Author name: Charles A. Riley II

Just as you can write the history of the world using the biographies of the famous men and women who changed it (Confucius, Alexander the Great, Queen Elizabeth, Winston Churchill, etc.), you can tell the story of humankind by going from one great cultural center to another. Certain cities at certain moments have defined the course of the arts . Consider Xi’an in the Tang dynasty, Florence and Amsterdam in the Renaissance, London in the time of Shakespeare, or Vienna during the era of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. In exactly this way, Paris during the Jazz Age was one of the most fun and one of the most important cities in the history of art, music, literature, and fashion.

Whenever the word “genius” is used, a small but magnificent group of names usually follows . Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Raphael, Beethoven and Mozart are the automatic choices . For the modern era, two giants stand above all others: Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso . They are in so many ways connected, especially because both of them redefined the way we consider the world we live in and both of them had brilliant new concepts of space. For Einstein, it meant the universe and man’s place in it were suddenly better known. For Picasso, the breakthrough was cubism, a way of looking at objects in space that was completely unlike any artistic vision before.