and their old assumptions far off balance. Despite protests from the White House that he has done little more than seize old ideas of President Reagan’s on arms control, much of the world sees Gorbachev as an innovator and a pragmatic compromiser, a statesman whose initiative and determination are responsible for the forthcoming treaty that would dismantle and destroy some nuclear weapons for the first time...

A visitor to the Soviet Union these days finds a myriad of voices and images that reflect the headiness of change, the thrill of hope and the fear of failure. The angry, elderly man, a black cap snug on his silvery hair, stared at the painting on a stand in Moscow’s Izmailova Park on a recent Sunday morning and demanded that the artist pull it down. “This is not art,” the elderly man said. The commotion prompted onlookers to crowd around the critic. They laughed at him, jeered at him, thrust their fingers at him to make their point. “Who the hell are you?” someone demanded. The elderly man finally gave up and stormed off...

France called Thursday for an urgent meeting of the finance ministers of the seven leading industrial democracies to keep the dollar from sliding further. In a speech to the French Economic and Social Council, Finance Minister Edouard Balladur said a meeting of the so-called Group of Seven--the United States, Japan, West Germany, Italy, Britain, Canada and France--is needed “very soon” to reinforce the accords of last February that had kept the dollar stable until this week. Reagan Administration officials, however, said a meeting was unlikely until budget negotiations with Congress were completed in Washington...

[Series REMAKING THE REVOLUTION: Gorbachev's Gamble] When Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and thus the founding father of the Soviet Union, died in 1924, his widow, Natalya Krupskaya, implored his followers: “Do not let your sorrow for Ilyich find expression in outward veneration of his personality. Do not raise monuments to him or palaces to his name. Do not organize pompous ceremonies in his memory.” The followers turned their backs on the widow’s plea. They turned from her, in fact, like a furious whirlwind and created out of Lenin a prophet or a saint or even a god on earth. No other hero of the 20th Century anywhere is venerated the way Lenin is venerated in the Soviet Union...

[Series REMAKING THE REVOLUTION: Gorbachev's Gamble] The Great October Revolution began here in St. Petersburg in 1917, when the Bolsheviks seized the reins of a battered Russia in a frenetic time that the American journalist John Reed called the “10 days that shook the world.” Leningrad, as St. Petersburg is now known, is thus a kind of holy city in the Soviet Union, the city of the vanguard of the revolution. Yet now, 70 years after the revolution, the Soviet Union’s second-largest city hardly seems in the vanguard of anything. Leningrad is, in fact, a little out of date and out of step with the reforms of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev...

Most foreigners believe that the French Revolution has a glorious image in France. After all, July 14, the anniversary of the revolutionary storming of the Bastille, is France’s national day. The revolutionary “Marseillaise” is the national anthem. And France will commemorate the 200th anniversary of the revolution in 1989. Yet, as the celebration nears, it is more and more obvious that a large minority of French has trouble embracing the revolution. Some fret over its bloody excesses and accuse generations of teachers and historians of hiding those stark and frightful realities. Some conservatives accuse leftists of exaggerating the place of the revolution in the mythology of France...

[OPINION] Hugh Capet was crowned king in 987 and the French now look on that date as the birth of France. The country is celebrating the end of its first millennium with religious ceremonies, sound-and-light shows, medieval jousting tournaments, historical symposiums, a bit of monarchist nostalgia and souvenir bric-a-brac decorated with 1,000-year-old designs. There are historical problems; nobody knows much about Hugh Capet. No scholar has ever been able to find a single medieval drawing or written description of him. His kingdom was not much, no more than bits of royal domain around Paris. He was probably more of a kinglet than a king. It is not even clear what he did as monarch aside from persuading a Roman Catholic archbishop to sanctify his son as unchallenged heir to the throne...

But Most Melanesians Boycott S. Pacific Referendum; Paris Hails Outcome. Almost everyone who voted in a special referendum in New Caledonia on Sunday rejected independence from France, but most Melanesians, the largest ethnic group on the South Pacific archipelago, boycotted the polls. Although many analysts had derided the referendum in advance as an exercise that will settle none of the racial and political problems of the territory, the French government hailed the results as a victory for democracy and for France. The results were about the best that the French government of Premier Jacques Chirac could have expected and fell short of the hopes of the main Melanesian independence party, the Socialist Kanak Front for National Liberation. Yet the results did little more than follow the general lines of the ethnic divisions of New Caledonia...

Makes Fools of Federal Military Ruler, Other Opponents in Nigerian Crisis - Lt. Col. C. Odumegwu Ojukwu is a roughly bearded young man with soft eyes and gentle tones and an unconcealed contempt for the men who oppose him in the present Nigerian crisis. There is a feeling in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, that all these Nigerian troubles with the secessionist state of Biafra would go away if only its leader, Ojukwu, would also go away. The feeling Is false. But it is worth recording because it reveals one of the problems In the crisis - the federal rulers know in their bones that Ojukwu has contempt for them...

[OPINION] The angry young men of Nigeria seem tired and subdued these days and not so young anymore. Five years ago, when I visited Lagos, they rushed from nightclub to nightclub, dancing the highlife and drinking and complaining, shouting abuse at politicians, accusing them of corruption, greed, nepotism, ignorance, inefficiency, sloth, lethargy. Their anger had excitement. One young man would pace back and forth and flap his arms in anguish over the sickness in his government. Their frustration was dramatic. "I am an angry young man," one told me, slamming his fist into his palm, "but I do not know what to do." When their frustration mounted, they would grow quiet and bitter, and talk vaguely about plots. Some day, they whispered, the army would put an end to all this...

Stanley Meisler, former Peace Corps deputy director for evaluation and research and Associated Press correspondent in Washington, D.C., Monday, was named chief of the Los Angeles Times news bureau in sub-Sahara Africa, now located in Nairobi, Kenya. Meisler, 33, succeeds Don Shannon, who has been transferred to The Times' Tokyo bureau following two years in Leopoldville, The Congo. The Leopoldville office has been closed. Meisler began his newspaper career with the Middletown (Ohio) Journal in 1953. He moved to the AP bureau in New Orleans a year later and to the Washington bureau in 1958. Meisler covered the House of Representatives prior to his appointment as a Peace Corps official in 1964. Awarded Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1961, Meisler spent a year traveling in Africa, followed by graduate studies in African affairs at UC Berkeley. He has written articles on Africa for Atlantic Monthly, the Reporter, the Nation and other magazines. A native of New York City, Meisler was graduated from City College of New York in 1952.

One night in steaming, gamboling Lagos, a young Nigerian poet leaned forward and whispered, "Nigeria is made up of a caste of corruption on the top and a caste of grumblers on the bottom." A friend joined in. "The grumblers are angry." "No," the poet disagreed. "They are not angry yet. They still have too much." These words caught the mood of a generation in Africa...