The flamboyant Spaniard often hid his artistic genius behind a perpetual zeal for self-promotion and an obsession with money. Genius or madman? A new exhibition may help you decide. Salvador Dalí spent much of his life promoting himself and shocking the world. He relished courting the masses, and he was probably better known, especially in the United States, than any other 20th-century painter, including even fellow Spaniard Pablo Picasso. He loved creating a sensation, not to mention controversy, and early in his career exhibited a drawing, titled SacredHeart, that featured the words “Sometimes I Spit with Pleasure on the Portrait of My Mother.” Publicity and money apparently mattered so much to Dalí that, twitching his waxed, upturned mustache, he endorsed a host of products for French and American television commercials. Diffidence was not in his vocabulary. “Compared to Velázquez, I am nothing,” he said in 1960, “but compared to contemporary painters, I am the most big genius of modern time...”

A major exhibition showcases the streamlined, glamorous look that dominated architecture and the decorative arts during the 1920s and ’30s.

An exhibition of ancient Maya art points up the opulence and violence of the great Mesoamerican civilization. While most of Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, the Maya of Mexico and Central America flourished. Living off a bounty of corn, they devised an elaborate calendar, charted stars and planets and invented the most complex written language in the Americas. And at the peak of their civilization, from a.d. 600 to 850, the Maya built monumental cities and produced art—stone sculptures, painted ceramics, delicate figurines and jade jewelry and masks—of astonishing beauty and striking, revelatory detail. Recently, scholars studying these pre-Columbian artworks have gained new insights into the life of the ancient Maya kings and their retinues. Now, an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. of more than 130 Maya masterworks, many of them never before displayed in the United States, affirms the pomp and sophistication of Maya courtly life, from its royals’ fondness for mirror-gazing to its chilling brutality...

From his Jewish Museum in Berlin to his proposal for the World Trade Center site, Daniel Libeskind designs buildings that reach out to history and humanity. Daniel Libeskind, the high-spirited American architect who in early February was selected as a finalist in the much publicized competition to design the site of the World Trade Center, was barely known outside the academic world until 1989. That year he was chosen to build what is now his most acclaimed work — the Jewish Museum in Berlin. He was 42 years old and had taught architecture for 16 years, but Libeskind had never actually built a building. He was not even sure that he would get to build this one. The Berlin Senate, which was to fund the project, was so uncertain about its plans that a nervous and pessimistic Libeskind described all talk about the project as “only a rumor...”

A rare exhibition of Joan Miró's whimsical, brightly painted bronzes highlights the unbridled playfulness of his later works. A new exhibit showcases the neglected, playful sculptures of artist Joan Miró. By the time he reached his 70s, Joan Miró had become - with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse - a pillar of modern art whose paintings graced the walls of modern museums. But he was also a contemporary artist who never stopped innovating. A small man with thin white hair and the palest of gray eyes, Miró dressed like a salesman, but his bourgeois demeanor hid a penchant for artistic shock. In his celebrated 1923-24 painting The Hunter (Catalan Landscape), for example, the hunter is a stick figure with whiskers, upturned mustache and flaming pipe. After a blink or two of surprise, an observer notices that the hunter is urinating on the ground. When I interviewed him on his 85th birthday in 1978 on the Spanish island of Majorca, his studio was strewn with unfinished paintings strikingly different from anything he’d done before...

[EDITOR'S NOTE] As a general rule, magazine editors don’t like to run more than one article by any one writer in the same issue. That goes for us, too, but this time we couldn’t help ourselves. Stanley Meisler’s story about Daniel Libeskind (World Trade Center site was selected as a finalist). And Meisler’s piece about the playful, painted bronzes of sculptor Joan Miró ("Mischief Maker") was just the thing — also timely, colorful, upbeat — to round out the issue. Meisler, for his part, regards his interviews with Miró, who died in 1983, and Libeskind as two of the high points of his 47-year journalism career, much of it as a foreign correspondent in Europe for the Los Angeles Times...

