National Gallery

The National Gallery of Art said last week that it would return a 17th-century Flemish painting to the heirs of Marguerite Stern, the widow of a Jewish banker from France whose art collection was seized by the Nazis when they occupied Paris. Members of the Stern family, now living in Europe, moved to reclaim the painting by Frans Snyders, after reading about it on the gallery's Web site. The painting, "Still Life With Fruit and Game," is the first that the museum agreed to return to its prewar owners.

Paul Cezanne, the French Post-Impressionist painter known as the father of modern art, was a proud, prickly and increasingly reclusive man whose genius went largely unrecognized for much of his life, only to be widely misunderstood when the world finally could no longer ignore it. His fame now is so great that it is almost impossible for us to view his art with fresh eyes - let alone through the eyes of his contemporaries of the late 1880s and 1890s....

Caravaggio's ChristCaravaggio's dramatic masterpiece "The Taking of Christ" (1602) will be the centerpiece of an exhibition at Washington's National Gallery of Art from May 30 until July 18.The Caravaggio, which was rediscovered in Ireland in 1990, will be exhibited in a newly installed gallery with eight other outstanding Italian, French and Spanish baroque paintings on the theme of "Saints and Sinners in Baroque Painting" from the museum's permanent collection.Caravaggio's...

Forty-two years after Rembrandt's Portrait of a Boy in Fancy Dress, or Titus, made an appearance in Washington, D.C., the painting will return to the National Gallery of Art to launch a series of loan exchanges with the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif. The portrait -- which appeared on the cover of Time magazine and in the gallery in 1965, after Simon purchased it -- will be on view in the nation's capital from May 11 to Sept. 4. It can be seen at the Simon museum through May 6. Future loans are under discussion; the Simon is expected to send a major work to Washington every other year and bring a National Gallery piece of equal quality to Pasadena on alternate years.

In the last decade of the 19th century, art and design were transformed by an exuberant new style created by younger artists who wanted to change the character of European civilization. "Art Nouveau: 1890-1914" at Washington's National Gallery of Art celebrates the achievement of this revolutionary modern art movement in the largest, most comprehensive exhibition ever presented on the subject, including more than 350 masterpieces in painting, sculpture, graphics, glass, ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewelry and architecture.

Eric Hebborn, 61, a world-renowned, English-born art forger who boasted that many of his paintings were in major museums as old masters, died Thursday in Rome after being found in a street the day before with serious head injuries of undetermined origin. Mr. Hebborn, exposed as a forger in the late 1970s, published an autobiography, "Drawn to Trouble: Confessions of a Master Forger," in which he said that several of the world's top museums had paintings by him.He said he had sold more than 1,000 fake old master and modern drawings, including 80 works by Augustus John, and others that became accepted as the work of Walter Sickert, Pablo Picasso and Breughel after scrutiny by experts.

Washington - In "ROCI," the title of his exhibit at the National Gallery, Robert Rauschenberg gives us a lot and not so much after all. It just depends on how you look at it.Since 1984, Rauschenberg has been engaged in a vast undertaking known as the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, or ROCI (pronounced rocky) for short. He has visited 10 countries, from Germany to Japan, from Malaysia to Mexico, in each case collecting materials (from fabrics to photos videos) for artworks based on the trips (ROCI/USSR, ROCI/Cuba, etc.)

For years, the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum seemed destined to live in the shadow of Washington's better known museums. People may have been vaguely aware that Gilbert Stuart's depiction of George Washington hung at the Portrait Gallery (and most left it at that), while the paintings and sculptures at the American Art Museum rarely attracted the attention enjoyed by their flashier counterparts at the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection or the Corcoran Gallery of Art. PORTRAIT GALLERY AND THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM / / 8th and F streets, N.W., in Washington / / reopen to the public July 1 / / 202-633-1000

The family of Roy Lichtenstein has given the National Gallery of Art in Washington more than a dozen drawings by the late pop artist in memory of Jane Meyerhoff, the Baltimore collector who died last year after having promised, with her husband, Robert, to donate their important collection of late 20th-century art to the museum. All 13 of the drawings in the Lichtenstein family gift are directly related to 11 of the artist's paintings in the Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection, a renowned collection of postwar art. The Meyerhoffs began giving parts of their collection to the National Gallery in 1986.

Lecture and concert in D.C. In honor of the anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, the National Gallery of Art in Washington is presenting a lecture and concert that celebrate the works of African-American artists. At 2 p.m. today, visitors to the museum's East Building Auditorium can attend the slide lecture "Norman Lewis in Harlem: An Inquiry Into the Laws of Nature." The event features a talk by museum curator Ruth Fine on Lewis, an African-American artist, as well as a slide show of many of his paintings and works on paper.