Movements
The movements that changed how art was made — each one mapped through its people, its works, and the rooms where they met.
Literary generation · Paris · c. 1921–1929The Lost GenerationThe writers remade by war and expatriate Paris — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Pound, and the rooms, presses, and bookshops that turned their encounters into literature.Enter the generation
Art movement · Paris · 1907–1914CubismThe Paris movement that broke the single viewpoint and rebuilt painting from fragments — Picasso and Braque's private experiment, seen early on Gertrude Stein's walls.Enter the movement
Art movement · Paris · c. 1918–1930Return to OrderThe postwar swing back to classical calm — Picasso's monumental figures, a shaken Europe's appetite for order, and the tendency Jean Cocteau's essays gave a name.Enter the movement
Art & literary movement · Paris · 1924–1966SurrealismThe dream given a manifesto — Breton's Paris movement of automatic writing, sleeping fits, and marvelous images, whose orbit brushes half these pages.Enter the movement
Film movement · Paris · c. 1958–1968The French New WaveThe young Paris critics who became directors after 1959 — Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Resnais — and the fast, cheap, personal filmmaking that changed world cinema.Enter the movement
Art movement · Paris · 1874–1886ImpressionismNot one style but an alliance: eight independent exhibitions, 1874 to 1886, that took modern painting out of the Salon's hands — and were named, by way of an insult, after Monet's Impression, Sunrise.Enter the movement
Cultural movement · Harlem, New York · c. 1918 – mid-1930sThe Harlem RenaissanceThe flowering of Black American literature, music, and art centered on Harlem between the world wars — Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, Aaron Douglas — with an outpost in Montmartre that this atlas knows street by street.Enter the movement