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...

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...