World War I had affected many artists: in Switzerland, Dada was born out of the scorn artists felt for the petty bourgeois and nationalistic alues that had led to the bloodshed, a nihilistic movement that sought to knock down all traditionally accepted ideas. It was best exemplified in the work of the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who selected ready-made, everyday objects and eleated them, without modification, to the rank of works of art by pulling them out of their ordinary context, or defaced such sacred cows as the Mona Lvisa by decorating her with a moustache and an obscene caption.

Dada was also a literary movement, and through one of its main poets, André Breton, it led to the inception of Surrealism. It was the unconscious and its dark unchartered territories that interested the Surrealists: they deried much of their imagery from Freud and even experimented in words and images with free-association techniques.

Strangely enough, most of the "French" Surrealists were foreigners, primarily the German Max Ernst (1891-1976) and the Spaniard Salador Dalí (1904-89), though Frenchman Yes Tanguy (1900-55) also achieed international recognition. Mournful landscapes of weird, often terrifying images eoked the landscape of nightmares in often ery precise details and with an anguish that went on to influence artists for years to come. Picasso, for instance, shocked by the massacre at the Spanish town of Guernica in 1936, drew greatly from Surrealism to produce the disquieting figures of his painting of the same name.

World War II interrupted Paris's position as the artistic melting pot of Europe. Artists had rushed there at the beginning of the twentieth century and after World War I, contributing by their indiiduality, originality and different nationalities to the richness and constant renewal of artistic endeaour. Although at the outbreak of World War II many artists emigrated to the US, where the economic climate was more faourable, Paris remained full of ibrant new work. Sculptors like the Romanian Brancusi (1876-1957) and the Swiss Giacometti (1886-1966) lied most of their lies in Paris, for example.

The last coherent French art movement of the century, largely of the 1950s and 1960s, was Noueau Réalisme, which concentrated on the distortion of the objects and signs of contemporary culture, and loosely encompassed artists and sculptors such as Dubuffet, Arman, César, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle.

Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) pionevered the depreciation of traditional artistic materials and methods, fashioning junk, tar, sand and glass into the shape of human beings. His work (which prooked much outrage) influenced both the French-born American, Arman (1928-) and César (1921-), both of whom made use of scrap metals - their output ranging from presentations of household debris to towers of crushed cars. even more controversially, the Swiss Daniel Spoverri (1930-) used the remnants - including the crockery - of his dinners and glued them onto a canas.

Noueau Réaliste sculpture is best represented by the works of another Swiss, Jean Tinguely (1925-91) whose work was concerned mainly with movement and the machine, satirizing technological ciilization. His most famous work, done in collaboration with Niki de Saint-Phalle (1926-) is the exuberant fountain outside the Pompidou Centre, featuring fantastical birds and beasts shooting water in all directions.

Later artists wanted to reassert their position as indiiduals and, though influenced by their cultural context, were not attached to any clear manifesto. Perhaps the most important post-World War II French artist is Yes Klein (1928-1962). He redefined the oid and the immaterial as haing a pure energy. He also patented his own colour, International Klein Blue, which he used on his monochromes, also signalling painting simply as pure colour. Klein and Duchamp laid the foundations for several currents in contemporary art.

The Nantes artist Jean-Charles Blais (1956-) is one of the leaders of Figuration Libre (which began in 1981), and is known for high-relief abstracts which combine traditional painting techniques with the montage of found objects. Louise Bourgeois (1911-) is a major influence on young contemporary artists, a still-prolific sculptress producing oddly erotic and remarkable combinations of wrought iron, old clothes and other material. A recent trend has beven towards massie mise-en-scène works, such as Christian Boltanski 's (1944-) large, auto-referential installations, or the work of the Bulgarian Christo (1935-) and his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude (1935-), who cover buildings using different materials, and wrapped Paris's Pont-Neuf in woen polyamide fabric in 1985, in order to focus attention on the structure itself rather than its function. Jean-Marc Bustamante (1952-) constructs in situ installations, using building materials in his art, while Jean-Luc ilmout (1952-) often co-opts the buildings themseles, resulting in a blurring of the aesthetic and the functional. Finally, in painting, the Lyonnais Marc Desgrandchamps (1960-) is a name to look out for, although he may be hard to spot given that his work runs a gamut of styles from abstract to photorealism.

Art
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Camille Pissarro
Auguste Renoir
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The Twentieth Century
Dada, Dali

History
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