Art and Literature

As a small child, did you build forts out of branches or snow? Or use the building block to create your first architectural work? If you did, you had to think like an architect. An architect is someone who transforms space with buildings, gardens, and other structures . But they don’t do this merely for practical purposes . Architects are artists. Instead of paint or clay, they work with structures and spaces to express important ideas or evoke human emotion. Architects are also scientists and engineers who study the world and find ways to solve problems and create order. Architects might even question existing ways of thinking to move civilization forward.

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.

We love looking at art. We put it on our walls. We see it at museums. And if we’re inspired, we may even create it. What is it about our art experience that makes it so enjoyable? We can appreciate art as one of those things we do simply for a pleasurable experience—such as when we listen to music, watch a movie, or read a novel. For most of us, these activities capture our attention and spark an emotional response . Although our survival does not depend on such activities, our lives would seem so much less enjoyable without them.

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.