Artful Holidays.(worldwide museum exhibitions)(Brief Article)

For perfectly understandable reasons, more people are staying home for the holidays this year. A little loath to get on airplanes during a hot war on terrorism, they're gathering around the dinner table and embracing loved ones. But however they choose to spend the holidays, inevitably they'll find themselves with a day or two at large when nothing seems more like nourishment for the soul than a museum visit. Part historical reverence, part intellectual uplift and part simple entertainment, a good museum exhibition is the kind of guiltless pleasure we can all do with these days. So, here's a global sampling of some of the more intriguing shows of the season.

We'll start with that precious stuff the Three Wise Men carried along with frankincense and myrrh: gold. There's a whole new museumful--The Gold of Africa Museum--in Cape Town, South Africa. Its entire collection of African gold art work was bought from the Musee Barbier- Mueller in Geneva. Quite a bit of gold--in the form of furniture filigree--is also on display at the newly renovated British galleries in London's Victoria & Albert Museum. Formerly known for their forbidding stuffiness, the new galleries are now temples of interactivity, with computer, video and audio guidance. This 31 million pound project gives us a chance to see such one-of-a-kind treasures as Henry VIII's writing desk, along with antique goodies from Chippendale and Wedgewood--just what a proper Victorian would have wanted under his Christmas tree. Less proper Victorians, however, might have preferred the glimpses of female ankle--and a whole lot more--provided by the paintings of Rossetti, Sargent, Whistler and others in the retro-racy exhibition "Exposed: The Victorian Nude," through Jan. 27 at Tate Britain, also in London.

Nothing, of course, could be less Victorian than the legendary pre- World War II German art and design school, the Bauhaus. "I don't want jam, not workshops and school, just school," said the sternly modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe when he was appointed its director in 1930. Mies outlasted the school (the Nazis shut it down in 1933). And over the course of a long career, he eventually became more famous than the Bauhaus itself. No wonder, then, that this winter is practically a Mies-fest in Berlin, with "More Than Just Function: Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus" at the Bauhaus Archive Museum through March 11, "Mies in Berlin" until March 10 at the Altes Museum and a just plain "Mies van der Rohe" furniture exhibition at the Vitra Design Museum, through Feb. 24.

Should anyone wonder what modern architecture could do to follow upon the elegant minimalism of Miesian modernists, the answer lies at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Actually, the answer lies both at and in the museum: the billowing, intertwining, almost giddily surreal forms of the retrospective exhibition "Frank Gehry, Architect" are on view (through Feb. 17) in ...