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The Impressionists and the masters of the period of Post-Impressionism untied artists’ hands. A sense of the barriers in art established by a tradition or a school had vanished. Young artists could permit themselves everything that was possible or impossible. The boldness of the late-nineteenth century generation drew them into the field of the study of colour and form. In 1890, the young painter and theoretician of art, Maurice Denis, put into words for the first time what they had come to realise from the work of their predecessors: “A painting, before it is a warhorse, a nude woman or some sort of anecdote is essentially a flat surface covered with colours put together in a certain order.”[8] The most important thing in painting was colour, and it required special investigation. In the 1880s, Seurat and Signac had already turned to chemists and physicists with the aim of establishing a science of colour which they could use for themselves. The texture of the paint that was applied to the canvas contributed to the force of the colour. The nervous expressiveness of the colourful strokes in Van Gogh’s paintings enraptured young artists at exhibitions held after his death.

      The Salon des Independants was established in Paris as early as 1884, and here anyone who wanted could exhibit his creations without the usual academic jury. In 1903, those who had never taken part in the official Salon that opened in the spring founded their own Salon d’Automne. And it was there that in 1905 Matisse and his group acquired the name “Fauves” because the violence of their colours evoked an association with beasts of prey, with wild animals in the primordial jungle. In 1907, the young poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was an admirer of Matisse’s position in art, obtained an interview with him. In his article he quoted the words of the artist: “I have paints and a canvas, and I must clearly express myself, even in a simple way, applying three or four spots of colour or drawing three or four expressive lines”.[9] The Cézanne exhibition of October 1906, immediately after the artist’s death, turned the eyes of all young painters towards the form of an object. They discovered abstract forms in the creations of primitive art, in the figurines of the masters of Africa and Oceania which had entered Europe in large quantities. The most striking result of these revelations was Picasso’s Cubism: in 1907 he showed his friends his first big Cubist picture, The Demoiselles d’Avignon.

      Similar processes in the assimilation of the new expressiveness in colour and form occurred in these years in other European countries as well. In 1905 “Die Brücke” (“The Bridge”) surfaced in Dresden, rivalling the Parisians in the field of colour. Subsequently, German artists also vied with the French for the claim to be the first to discover primitive art. In 1909, the Futurist Manifesto was published in Milan and then Paris. Its author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote: “Our poetry is courage, audacity and revolt.” The Futurists were the first to rise up against old-fashioned art and cultural tradition. “Down with museums and libraries!” wrote Marinetti. “We issue this flaming manifesto as a proclamation announcing the establishment of Futurism, because we want to deliver this country from the malignant tumour on its body – from professors, archaeologists, cicerones and antiquarians… Hurry over here! Burn down the libraries! Dam the canals and sink the museums! Ha! Let the current carry off the famous paintings. Grab the pickaxes and the hammers! Destroy the walls of the venerable cities!”[10] Form served for them as a reflection of the swiftness of movement, of the dynamic of the new industrial world. In Russia, the artist Kazimir Malevich strove to remove the fetters of literature from art, to liberate it “from all the content in which it has been held back for thousands of years.”[11] Painting and sculpture were fully liberated from literary subjects, and only the motif remained to give a push to the assimilation of colour, form and movement. In Munich, a group of artists gathered around the journal “Der Blaue Reiter”, including the Russian Wassily Kandinsky. Their painting absorbed the whole richness of colour that by that moment had been opened up to the European avant-garde. In 1910, Kandinsky painted his first watercolour, in which there was nothing apart from a spot of colour and lines. The appearance of abstract painting was the natural result of such a rapid development in art. The artistic avant-garde was ruthless in its treatment of the bourgeois aesthetic.

      Giorgio de Chirico, Hector and Andromache, 1917.

      Oil on canvas, 90 × 60 cm.

      Private Collection, Milan.

      Salvador Dalí, Gala and the Angelus of Millet Immediately Preceding the Arrival of the Conic Anamorphoses, 1933.

      Oil on wood, 24 × 18.8 cm.

      The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

      Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife – Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–1920.

      Photomontage, 114 × 90.2 cm.

      Staaliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

      Francis Picabia, The Cacodylic Eye, 1921.

      Oil on canvas and photographic collage including postcards and various cuts of paper, 148.6 × 117.4 cm.

      Centre Georges-Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris.

      Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky), Night Sun – Abandoned Playground, 1943.

      Private Collection.

      No less important was the fact that the new art was becoming international. Paris attracted all of the insurgents, all those who were finding alternatives to the traditional, much-travelled route. In Montmartre, and later in the district of the Boulevard Montparnasse, a special artistic world sprang up. Around 1900 in Montmartre, “an uncomfortable wooden house, nicknamed the Bateau-Lavoir, housed painters, sculptors, writers, humorists, actors, laundresses, dressmakers and costermongers.”[12] The Dutchman Kees van Dongen moved in, “barefoot in sandals, his red beard accompanied by a pipe and a smile.”[13] From 1904, the Spaniard Pablo Picasso lived on the floor below with his Parisian girlfriend Fernande Olivier, while artists, sculptors and poets from Spain gathered around him. The “Fauves” from the Parisian suburb of Chatou were often seen alongside them – the giants André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. The poets Max Jacob, André Salmon and others often came into their group. The ideological inspiration of the group was Guillaume Apollinaire. He met Picasso soon after the latter’s appearance in Montparnasse, and became the most ardent defender of the Cubism Picasso had devised. In 1906, the international colony of Montmartre was reinforced by an Italian from Livorno, Amedeo Modigliani. Jews from Russia and Poland, Germans, Romanians, even emigrants from Japan and Latin America entered a variegated artistic community which the journalist from Montmartre André Varnaux wittily called “The Paris School”.

      The war destroyed the picturesque world of Montmartre which in these men’s art had been an inspirational force in its own right. The war brought the ruin of all their hopes. The Parisian Germans had to go return to Germany to take up arms against their friends. The French were also mobilised: some went away to the front, others, like Vlaminck, worked in munitions factories. In December 1914, Apollinaire wrote:

      All the memories of a while ago

      O my friends gone to war

      Where are they, Braque and Max Jacob

      Derain with grey eyes like the dawn

      Where are Raynal Billy Dalize

      Whose names resound with melancholy

      Like footsteps in a church

      Where is Cremnitz who has enlisted

      Perhaps they are dead already…[14]

      Apollinaire’s

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