Museums

Two Titian masterpieces — Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto — are in the United States for the first time. Fresh Air's Lloyd Schwartz says art lovers will want to see them in person — particularly because there's a chance they may be permanently separated.

French artist Henri Matisse is probably best known for his decorative and colorful paintings, especially nudes and still lifes. But a show at the Museum of Modern Art, called "Matisse: Radical Invention," deals with a more experimental period in Matisse's life. Critic Lloyd Schwartz says the show allows viewers to see Matisse's growth as an artist.

Whitman founded the FBI's Art Crime Team and has tracked down more than $225 million worth of stolen art and cultural property -- including a $36 million self-portrait by Rembrandt. Whitman describes the heists in his new memoir, Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures.

The influential photographer died of cancer Sunday. He was 63. In remembrance, we listen to a 1989 interview with him about his Pictures from Home, a decade-long project in which he observed the effects of his father's job loss on his family — a poignant topic once more.

This interview was originally broadcast July 12, 1989.

The Bauhaus was one of the most important and exciting social and artistic movements of post-World-War-I Germany. Founded by architect Walter Gropius, the movement lasted 14 years until the Nazis finally forced it to shut down. An astonishing exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art gives a thorough view of the precise but imaginative products of Bauhaus.

During his decade as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving is credited with transforming the museum from a somber monolith into a friendly and exciting place. Hoving died Thursday of cancer at his Manhattan home, according to his family. He was 78.

This interview was originally broadcast Jan. 15, 1993.

Judith Fox's new book of photographs is an intimate portrait of a loved one's submergence into Alzheimer's. I Still Do is a chronicle of her husband's journey with the disease.

The photographer, who died Oct. 27 at age 89, dedicated his decades-long career to capturing images of African Americans. Roy DeCarava's subjects ranged from daily life in his hometown of Harlem to the Civil Rights movement.

An exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts is both an art history lesson and a celebration of the most sumptuous works of Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

Street artist Shepard Fairey created the iconic red, white and blue Obama illustration that became the unofficial poster of the campaign. Although his campaign poster never became official, Fairey has been commissioned to design the official poster for the inauguration.

Photographer William Claxton got his start taking photos of jazz musicians in natural settings instead of smoky lounges. His 1967 film Basic Black was considered the first fashion video. He died Oct. 11 from congestive heart failure.

Former Philadelphia Museum of Art director Anne D'Harnoncourt brought the museum new prominence, spearheading the renovation of 20 galleries and a build-up of its modern-art collection. She died June 1 at the age of 64.

Hamburg-born Astrid Kirchherr met the Beatles in 1960, before they were famous. She took some of the earliest photographs of the group and was engaged to Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles' original bassist, before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962.

Over the course of eight years, Matthew Diffee has had more than 100 of his illustrations published in the cartoonists' bible, The New Yorker.

But that magazine gets more than 500 submissions a week — and for each issue, the editors select only 20 cartoons, in a process that Diffee says may or may not involve the use of darts.

So even Diffee has had to deal with rejection. Happily, he's found a channel: His new book, featuring his own work and that of 37 other New Yorker regulars, is The Rejection Collection, Vol. 2: The Cream of the Crap.

Award-winning photographer Ashley Gilbertson has spent much of the past five years in Iraq, taking incredible photographs for The New York Times and other publications. Born in 1978, Gilbertson has captured some of the world's most dangerous places on camera. A book of his work, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War, will be published this fall.

John Ridley's comic-book series The American Way has just been collected into a graphic novel. The series takes place in 1961, when the government has created a team of super-heroes to battle foreign super-villains. But it's all just a sham — a diversion created to pacify the public.

Ridley, who co-created The American Way with Georges Jeanty and Karl Story, previously wrote the screenplay for Three Kings and the novel A Conversation with the Mann.

Underground comic book artist Robert Crumb created ZAP COMIX and is the artist behind such 1960s and 1970s icons as Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, and Keep-on-Truckin. His wife, Aline Kominsky Crumb, was one of the earliest underground female cartoonists. Her new book, Need More Love: A Graphic Memoir, chronicles her life and career. Robert's new book is The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb.

William Gottlieb died of a stroke last Sunday at the age of 89. In the '40s, Gottlieb learned photography and took hundreds of shots of the jazz greats of the time. Many of those shots are now well known through album covers, books, and posters. 200 of those photos appear in Gottlieb's book, The Golden Age of Jazz.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz describes the first major American exhibition of Dadaist art at Washington's National Gallery of Art.

Rock Historian Ed Ward on the history of African-American musicians in Nashville. He plays music from Night Train to Nashville a double CD put out by the Country Music Hall of Fame (in conjunction with a Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum Show).