Henri Rousseau, To Celebrate the Baby!, 1903

Sophie Taeuber-Arp is one of the most important representatives of Classical Modernism and is considered a pioneer of abstraction.

Alberto Giacometti was in Geneva during the Second World War. In 1945 he returned to Paris. His old studio was still intact and he could have simply continued working.

Secluded, Giorgio Morandi lived and worked in Bologna. He specialized in still lifes on small format canvases.

The Alsace artist, Hans Arp, had already played a central role as artist and poet in the Dadaist movements in Zürich and Paris. Humour and irony also characterised his later work, especially the reliefs.

In 1926 Alexander Calder left America and went to Paris where the most important new artists of the time were working. His encounter with the Dutchman Piet Mondrian was groundbreaking.

The Italian Giorgio de Chirico painted his mysterious pictures in Paris before the First World War. He called his art “Pittura metafisica,” a style that had great influence on European painting.

The presence of Cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque was exceptionally strong even before the First World War. The Spaniard Juan Gris discovered the foundations of his work within them, but nevertheless developed his own, quite individual style, which led him to a strictly classical pictorial design.

In the years preceding the First World War Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso developed cubism.This was a new type of portrayal of reality.

Fernand Léger was not a painter of finely nuanced colour tones like Robert Delaunay, and he also wasn’t a strict Cubist like Braque and Picasso. Léger was a painter of expressive contrasts: colour, line and form come into direct conflict in his pictures.

Robert Delaunay painted numerous views of Paris. The view of the city through a window is the subject of a series of pictures that he painted in 1912.