The Paris Atlas

The Paris Atlas

Movements

The movements that changed how art was made — each one mapped through its people, its works, and the rooms where they met.

Pen-and-ink illustration of four young writers revising manuscripts around a typewriter at a Paris café in the 1920s

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

Sunlight through a railing breaking into diagonal planes of shadow across bare concrete

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

Picasso's Mother and Child: a monumental woman in a white tunic seated by a gray sea, holding an infant who reaches up toward her face

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

Pen-and-ink dream collage — a classical bust with clouds for eyes, a floating eye, a door opening onto sky, fish swimming through air, and an impossible staircase

Art & literary movement · Paris · 1924–1966SurrealismThe dream given a manifesto — Breton's Paris movement of automatic writing, sleeping fits, and marvelous images, whose orbit touched most of the city's avant-garde.Enter the movement

Young Jean-Luc Godard in dark glasses, cigarette in his mouth, holding a strip of film up to the light with both hands

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

An orange sun over a hazy blue-grey harbor, small boats in the foreground, painted in loose broken strokes

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

Pen-and-ink illustration of a 1920s Harlem avenue at night: a young Black poet holding a book talks with a woman in a beaded dress while musicians carry a trumpet and trombone into a club under a glowing marquee, the crowd and brownstones behind them swept with one gold brush stroke

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 can be traced street by street.Enter the movement

Pen-and-ink illustration of a young playwright in a red waistcoat moving through a crowded 1830 Paris theatre foyer while a woman paints and a pianist plays

Art & literary movement · Europe · c. 1790–1850RomanticismThe argument that feeling, imagination and freedom belong at the centre of art rather than at its edges — settled in Paris, in the 1830s, in a theatre riot and at the Salon.Enter the movement

Pen-and-ink Dada collage with a mannequin head, bicycle wheel, chess knight, gears, torn paper, stage curtains, and a suspended gloved hand

Art movement · International · c. 1916–1924DadaThe anti-art movement born in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 amid the slaughter of the First World War, carried to Paris by Tristan Tzara in 1920, and dissolved into Surrealism by 1924.Enter the movement

Ink-and-gouache Mediterranean harbor with a vermilion tree, cobalt water, orange sky, white hillside houses, sailboats, brushes, and a paint palette

Art movement · France · c. 1905–1908FauvismThe short, loud Paris movement that freed colour from description — Henri Matisse and André Derain's blazing canvases of 1905, named 'wild beasts' by a mocking critic at the Salon d'Automne.Enter the movement

Engraved painter's hand placing a colored dot as separated blue, red, yellow, and green marks resolve into a Seine-side scene with trees, parasols, and a sailboat

Painting technique and movement · Paris · 1886–circa 1906PointillismThe Paris technique of painting in small separate dots of pure color, invented by Georges Seurat, championed by Paul Signac, and unveiled with A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in 1886.Enter the movement

Aerial view of the 1925 Paris decorative arts exhibition: tall square pylons flanking the Porte d'Honneur entrance, crowds on the paths below, pavilions and a clock tower spreading toward the Invalides dome

Art & design movement · Paris · circa 1910–1939Art DecoThe international design style of geometric pattern, rich surfaces and modern life, named after the 1925 Paris decorative arts exhibition and built into everything from Ruhlmann's cabinets to the Chrysler Building.Enter the movement

Caravaggio's The Calling of Saint Matthew: men in feathered hats counting coins at a table in a dark room, a shaft of light falling across the back wall, Christ at the right pointing toward them

Art movement and historical period · Rome · circa 1600–1750Baroque ArtThe seventeenth-century style of dramatic light, twisting movement and direct address to the viewer — Caravaggio and Bernini in Rome, Rembrandt and Vermeer in the Dutch Republic, Velázquez in Madrid, Poussin in Paris and Rome.Enter the period

Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night: a night sky of swirling blue and yellow currents above a sleeping village, with a dark flame-shaped cypress rising at the left and a church spire below

Historical period and art category · Paris · circa 1860s–1970sModern ArtThe broad category holding the experimental art movements from Realism and Impressionism to Pop and Conceptual art — not one movement, but the historical formation many opposing movements belong to.Enter the category

A nude young man stands on a rocky ledge holding a long red-shafted spear upright. A sphinx with a young woman's head and bare torso, a tawny lion's body and large blue-grey wings has sprung against his chest, its front paws hooked into him, staring up into his face while he looks steadily down at her. On the ledge below lie a pale human foot, scattered fingers, a red cloth and a gold crown; a narrow rocky gorge and grey sky fill the background, with an ornamented urn on a column at the right.

Art & literary movement · Paris · circa 1860–1910SymbolismSymbolism gave form to dreams, ideas and inner experience. Its artists, poets, paintings, music, history and Paris collections.Enter the movement

Art & design movement · Europe · circa 1890–1914Art NouveauArt Nouveau brought flowing natural forms to architecture and design around 1900. Its artists, buildings, posters, objects and surviving Paris interiors.Enter the movement

A large mosque interior painted in fine detail: rows of slender columns supporting red-and-white striped arches, brass lamps hanging on long chains, pigeons on the stone floor. Worshippers in pale robes stand in rows along the left. In the right foreground a group of men in red, white and striped dress stand with hands raised in prayer, one on a patterned rug laid across the flagstones.

Art movement · Paris · circa 1800–1900OrientalismOrientalist painting depicted North Africa and the Middle East. Its artists, major works, travel, empire, critical debates and Paris collections.Enter the movement

A still life on a table. A wicker basket tips up on a wooden block at the left, spilling red and green apples. A dark green wine bottle stands behind it, leaning slightly. At the right a white plate holds a stack of pale finger biscuits. A rumpled white cloth runs across the table with more apples on it, and the edge of the table on the left does not line up with the edge on the right.

Art movement · Paris · circa 1886–1905Post-ImpressionismPost-Impressionism grew from Impressionism in the 1880s. Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat: their paintings, methods, history and Paris collections.Enter the movement

A rectangular enamel plaque on a deep blue ground scattered with small rosettes. On the left, Christ on the cross between two standing figures, with two angels above. On the right, three men in short tunics stride forward with drawn swords towards a robed figure standing at a draped altar with a chalice on it. The figures are gilded and engraved; the blue is champleve enamel.

Historical period · Europe · 5th century to the 15thMedieval ArtMedieval art across a thousand years: Byzantine, Romanesque and Gothic traditions, manuscripts, sculpture, stained glass, makers and Paris collections.Enter the period