Masterworks

This imaginary German city of the Middle Ages was painted in 1815 by the Romantic architect and painter, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The sky is black with storm clouds, but an unerring shaft of sunlight picks out the huge cathedral at the top of the hill. It glistens like a precious stone. The miraculous light allows us to inspect the cathedral in impressive detail...

This picture made Carl Spitzweg, the painter from Munich, world-famous. It proved to be so popular that he produced several versions of it. This one was painted in 1839 and now hangs in the National Gallery of West Berlin. Why was Spitzweg's view of 'The Poor Poet' shivering in his garret so popular? Certainly the picture seems immediately amusing. But there is more to it than mere fun...

Adolf Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel, the secret Realist, painted factories and backyards, quiet family suppers and busy funerals, building sites and bedrooms. The more ordinary the sight, the more keenly he observed it. He painted the clouds in the sky and the wall of his studio with as much care and attention as he painted the funeral of a popular revolutionary or flute concert given by a king...

Otto Dix started work on 'Flanders' in 1934. It was to be his last record of the First World War. A year earlier, in 1933, he had been forced out of the Dresden Academy of Arts by the Nazis. Dix had been a professor there since 1927. He could see where Nazi policies were leading and 'Flanders' was surely intended as a fresh reminder to all of the consequences of war...

'Dada', wrote the Dadaist poet, Tristan Tzara, 'is a state of mind - a gasometer of jangled feelings.' 'Dada,' said the German painter and film maker Hans Richter, 'was a storm that broke over the world of art.' For Berlin artist, Hannah Höch, Dada was a weapon with which to attack a society she detested.