Ulrich Sauff and his wife stared at the mammoth domino pieces marking the path where the Berlin Wall once stood and reminisced about life in the barrier's shadow.

"It was like a prison," said Sauff, 73, who lived on the Western side of the wall. "For us 'Wessis,' the few kilometers from our old home to our new home (in the East) was unthinkable."

The Sauffs were among those who gathered Monday to celebrate 20 years of unity, marking the day the wall came down. Thousands cheered as 1,000 colorfully decorated dominoes along a mile-long route were toppled to symbolize both the moment the wall came crashing down and the resulting fall of communist governments in Eastern Europe.

It was the finale to a day of memorial services, speeches and events that attracted leaders from around the world, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and 78-year-old Gorbachev stood shoulder to shoulder...

ROME — Painting was more prized than sculpture by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and easel paintings more than frescoes, which were considered essentially decorative. Yet not a single easel painting of the kind described by Pliny the Elder in his encyclopedic “Natural History” of the first century A.D. has come down to us. Accordingly, when it comes to understanding Roman painting, we are seemingly doomed to be equipped with only half the story.

An international group of experts led by Eugenio La Rocca has now confronted this obstacle in the exhibition “Rome: The Painting of an Empire” by bringing together over 100 of the finest and most characteristic surviving examples of Roman painting, the majority of them frescoes, but suggesting a broader picture of painting in the ancient world despite the losses. Spanning more than four centuries, these works illustrate the principal genres, from mythological, religious and landscape painting to still life, the nude and portraiture...

[Research assistance for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.]

In July 1972, musician Johnny Cash sat opposite President Richard Nixon in the White House's Blue Room. As a horde of media huddled a few feet away, the country music superstar had come to discuss prison reform with the self-anointed leader of America's "silent majority." "Johnny, would you be willing to play a few songs for us," Nixon asked Cash. "I like Merle Haggard's 'Okie From Muskogee' and Guy Drake's 'Welfare Cadillac.'" The architect of the GOP's Southern strategy was asking for two famous expressions of white working-class resentment.

"I don't know those songs," replied Cash, "but I got a few of my own I can play for you." Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of...

IT is almost too perfect that the first African-American president of the United States was elected in time for the 40th anniversary of “Sesame Street.” The world is finally beginning to look the way that the PBS show always made it out to be.

So it is to the credit of this daunting cultural landmark — a program that has taught generations of children to count, countless parents how to teach and is seen in 125 countries around the world — that Tuesday’s anniversary is not a frenzy of preening self-celebration. Episode No. 4187 is as child-centric and respectful of routine as any other.

The special guest — the first lady, Michelle Obama — doesn’t make her appearance alongside Big Bird until midway into a show crammed with the usual preschool didactics. The letter of the day comes first — H, as in help and hug and healthy.

The only real difference is that on this day, viewers have to count to 40.

The pedagogy hasn’t changed, but the look...

Who would not wish for a close relative like Aunt Jane? In early 1817, the year she died, suffering, perhaps, from lymphoma and beginning work on a novel she became too ill to finish, Jane Austen wrote a letter to her 8-year-old niece, Cassandra.

“Ym raed Yssac,” it begins, “I hsiw uoy a yppah wen raey.”

Every word in the letter is spelled backward, from that opening New Year’s wish to her dear Cassy to the signature, “Ruoy Etanoitceffa Tnua, Enaj Netsua.” The author, here as elsewhere, does not condescend to her readers, but she also knows who they are and how to give them pleasure. Imagine an 8-year-old girl, perhaps as precocious as her aunt, playfully deciphering these good wishes.

The difficulty comes, though, in imagining Austen herself. She was such a subtle reader of her characters’ manners, so knowing about their flaws and virtues, yet herself so opaque and mysterious a presence that it is hard to imagine her in the flesh. You have to read...

Ask most people what they think of when they hear the word Bauhaus, and they’re likely to come up with tubular steel furniture, prefabricated housing, ranks of naïve utopians and Tom Wolfe’s withering disdain for all of the above. A show about the Bauhaus? No thanks. Who, after all, really needs to see another Breuer chair?

Which is why “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” opening on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, is such an unexpected treat. The kind of exhibition that comes around once in a rare while, it takes a sledgehammer to the clichés, particularly the notion that the Bauhaus marched in lockstep to a single vision.

Organized by Barry Bergdoll, the museum’s chief curator of architecture and design, and Leah Dickerman, a curator of painting and sculpture, the show makes much of the ideological and creative clashes that rocked this German school during its brief but remarkable history — between commercial and creative values, pragmatists and...

Back when the Underground was in the foreground of film discussion, Andy Warhol made a picture called The Chelsea Girls. It was shot in the celebrated Hotel Chelsea in New York, but it had much less to do with its setting than with Warhol’s attempts to reshape film form. Nonetheless, he felt a need to mention the place in his title.

Now, however, comes a concentration on the place--Chelsea on the Rocks, a documentary meant as memorial. The hotel has had a century-old reputation as a rather free-and-easy, convivial roost for all kinds of artists: it has now changed ownership, and this film was made as tribute to a landmark that may be changing. The director is Abel Ferrara, who made such numbers as Bad Lieutenant and King of New York, and is not especially known for sentiment. But he was drawn to this subject and has handled it with all the appropriate mist and chuckle.

The Chelsea, which has 250 rooms, was built on West 23rd Street in Manhattan in the late...

LOS ANGELES — For decades, the Walt Disney Company has largely kept Mickey Mouse frozen under glass, fearful that even the tiniest tinkering might tarnish the brand and upend his $5 billion or so in annual merchandise sales. One false move and Disney could have New Coke on its hands.

Now, however, concerned that Mickey has become more of a corporate symbol than a beloved character for recent generations of young people, Disney is taking the risky step of re-imagining him for the future.

The first glimmer of this will be the introduction next year of a new video game, Epic Mickey, in which the formerly squeaky clean character can be cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland.

And at the same time, in a parallel but separate effort, Disney has quietly embarked on an even larger project to rethink the character’s personality, from the way Mickey walks and talks to the way he appears on the Disney Channel and how...

If Michael Moore had arrived on the film scene as a conservative Republican activist in 1989, he might be heralded by Fox News today as a major American hero, and he might even be able to get a fair review in the so-called "liberal" New York Times.

Unfortunately for him and his message, he started making movies during the late 1980s, when the presidencies of Republicans Ronald Reagan and then George Herbert Walker Bush made them the target of his outsourcing ire. Moore first became famous for his 1989 film "Roger and Me," a documentary about what happened to his home town of Flint, Michigan, after General Motors closed its automobile factories and moved to Mexico, where workers made much less.

Since then, Moore has been known as a critic of the "neoliberal" view of globalization, according to Wikipedia, although that term goes right over the heads of most of the working people in the US who should be watching his movies and...