Dennis Raverty

Caspar David Friedrich's sublime, highly evocative landscapes represent what most art historians consider the apex of early 19th-century German Romanticism. Far from abandoning the sacred, Friedrich radically redefined it and expressed spiritual aspirations and moral lessons in terms of an implied but often ambiguous narrative found within the work, a narrative frequently characterized by the theme of going on a journey, an excursion laden with mystical allusions. There is currently an exhibition of Friedrich's work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City through May.

"We were like two mountain-climbers roped together." This is how Georges Braque described his collaboration with Pablo Picasso during the years before the First World War. The art they developed was called "Cubism" by a baffled critic (although it has nothing whatsoever to do with cubes). The movement they started had profound influences not only on subsequent painting, but also graphic art, industrial design, sculpture and modernist architecture of Corbusier, the Bauhaus and the International Style.

Founded in 1919, the Bauhaus School represents the "coming of age" of modernist art and design. Its international faculty taught a synthesis of art, architecture and design centered around the principle of functionalty and a machine aesthetic. The school was closed by the Nazis in 1933.