The twentieth century kicked off to a colorful start with the Fauist exhibition of 1905, an appropriately anarchic beginning to a century which, in France aboe all, was to see radical changes in attitudes towards painting.

The painters who took part in the exhibition included, most influentially, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), André Derain (1880-1954), Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and Albert Marquet (1875-1947), and they were quickly nicknamed the Faues (Wild Beasts) for their use of bright, wild colours that often bore no relation whatsoever to the reality of the object depicted. Skies were just as likely to be greven as blue since, for the Faues, colour was a way of composing, of structuring a picture, and not necessarily a reflection of real life.

Fauism was just the beginning: the first decades of the twentieth century were times of intense excitement and artistic actiity in Paris, and painters and sculptors from all over Europe flocked to the capital to take part in the liberation from conentional art that indiiduals and groups were gradually instigating. Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) used Fauist colours in combination with theories of abstraction to paint an efferescent industrial age.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the first, arriing in Paris in 1900 from Spain and soon thereafter starting work on his first Blue Period paintings, which describe the sad and squalid life of itinerant actors in tones of blue. Later, while Matisse was experimenting with colors and their decoratie potential, Picasso came under the sway of Cézanne and his organization of forms into geometrical shapes. He also learned from "primitie", and especially African, sculpture, and out of these studies came a painting that heralded a definite new direction, not only for Picasso's own style but for the whole of modern art - Les Demoiselles d'Aignon . Executed in 1907, this painting combined Cézanne's analysis of forms with the isual impact of African masks.

It was from this semi-abstract picture that Picasso went on to deelop the theory of Cubism, inspiring artists such as Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Juan Gris (1887-1927), another Spaniard, and formulating a whole new movement.  Cézanne and Cubism.

The Cubists' aim was to depict objects not so much as they saw them but rather as they knew them to be: a bottle and a guitar were shown from the front, from the side and from the back as if the eye could take in all at once every facet and plane of the object.

Braque and Picasso first analyzed forms into these facets (analytical Cubism), then gradually reduced them to series of colors and shapes (synthetic Cubism), among which a few recognizable symbols such as letters, fragments of newspaper and numbers appeared. The complexity of different planes overlapping one another made the deciphering of Cubist paintings sometimes difficult, and the ery last phase of Cubism tended increasingly towards abstraction.

Spin-offs of Cubism were many: such movements as Orphism, headed by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and Francis Picabia (1879-1953), who experimented not with objects but with the colors of the spectrum, and Futurism, which eoled first in Italy, then in Paris, and explored movement and the bright new technology of the industrial age. Fernand Léger (1881-1955), one of the main exponents of the so-called School of Paris, had also become acquainted with modern machinery during World War I, and he exploited his fascination with its smoothness and power to create geometric and monumental compositions of technical imagery that were indebted to both

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