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``The attribution is still under study,'' he says, eager to talk about it and the other paintings. He faces a stunning blue-and-green painting by Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, a Paul Klee, and an easel with a painting of St. Impresario Brown sits with his back to the wall of his large, sunny office. This fall Brown has unfurled a huge, sumptuous tribute to Japanese art: ``Japan: The Shaping of Daimyo Culture 1185-1868.'' It's actually a multimedia festival, including Japanese No theater, a film festival, and traditional Japanese tea ceremonies open to the public. At one point during the summer, some of the 7 million people who flock to this museum annually could see a dazzling array of international exhibits: ``The Art of Paul Gauguin,'' which some critics called the show of the century ``Sweden: A Royal Treasury,'' opened by the King and Queen of Sweden ``The Human Figure in Early Greek Art,'' introduced by Melina Mercouri, the film star and Greek minister of culture and ``Masterworks from Munich'' as well as flag paintings by Childe Hassam and maritime paintings by Fitz Hugh Lane, both Americans. This summer the gallery was like some beautiful six-ring circus of art, with Carter Brown as ringmaster. The enigma, dressed in gray and blue with a scarlet French Legion of Honor ribbon in his lapel, sits for this profile in his office at the National Gallery. ``Picasso painted people from many different directions at one time - maybe for the faceting you'd have to look towards a Cubist.'' If there is a painter whose work reminds her of her brother, she says, it is Picasso. ``He is a very private person, and he is many-faceted, so that he turns the facet that is most appropriate to any given situation to whomever he is communicating with at a given moment,'' says his sister, Angela Fischer. Brown himself remains an unpublic story, as inscrutable as the ``Mona Lisa.''

Carter Brown, as he is known, is director of the National Gallery of Art, whose spectacular ``Treasure Houses of Britain'' show, opened by the Prince of Wales, filled a 63/4-pound set of press clipping books. And his life is of such a heady richness - dining with kings, queens, and presidents, negotiating like the Kissinger of the art world for priceless paintings, mounting shows as popular as Broadway hits, all with a patrician ease tinged with enigma - that he might have stepped from the pages of an F. HIS name is distinctive, John Carter Brown.