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...

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 2012, when Barack Obama won reelection, an odd but thrilling metaphor engulfed me. The election was like the climax of one of those early Howard Fast novels. After enduring months of derision of their leader as somehow unAmerican and countless maneuvers to curtail their right to vote and incessant tirades against the poor for taking, not giving, after enduring all the despicable attempts to belittle and suppress them, the poor and the blacks and the Hispanics and the young and the women united and arose to defend their hero and astound and frighten all the smug fat cats. “What a wonderful thing is metaphor,” wrote Christopher Fry in one of his plays. Well, so much for metaphor...