In Focus - Discover France: Experience the Best of France - page 734

landscapes of Provence and the Riviera at-
tracted many artists, including Paul Cézanne
(1839-1906) and the Dutch artist Vincent van
Gogh (1853-90), while the hustle and bustle
of fin-de-siècle Paris attracted others, such
as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901),
best known for his paintings of Parisian
brothels. Other artists travelled further afield:
Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) emigrated to Tahiti, where he produced rich, sensual
paintings inspired by his adopted tropical home.
Meanwhile in St-Tropez, pointillist painters applied paint in small dots to produce
a colourful mosaic-like effect: the works of Georges Seurat and his pupil Paul Sig-
nac (1863-1935) are on display at St-Tropez's Musée de l'Annonciade.

5 ARTISTS GALORE IN
MONTMARTRE ( CLICK HERE )

Fauvism, Cubism & Surrealism
The dawn of the 20th century inspired a bewildering diversity of artistic movements,
many of which inspired considerable controversy. Fauvist artists such as Henri Ma-
tisse (1869-1954) and André Dérain (1880-1954) moved even further from the
confines of representational art, often using bold, brash colours that bore little rela-
tion to reality; the movement famously got its name from a shocked art critic who
compared the artists with fauves (wild animals) after an exhibition in 1905.
Fauvism marked the start of an experimental century. Cubism completely threw
out the artistic rule book, breaking subjects into component shapes and ignoring
long-established rules of perspective and composition: among its key figures were
the Spanish-born artist Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and the French artist Georges
Braque (1882-1963).
Meanwhile, surrealist artists delved into their subconscious in search of hidden
dreams and desires, inspired by the theories of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Dadaism, an offshoot of surrealism, was shot through with a rebellious spirit and an
anarchic sense of humour - one of its most famous exponents, Marcel Duchamp
(1887-1962), famously made a sculpture from a men's urinal and painted a goatee
on the Mona Lisa .

Modern Art
After WWII, the focus shifted from Paris to southern France in the 1960s with new
realists such as Arman (1928-2005) and Yves Klein (1928-62), both from Nice. In
1960 Klein famously produced Anthropométrie de l'Époque Bleue, a series of im-