We travel to Africa with Kofi Annan, broker of the unanimous U.N. resolution to allow weapons inspectors back into Iraq. The trip would take Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations and a Nobel Peace laureate, first to Vienna for a meeting with Iraqi officials and then to Africa, where he would visit four nations in eight days to continue his particular brand of relentless yet soft-spoken diplomacy. Annan, 64, has been with the U.N. for 40 years, but unlike many career bureaucrats, he doesn’t shrink from trouble and is said to grow calmer as a crisis mounts. He has represented the world body in international and civil conflicts in Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor and other hot zones, and he oversaw the U.N.’s 70,000 peacekeeping troops and civilian workers from 1993 to 1996. The next year he became the seventh Secretary-General - the first to rise through the U.N. ranks and the first black “diplomat in chief”...

On the 150th anniversary of Antoni Gaudí’s birth, adoring crowds make the pilgrimage to Barcelona to gaze upon the Catalan architect’s astonishing and whimsical works. In Barcelona, a yearlong celebration spotlights architecture's playful genius - the audacious and eccentric Antoni Gaudí. When I first came upon the startling and fanciful works of Antoni Gaudí a quarter of a century ago, I assumed he must have been some kind of freakish genius who created wonderful art out of his wild imagination, without regard to other architects or any artist before or during his time. I also thought that the Barcelona architect now being honored by that city’s "International Gaudí Year" celebrations was one of a kind, and that his fantastic curving structures, shattered-tile chimneys, lavish decoration and bizarre towers stood alone. I soon found, however, that this assumption troubled my Barcelona friends. To them, Gaudí was deeply rooted in the history of Catalonia, their region of Spain, and in the fashion of Art Nouveau that stirred such centers of culture as Paris, Vienna, Brussels, Glasgow, Munich and Barcelona at the turn of the 20th century. I was making the common error of an outsider encountering the greatness of Gaudí for the first time.

A lavish exhibition of the Spanish artist's works, including his famous painting The Naked Maja, stirs new debate about his relationships with the women he painted. The 20th-century French novelist André Malraux proclaimed that "modern art begins" with the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya. Born in 1746 in the Spanish province of Aragon, the fiercely independent and relentlessly innovative Goya tackled a wide range of media and subject matter over the course of his half-century career. One of Spain's most celebrated artists, he served as a court painter to King Charles IV and counted such influential individuals as the renowned Duchess of Alba and royal adviser Manuel Godoy among his patrons. Though he suffered a near-fatal illness at age 47 that left him deaf, Goya went on to paint some of his most famous canvases, including his scandalous, at the time, Naked Maja...

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...

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..."

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...

As the 20th century neared, more than a hundred years ago, artists and intellectuals and merchants throughout Europe and in the United States tried to whip art into new shapes so it could keep pace with the ever-changing modern world. This frenzy to throw off the stultifying past excited artists and craftspeople, dealers and shopkeepers. Since they believed they were creating everything anew, their style is best known today as Art Nouveau, French for "new art." In April, London's Victoria and Albert Museum opened the largest exhibition of Art Nouveau ever assembled. The show, expanded even more, comes to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. on October 8, 2000.

Creating monumental works in iron, steel, and wood, Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida has come to see space itself as material to mold. Eduardo Chillida, the renowned 76-year-old Spanish sculptor, wants to climax a long and distinguished career by carving out a massive space 11 stories high and just as wide inside a mountain on one of Spain's Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The tall and soft-spoken Chillida, who often sounds more like a poet than a sculptor, is awed by the idea of standing within the enormous emptiness of a mountain and looking upward at shafts of light from the sun and the moon. Chillida (pronounced Chee-YEE-dah) may never realize the work. Although the provincial government of the Canary Islands has approved the project, and promoters are already urging tourists to visit the anointed mountain, a small group of environmentalists has denounced the venture, castigating Chillida for meddling with nature. On top of this, engineers have not yet finished a study to determine whether Chillida's plan is structurally sound, and other problems have arisen. Whether successful or not, the grand ambition of the mountain project has not surprised anyone who knows the work of Chillida well...

Treasures from an Istanbul palace reveal the power and mystique of the sultans who lived here. For centuries, the Western world was fascinated by the marvels and mysteries of the Ottoman Empire and the sultans who ruled their vast domains from the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. Writers, composers and artists celebrated or satirized the omnipotence and opulence of the sultans and the secrecy lurking in the harem. The creative works about the Turks were so numerous that the French had a word for the genre: Turqueries. The examples are plentiful and well-known. In the 17th century, Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme ridicules a bourgeois father who allows a young man to marry his daughter only after the suitor pretends to be the son of the sultan. In the 18th century, Mozart's opera The Abduction from the Seraglio tells the story of two kidnapped young women who are freed from a pasha's palace. In the 19th century, Ingres beguiles his patrons by painting fanciful scenes of voluptuous women lying languidly in the harem and Turkish baths...

Matthias Grünewald’s 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece glorified suffering and offered comfort to those afflicted with a dread disease. The Isenheim Altarpiece, painted by Matthias Grünewald almost 500 years ago, is regarded by scholars and critics as a sublime artistic creation, an icon of Western civilization like Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Yet, in all of last year, barely 250,000 people came to the Unterlinden Museum in the French Alsatian town of Colmar to look at this masterpiece of Northern Renaissance art. That is a paltry number compared with the millions who crowd into the museums of Paris and Rome and New York every year to render homage to similar stirring creations. "Of the handful of the greatest works of Western art," New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman wrote after making a pilgrimage to the altarpiece in 1998, "it's the one that may have been seen by the fewest people, certainly by the fewest Americans..."

The National Gallery's new sculpture garden offers a bouquet of modern masters. Crowds of sightseers are coming upon a magical garden on the National Mall these days, a garden that reflects the power and beauty and tragedy and laughter and illusion of art," writes Smithsonian contributor Stanley Meisler. "Their find is the long-awaited National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, an oasis among some of the best-known museums and monuments in America." After languishing for more than 30 years, the National Gallery of Art's plans for a 20th-century sculpture garden finally got under way earlier this decade when the museum received a major donation from the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation that covered most of the cost of construction and the purchase of eight sculptures. Now the 6.1-acre park, which opened May 23, is playing host to a broad audience of admirers of modern sculpture...

John Singer Sargent made his fortune and reputation as a portrait painter of beautiful women and influential men. One of the great painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, John Singer Sargent made his fortune and reputation as a portrait painter of beautiful women and influential men. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, novelists Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, actress Ellen Terry and art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner all sat for him. Raised in Europe by an American expatriate family, Sargent attended art schools in Paris. Precociously gifted, he soon assimilated lessons from the old masters, the contemporary Impressionists and the Spanish painters Velázquez and Goya, producing a spectacular array of exciting and masterful paintings while only in his 20s. At the 1884 Paris Salon, however, his portrait of the 23-year-old American Virginie Gautreau, shown with bare shoulders, overflowing bosom and haughty manner, scandalized the Paris establishment...

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..."

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...

Money is no object for the Getty Trust, as it builds its collections and does good works around the globe. Now it has a new home overlooking Los Angeles. "I've always said that Getty-watching is like going to the Indianapolis 500," says John Walsh, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. "You're not there to see them go round and round. You're there to see them hit the wall." The Getty Trust, whose extraordinary wealth has made it a target of both envy and scorn, will open its flagship Getty Center on December 16. The billion-dollar museum and research campus, designed by Richard Meier and perched on a ridge in the foothills of California's Santa Monica Mountains, is the home of an art institution whose focus has expanded exponentially since the death of J. Paul Getty, its oil baron founder, in 1976...

The Scottish architect and designer, in vogue at the turn of the century, is hot again, and coming to America. With his wife, Margaret, he changed the face of Glasgow; now the city is celebrating them by sending a major exhibition across the pond. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the masterful Scottish architect and designer, created his small stock of exquisite work in a brief outburst of youthful exuberance around the turn of the century and then slipped into a desperate decline. After Mackintosh died in 1928, a critic described him as "the European counterpart of Frank Lloyd Wright" and a forerunner of Le Corbusier. In 1994, a Mackintosh writing desk was sold at auction in London for an astounding 793,500 pounds, setting a record for a piece of 20th-century furniture. But Mackintosh never felt the kind of acclaim during his lifetime that critics shower on great artists. After tasting early success in his native Glasgow, a depressed Mackintosh found himself falling out of fashion. Drinking too much, he muttered bitterly in his 40s about the world passing him by. Long before he died, he gave up architecture and design...

A fabulous cache of Impressionist and other paintings, hidden for 50 years, is surfacing in a new exhibit at the Hermitage, Russia's museum of the czars in St. Petersburg. The paintings, by masters such as Van Gogh, Degas, Monet and Renoir, were confiscated from Germany by the Red Army at the close of World War II. One of the most opulent sites on Earth, the Hermitage includes the Winter Palace of the Romanov czars, who lived on a scale of lavish luxury rivaled only by the Bourbons and the Habsburgs. It's history goes back to Czar Peter the Great and the founding of St. Petersburg in 1703 as "a window on Europe" for Mother Russia. By 1783, Catherine the Great had purchased artworks by the thousands. To house them she added annex after annex to the Winter Palace, calling them her Hermitage — literally, a home for hermits; figuratively, a refuge.

The mill closing augured ill for Chemainus. But spruced up, with bright murals everywhere, it's turned into a Canadian tourist haven. Like mist over the nearby bay, a cold gloom hovered over the little Vancouver Island town of Chemainus as it faced the 1980s. The waterfront sawmill, mainstay for more than a century, was losing millions of dollars a year. Then the government of British Columbia agreed to subsidize a downtown revitalization program that would spruce up the shops on Willow Street with planters, benches and parking space. But supermarkets were sprouting in bigger towns just a few miles down the Trans-Canada Highway. Who would shop in tiny Chemainus, even a spruced-up Chemainus? "People were wondering whether the town was going to die or not," says Rodney Moore, a retired meal shop owner. The death knell seemed sure in 1983 when the mill shut down. Yet today, Canada's Chemainus is a thriving town, hued in sprightly pastels, a kind of gingerbread Carmel of the North that attracts 400,000 tourists a year, most making a detour to take in 32 murals now adorning the sides of buildings and standing walls in a festival of color.

And although the works of the noted Catalan artist appear spontaneous and free, they were really the product of disciplined intensity. On a sun-seared April afternoon 15 years ago, another foreign correspondent and I called on Joan Miró at his home on a hill just outside Palma on the craggy, medieval island of Majorca. A few days short of his 85th birthday, the impish yet seemingly shy painter, wearing a suit and tie, received us in his living room, a typical Spanish bourgeois salon with stuffed furniture, houseplants and shelves of knickknacks. The decor, in fact, included several pieces of the white-painted, clay-molded, folk-crafted whistle figures that tourists always buy in Majorca. The paintings, tapestry and fan on the walls, however, did not blend in. All were original Mirós. Polite, pleased to meet journalists from the country that first hailed his genius, Miró, during more than two hours of conversation in Spanish, acknowledged that outsiders might be surprised at how ordinary he seemed, how different from the images of his more bohemian, more histrionic, more eccentric compatriots Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. "I live like a normal citizen," he said. "But there is a Catalan saying that the procession marches inside you. What happens is inside...

American twentysomethings are flocking to the city of Vaclav Havel, Franz Kafka, old Beatles tunes and booming new businesses...

Wielding his throat-tonic fortune, Albert Barnes silenced the critics with a collection, now at the National Gallery, that speaks for itself...

From the 8th to the 15th century, Islam ruled in Spain's rich southern region; it's priceless artwork is now on view at the Met in New York...

When the king and queen redecorated in 1818, those old paintings just didn't go with the wallpaper. And there was this empty building...

East Berlin's Pergamon Museum, home to a rare collection of Hellenistic art and architecture, now welcomes visitors from the Western world...

