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”...

Edouard Vuillard, the red-bearded French painter of small, intimate scenes and large decorative panels, stood at the height of the avant-garde in art during the 1890s. No one seemed more daring than Vuillard and his associates in Paris. But time -- and the likes of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse -- swiftly passed them by. As Vuillard’s friend and fellow painter Pierre Bonnard once wrote: “The pace of progress speeded up, society was ready to accept Cubism and Surrealism before we had achieved what we had set out to do. We were left, as it were, hanging in the air.” Vuillard was never really neglected. But art historians tended to look on him as a flash that flickered out before the end of the 19th century...

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...

The United Nations has been castigated by critics for weeks as a toothless organization loaded with appeasers and weasels, as a throwback to the League of Nations, as a cracked body tottering on the brink of irrelevance. George F. Will, the erudite conservative columnist, even suggested it was heading the way of the medieval Hanseatic League. Yet the current Iraq crisis may actually prove one of the UN's finest hours...

American architect Daniel Libeskind is a master at relating the beauty of a building to its meaning and purpose. His works are a blend of space and story -- the reason he won the intense, highly publicized competition earlier this year to redesign the World Trade Center site in New York. It may take a decade before his exciting complex is complete. But Americans can see what may be in store for New York with his two earliest works in Germany: the acclaimed Jewish Museum Berlin and the little-known Felix Nussbaum House in the northwestern town of Osnabruck. Visiting them is an emotional, even wrenching, experience...

Those of us who opposed the war were probably right. Iraq posed no danger to Americans. It had few, if any, prohibited weapons ready to strike. No link with terrorism was ever proven. No doubt Saddam Hussein was a despicable tyrant but we have always tolerated - and still do - a globe full of them. But none of this really matters. We might as well, like Lear, rail at the wind and storms. History belongs to the victors. Only they can gloat...

Both John Wilson in the New York Times and Jon Thurber in the Los Angeles Times wrote ample and thoughtful obituaries of Benny Carter after he died July 12 at the age of 95, and there is no need here for me to try to embellish their accounts of his long and incredibly versatile musical career. But I have a few memories of Benny as a gentle and gracious man, and I would like to set them down. Wilson and Thurber caught this side of him a little, but it was overwhelmed, of course, by their first-rate accounts of his greatness as a musician, composer, arranger and bandleader...

The grand and stirring exhibition of the works of Romare Bearden, which opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington last week, is far more than a retrospective. It is a celebration -- a celebration of the art establishment’s anointment of this African American painter and collagist into the highest ranks of American artists. There has often been a tendency to lump African American artists into a special and lesser place -- as genre painters of black life. Bearden, who died in 1988 at the age of 76, always called on his African American colleagues not to limit themselves in this way. “The Negro artist,” he said, “must come to think of himself not primarily as a Negro artist, but as an artist.” Yet, as Bearden often complained, the American art establishment did not think the same way. For those with influence in the art world, he said, “the Negro artist is usually not ... on the scene...”

In the 1990s, while I was covering the United Nations for the Los Angeles Times, Madeleine Albright approached my table at a banquet in New York. My wife hugged her warmly, exclaiming: “Madeleine, you’re doing a wonderful job as U.N. ambassador!” “Yes,” Albright replied, “but Stanley doesn’t think so.” I grinned foolishly. I kept recalling that encounter as I read this engaging memoir of a remarkable foreign-born woman who came here as a refugee child and later negotiated the political thickets of Washington to become this nation’s first female secretary of State. No one could accuse Madeleine Albright of timidity; she is always blunt and direct. Perhaps more important, the remark reflected a troubling reality: Although I admired and respected her, I often found her words and actions as U.N. ambassador and secretary of State disappointing. I was not alone. She faced a barrage of criticism from reporters, foreign policy wonks and State Department professionals throughout her tenure. This book is her spirited defense...

The small genre masterpieces of the French painters of the 18th century are so frothy, so delightful, so charming and sometimes so naughty that it is hard to associate them with such weighty themes as philosophy and revolution. But an extraordinary exhibition of these paintings, currently at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, makes the persuasive case that these great artists, no matter how frivolous their subjects often seemed, reflected the philosophical ideas of the Enlightenment that coursed through France during these decades and laid the groundwork for the French Revolution. A visitor does not need to know all this to savor these wonderful works, but the historical dimension adds a special flavor that helps bind the artists together...

More than 40 years ago, I sat in the Western Nigeria House of Assembly in Ibadan and marveled at how well the British colonial government had implanted its democratic parliamentary system into this new African country. An African page in blue knee breeches and red stockings walked into the chamber carrying a mace. “The Speak-uh,” he cried. The Speaker, a tall African in white wig and black robes, entered, strode across the chamber and sat in his enormous chair. The page carefully put the mace on its stand on the table below the Speaker and saluted him...

Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the patent medicine man who amassed the greatest private collection of paintings in America during the first half of the 20th century, behaved so outlandishly that it was always hard to write about his hoard of art without writing an awful lot about him. Now that his collection is in dire danger of losing its special and wonderful character by moving to a cold modern museum in downtown Philadelphia, he and his wishes have few defenders...

The editors of Doubleday, headquartered at 1745 Broadway in New York, would surely have raised their eyebrows and grabbed their red pencils if a best-selling novelist had submitted a manuscript that placed the Empire State Building on Central Park West, the United Nations on Broadway and Yankee Stadium on Fifth Avenue. Yet Doubleday has published a novel - number one on the best-selling lists for a good many weeks - rife with so much confusion about the sites of Paris that it is hard not to wince. This might be excusable if Paris played a minor role in the book. But the main setting of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is Paris. Someone should have supplied him with a map...