Georges Braque in the context of "Fauvism"

The Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon (French: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, pronounced [myze de boz‿aʁ də ljɔ̃] ) is a municipal museum of fine arts in the French city of Lyon. Located near the Place des Terreaux, it is housed in a former Benedictine convent which was active during the 17th and 18th centuries. It was restored between 1988, and 1998, remaining open to visitors throughout this time despite the ongoing restoration works. Its collections range from ancient Egyptian antiquities to the Modern art period, making the museum one of the most important in Europe. It also hosts important exhibitions of art, for example the exhibitions of works by Georges Braque and Henri Laurens in the second half of 2005, and another on the work of Théodore Géricault from April to July 2006. It is one of the largest art museums in France.

Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic of the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or Postmodern art.

Modern art begins with the post-impressionist painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. These artists were essential to modern art's development. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the pre-cubists Georges Braque, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Jean Metzinger and Maurice de Vlaminck revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild," multi-colored, expressive landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Matisse's two versions of The Dance signified a key point in his career and the development of modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive art: the intense warm color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.

Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (UK: /ˈdjuːʃɒ̃/, US: /djuːˈʃɒ̃, djuːˈʃɑːmp/; French: [maʁsɛl dyʃɑ̃]; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French American artist, chess player, and inventor who played a key role in the development of the avant-garde in the United States and in New York City, where he spent the last 25 years of his life.

Duchamp was the first artist to elevate a toilet to the status of an art form. By the time of World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (such as Henri Matisse) as "retinal," intended only to please the eye. Instead, he wanted to use art to serve the mind. He is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, as one of the three artists who helped to establish the post-industrial perspective in art history, and he is considered the progenitor of Conceptual art.

Proto-Cubism (also referred to as Protocubism, Early Cubism, and Pre-Cubism or Précubisme) is an intermediary transition phase in the history of art chronologically extending from 1906 to 1910. Evidence suggests that the production of proto-Cubist paintings resulted from a wide-ranging series of experiments, circumstances, influences and conditions, rather than from one isolated static event, trajectory, artist or discourse. With its roots stemming from at least the late 19th century, this period is characterized by a move towards the radical geometrization of form and a reduction or limitation of the color palette (in comparison with Fauvism). It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase of an art movement that would become altogether more extreme, known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.

Proto-Cubist artworks typically depict objects in geometric schemas of cubic or conic shapes. The illusion of classical perspective is progressively stripped away from objective representation to reveal the constructive essence of the physical world (not just as seen). The term is applied not only to works of this period by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, but to a range of art produced in France during the early 1900s, by such artists as Juan Gris, Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Henri Le Fauconnier, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Léger, and to variants developed elsewhere in Europe. Proto-Cubist works embrace many disparate styles, and would affect diverse individuals, groups and movements, ultimately forming a fundamental stage in the history of modern art of the 20th-century.

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. Part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it portrays five nude female prostitutes in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó, a street in Barcelona, Spain. The figures are confrontational and not conventionally feminine, being rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes, some to a menacing degree. The far left figure exhibits facial features and dress of Egyptian or southern Asian style. The two adjacent figures are in an Iberian style of Picasso's Spain, while the two on the right have African mask-like features. