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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

THE BRUISED cultural feelings of Washington received a fillip of sorts during the week of April 17, when twenty-eight writers and artists from eleven countries assembled for an annual congress sponsored by the capital’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and financed by the Ford Foundation. The roster included Italian Nobel-Prize poet Salvatore Quasimodo, American poets Richard Eberhart, Stanley Kunitz and Allen Tate, England’s critic-poet Sir Herbert Read and potter Bernard Leach, French poet Yves Bonnefoy and Brazilian novelist Erico Verissimo. Keeping close to a prepared schedule, they ate, drank and partied together, delivered lectures, plunged into panel discussions, declaimed poetry and exchanged views on the theme of the congress — the status of the artist. Leach even potted. While these activities did not tear headlines from the other major events of the week (the convening of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the opening of the Washington Senators’ annual drive to soar higher than eighth place), enough occurred to make Washington cultural buffs puff out their chests and, for at least a week, forget Howard Taubman...

MEXICO CITY’S Palace of Fine Arts assigns one of its salons to modern art and another to Mexican art, but both, like all the others, exhibit the same kind of paintings. In tiers of galleries, this huge museum offers little but work by twentieth-century Mexicans. A first look is far from a dull experience. Eager for more, I marched from room to room, excited by a mural still in progress, by the stark perspective of Siqueiros, by the cluttered symbols of Rivera, by the bright colors and stunted figures of young artists, by the mystery of a powerful art spawned in a political revolution. Only later did doubt creep in. Where do young Mexicans go, I wondered, to find out about Botticelli or El Greco or Rembrandt or Degas or Picasso or de Kooning? Later, at the small Antonio Souza Gallery, the American manager discussed her related problem. The gallery displayed numerous canvases by Leo Rosshandler, a Dutch painter living in Mexico, who paints huge, frightening birds in thick blacks, browns and whites. Although visitors gazed long and quietly at them, sales were meager. “The Mexican public has not been educated beyond Mexican nationalistic art,” the manager said. “They want the usual paintings of the Indian woman with her rebozo and little child.”During my stay, a brisk controversy in the newspapers, stirred by José Luis Cuevas, has emphasized the significance of the gallery’s problem...