This monumental art reference series will offer a complete and up-to-date survey of the major movements and art phenomena of the 1900s and the first years of the new millennium in an original interdisciplinary analysis of artistic culture. It provides an extraordinary repertory of images and a vast source of information, enriched fact-finding windows and technical information compiled by experts. This first volume in the series highlights the artistic situation at the beginning of the last century and explores the different artistic choices taken in the search for modernity and of art as a total experience. Volume 1 examines avant-garde movements in the years between 1900 and 1901--the Fauves, the Cubists and others--both as complex syntheses of nineteenth century artistic culture and as alternatives to the traditional language of figurative art. The period examined starts with emblematic moments such as the Great Exhibition in Paris, which opened a century of technological marvels, and closes with the end of the initial phase of the Dada movement and the foundation of the Bauhaus school.