How a mustachioed Barcelona artist foiled an elaborate plot to spirit Catalonia's priceless Romanesque paintings away from their homeland. In the summer of 1919, Joan Vallhonrat made his way by train, stagecoach and mule from Barcelona to the village of Mur in mountainous western Catalonia, just below the Spanish Pyrenees. An artist, Vallhonrat had accepted a commission from the Institute of Catalan Studies to travel to the remote Romanesque churches of Catalonia and paint scaled-down reproductions of the frescoes that had adorned their walls for centuries. When he entered the church of Santa Maria de Mur, however, he found a strange group of men gingerly chipping away the plaster behind the frescoes to tear them down, cart them away and ship them to America...

The masterful modernist manipulated light, form and focus to create color-strewn scenes of everyday life. hough the public loved his happily colored landscapes, his well-lit scenes of domestic life, his erotic and classically posed nudes, and his penetrating self-portraits, when he died in 1947 at age 79, the French painter Pierre Bonnard was viewed by many critics as a primitive generator of color who belonged far more to the 19th century than to the 20th. Over the past five decades that view has changed dramatically. "So much so," writes Stanley Meisler, "that Bonnard is now widely regarded as one of our century's most complex and masterful painters." An extraordinary Bonnard retrospective, which opened at the Tate Gallery in London in February, will be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from June 17 to October 13. "Bonnard was not interested in competing with contemporary painters," says the show's curator, British art historian Sarah Whitfield. "He was interested in competing with the history of art." And he did so, writes Meisler, "with a host of modern, radical approaches..."

Since I usually write about foreign affairs, I have not covered much of the Monica story. I did have to whip out color on the first day she showed up at the federal courthouse to testify in secret before the grand jury. The frenzy of the photographers and the glee of the television performers and the gawks of the tourists made the story feel even more unwholesome than usual. I kept my sanity that day by escaping for an hour at the National Gallery of Art across the street. I can thus offer no special insights into what is going on in Washington, just a few random thoughts about the Starr report and its aftermath. The zeal of Kenneth Starr so astounded me that I had to reach for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to find a meaningful parallel. There is a good deal of Roger Chillingworth, the husband of the adulterous Hester Prynne, in Starr. To avenge his wrong, the relentless Chillingworth transforms himself into a gnarled, satanic creature...

If Gen. Augusto Pinochet ever stands trial in a Spanish court for crimes against humanity, the venue will be odd and ironic. That is because Spaniards, in the celebrated transition from the cruel dictatorship of Francisco Franco to democracy more than 20 years ago, never tried anyone for complicity in their villain’s crimes against humanity. Spain, in fact, never even created a truth commission to delve into the carnage of the Franco past. Instead, Spaniards abided by what they called el pacto del olvido (the pact of forgetting), an informal understanding that blame and revenge must be laid aside lest furies break loose and smash the movement toward democracy. Franco’s sins were hardly the lesser of Pinochet’s. In the wake of Franco’s 1939 victory in the Spanish Civil War, he and his henchmen killed thousands of their countrymen, often in summary executions or after swift and bogus trials. For the 36 years of his reign, he allowed no dissent; leftists languished in prisons for decades...

The American impasse on Iraq derives from two American faults: sound-bite thinking and too much empty bombast. For almost a decade, American policy towards Saddam Hussein has been based on the assumption that he can't last very long. This has produced a lot of threats and blather without too much thought about what would happen if someone didn't rescue us from our threats. The confusion has led us to the present snarl where options are limited and we do not know what to do. None of this would be with us, of course, if President George Bush had finished the job and ordered the troops into Baghdad to bring down Saddam. But we can't blame Bush much for this. That was not a war aim at the time. Policymakers, in fact, did not want Iraq so weak that it could not balance the power of our then bête noire, Iran. Moreover, the Bush people had every right to expect the Iraqi military to get rid of its disgraced leader. It's hard to recall any leader in the last century or so who survived a defeat as total as Saddam's. Napoleon III, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Mussolini all died or were dumped into oblivion...

The Clinton administration and international donor organizations, heeding a warning from four Central American presidents that the ravages of Hurricane Mitch are endangering democracy in their countries, pledged more than $1 billion Thursday in relief and interest-free loans to the devastated region. “You are our neighbors, our friends, our partners,” Undersecretary of State Stuart E. Eizenstat said during an emergency meeting of the visiting presidents and a group of donor organizations. “When you suffer, we suffer. When you hurt, we hurt with you. When you need help, we are there to help.” It was not clear, however, whether the promises of aid would match the enormous need. Describing the extent of the horror six weeks ago, President Carlos Flores of Honduras said Thursday that the storm “destroyed 50 years of efforts to build an infrastructure and stole away assets of two generations of Hondurans...”

As the United States and Britain relentlessly carried out a third wave of airstrikes early today, the Iraqi regime fought back on the stage of world opinion, with President Saddam Hussein telling Arab television viewers that he will kneel only “before the face of God” and never to his enemies. And in a witting echo of Republicans during impeachment proceedings on Capitol Hill, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz branded President Clinton a liar to his people in the Monica S. Lewinsky affair and declared that the U.S. president has also been lying to Americans about Iraq. In Washington, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen told reporters that U.S. ships and warplanes had already launched more cruise missiles against Iraq than the total number fired at the country during the entire five weeks of bombing in the 1991 Persian Gulf War...

The United States on Wednesday ordered three Cuban diplomats at the United Nations to pack their bags and leave the country “for activities incompatible with their status as members of a U.N. mission,” a diplomatic euphemism for spying. The expulsions, which must be carried out by 5 p.m. EST Monday, were ordered because of activities that amounted to “violations of U.S. laws and endangerment of our national security interests,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said in a statement. Rubin said that “this action was taken as a result of evidence developed during an exhaustive investigation by the FBI.” But he offered no details. Both the Associated Press and Reuters, however, reported that the diplomats under expulsion had some connection with 10 Cubans arrested in Miami two months ago on charges that they had tried to infiltrate anti-communist Cuban exile groups and to spy on U.S. military bases for Cuba...