As an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston shows us, the queen of cities was definitely the place to be at the fin de siècle...

For decades, Brazilian politicians and patriots have concerned themselves with visions of taming the Amazon River basin, an area almost as large as the United States, home to approximately 15 million species of plants and animals, tangled under the largest stretch of dense, daunting tropical forest left on Earth. The Brazilians envisioned bulldozing and burning enormous tracts of the forest, clearing them for cattle ranches and some farms, laying highways across the basin, and fashioning great cities. Most Brazilians knew that some Indians in habited the forest but were not pre pared to find tens of thousands of rubber tappers, relics of the past, still living there as well (Smithsonian. November 1989). As they forged ahead with their schemes, violent conflict became inevitable, a violence at least as terrible as that spawned by the conquest of the American West. Out of that violence came the murder of Chico Mendes, the rumpled. 44-year-old leader of a local tappers' union who had become the unlikely hero of environmental groups throughout the world. The international outcry over his death astounded and unnerved Brazil...

This book reads like the screenplay of a science fiction horror movie: a monstrous slick of blackness, engulfing birds and otters and seals before spewing them out as sticky, fluttering, moribund globs, rushes incessantly toward the innocents of Alaska, ready to lash the pristine coast with deadly and indelible filth. A host of tiny people scratch and prick at the monster, yet retreat steadily from the maw of its rage. But, unlike many screenplays, this story has no happy ending, no hero to slay the dragon. The slick is never controlled, and America is left with its worst environmental disaster. In a swift, unadorned and remark ably evenhanded manner, Art Davidson, an Alaskan nature writer, tells the story of the grounding of the tanker Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound in 1989, the spill of more than ten million gallons of oil into the waters, the frantic and futile efforts to clear the spill, and the terrible havoc visited upon the fragile environment of Alaska...

At Washington National Cathedral, after 83 years of work, plans are set to celebrate its completion - a triumph of faith and reason...

To be an independent artist in the USSR until recently was to live a secret, underground existence. Things are very different these days...

Economic blows and urban blight savaged the great city, a fortress of Victorian grandeur, but now things are looking up...

Delacroix, Manet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin. Seurat, Degas, Matisse and thousands of other French artists, many penniless then and still unknown, had studios in Paris. Foreigners such as Sargent, Whistler, Chagall and Miró felt they had no choice but to rush there. From the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, almost all artists looked to Paris as their mecca. In this unusual and carefully illustrated book, John Milner, head of the Department of Fine Art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in England, describes how French tradition and government policy, along with Parisian commerce and practical necessity, combined to create a kind of factory of art in Paris in the 19th century...

Isolated and tormented, he once said that he was going to murder his paintings, but fortunately they are still with us. When I graduated from the City College of New York in 1952, my Uncle Morris had a heart-to-heart talk with me. He told me to work hard, get a steady job and not spend the rest of my life struggling in a Paris garret like his cousin Soutine. "Chaim Soutine, the painter?" I asked. "You mean you've heard of him?" replied Uncle Morris. My late Uncle Morris' ignorance might seem inexcusable. By 1952, Soutine's paintings graced the collections of the Phillips Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and other museums throughout the United States. MOMA and the Cleveland Museum of Art had recently mounted a major retrospective of his work. His reputation had been set in the art world for many years...

With his bizarre and fearsome images, the enigmatic master of apocalypse still speaks to us across five centuries. A half-millennium ago when Europe was moving out of the Middle Ages, Hieronymus Bosch, a prosperous painter and landowner in the duchy of Brabant in what is now the Netherlands, was widely admired as one of the cleverest, most pious, most perceptive, most apocalyptic masters of his times. He then slipped into several hundred years of obscurity. The symbolism and message of his terrifying masterpieces seemed bizarre and unsavory and even heretical. But he has been rediscovered in the 20th century. American tourists, who have little Bosch at home, now crowd through the museums of Europe to be awed by his great triptychs or to track down his smaller masterpieces...

As the old Hapsburg order disintegrated and anti-Semitism grew, Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka gave form to their foreboding...