I covered the House of Representatives for the Associated Press for a year or so during the 1960s and left with profound respect and affection for what is really a unique American institution. For years as a foreign correspondent I would extol the genius of our House against the lap dog role played by Houses in the parliamentary system used by democratic countries in Europe and former British dominions like Canada...

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...

In Washington a few weeks ago, David Howard, a white gay man serving as the city's ombudsman, bemoaned the paucity of his budget. "I will have to be niggardly with this fund," he told coworkers, "because it's not going to be a lot of money." One of his listeners was shocked by the sound of the word and spread the news quickly that Howard had used an expression rooted in the hated epithet nigger. Blacks, who make up a majority of the capital's population, expressed their alarm and dismay...

The backbiting and ass-covering erupted in Washington soon after the bombs began pounding Yugoslavia in March. The rush to escape and stamp blame was clear evidence that something had gone awry. The powers in the capital had obviously hoped and expected Slobodan Milosevic to put up no more than a show of resistance before signing with shaking hands any damn paper we would set before him. His defiance and the terrible fury hurled at the Kosovo Albanians surprised President Clinton and his foreign policy mavens. No matter how loud NATO and Washington may trumpet victory at the end, there is no doubt that a grievous miscalculation occurred at the beginning. And most people are blaming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright...

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...

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...

I have just finished reading Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth Century Odyssey by Michael Dobbs, the second Albright biography that I have read in a year. The other was Seasons of Her Life by Ann Blackman. That's a lot of biography for a secretary of state in office. I don't believe anyone ever wrote one about Warren Christopher, and I haven't heard of any publishing house hawking a Christopher bio now that he's out of office. But Madeline Albright is a secretary of state with pizzazz, sort of like a rock star...

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, has just published Unvanquished: A U.S. - U.N. Saga, his memoir of five years in office, and the account amounts to what the French would call un réglement de compte: his revenge against Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. As U.N. ambassador in 1996, she cast the veto that overrode the affirmative votes of all 14 other members of the Security Council, preventing Boutros from a second term...

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...

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 moment brims with high drama. Riding his motorcycle through the Ojai Valley, Otis Chandler, now 71, suddenly knows he must break years of silence about the fate of his Los Angeles Times. The moment has finally come to speak out and berate the stupidity of the people who now run the paper he loves...