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...

Praised by critics, admired by colleagues and respected by students, the distinguished 19th-century artist produced paintings and pastels of gentle beauty. William Merritt Chase dominated the universe of American art during the late 19th century. He was one of the first artists to turn out Impressionist landscapes in the United States, a portrait painter of the first rank, a master of still life, a renowned teacher, a leader of societies of artists, and a gifted connoisseur of European painting. He also knew everyone who counted in American art. Chase created the image of the typical artist for most Americans in his day. He believed in theatrical self-promotion, in the need for an artist like himself to show that he was different from the rest of society. He filled his studio with objets d'art and so much bric-a-brac that it became the talk of New York. When he walked down the street, he wanted onlookers to know he was an artist - a rather dandy, gentlemanly, eccentric artist...

Gilbert Stuart and the Creation of an Icon - In his "Lansdowne" portrait of Washington, as well as those of others, Gilbert Stuart caught the essence of his sitter. The American artist Gilbert Stuart was just a few days short of his 39th birthday in late 1794 when he arrived in Philadelphia intent on painting portraits of President George Washington. Considered the foremost American portrait painter of his day, the thoughtful and highly gifted artist managed to infuse his portraits of Washington, his most famous sitter, with a dignity and presence that inspire and still awe us today. But Stuart was a complex man. He was a garrulous boaster, an impulsive prankster, an incorrigible punster and an excessive imbiber. "Yet none of these faults," writes author Stanley Meisler, "detracted from the genius and talent to create what Stuart scholar Dorinda Evans calls 'a metaphysical incandescence' in his portraits, as if, as some contemporaries reflected, he were depicting the souls as well as the features of his sitters..."

I have been reading No Ordinary Time lately, Doris Kearns Goodwin's marvelous history of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during World War II. There are so many reminders of my childhood, so many names of long forgotten officials like War Production Board chief Donald Nelson that we used to memorize from My Weekly Reader. Goodwin describes the remarkable ability of President Roosevelt to unify the nation and mold public opinion...

An all-out American war against terrorism is unprecedented. But much of the rhetoric by our politicians has a familiar ring. The president says we are in a "crusade" against "a new kind of evil" and that each nation must decide whether "you are with us or you are with the terrorists." ... These words echo from the past in an eerie way. I heard these kind of arguments from American politicians and diplomats often as a foreign and Washington correspondent for more than 30 years during the Cold War...

Artist Paul Signac steps out of the shadow of his celebrated colleague, pointillist Georges Seurat, to star in a new exhibition at the Met. The French painter Paul Signac would spend many years of his long, prolific career preaching, practicing and elaborating the theories of art that he and his friend and mentor Georges Seurat had championed together before the latter's death in 1891. He became known, in fact, as Seurat's Saint Paul. According to Susan Alyson Stein, associate curator of European paintings at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, scholars have looked on Seurat as the genius and Signac as the promoter. "In Pointillism," she says, "there was Seurat and that other guy, Signac." On view at the Met from October 9 through December 30, "Signac 1863-1935: Master Neo-Impressionist"—the first major retrospective of Signac's work in nearly 40 years—brings the artist out of the shadows and into the spotlight, firmly establishing him as a major artist in his own right...

Kofi Annan, soft in speech, clear and plain in meaning, scrupulously honest with words, is the second United Nations Secretary-General to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee in Oslo awarded the prize posthumously to Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961 for his leadership in the bloody Congo crisis that took his life. There can hardly be two statesmen of molds so different. And the mood and power of the U.N. then and now contrast as much as the personalities of the two men...

There was a time -- romantic in French history -- when French Indochina with its capital of Hanoi shimmered as one of the jewels of the French colonial empire. Thousands of French administrators and teachers and merchants and police lived in Hanoi. The brightest and richest Vietnamese studied at elite French schools there. French law, French bureaucracy and French communications dominated life in the colony. And a visitor could taste a little bit of France and its elegance in the best hotels and restaurants...