Coruscation

"Zao is part of a coterie of Chinese artists that came of aesthetic age in the 1950s, an intriguing period of time that saw a wide range of Chinese artists practicing in the most diverse circumstance imaginable," said Joan Kee, a University of Michigan art historian who is a specialist on postwar and contemporary Asian painting. "On the one hand there was Zao, living in Paris and represented by important New York galleries like Samuel Kootz," she said. "Then you had artists like Lin Fengmian, working under the Communist regime on the eve of the anti-rightist campaign."

Irving H. Picard is pursuing hundreds of lawsuits to retrieve fictitious "profits" from the lucky coterie of Madoff investors who cashed out before his arrest. Now Picard has raised the stakes with two suits that reach deep into American institutions -- the New York Mets, whose principal owners, the Wilpon family, seemed to constitute a Madoff financial farm team, and JPMorgan Chase, the main Madoff banker.

-- Frank Rich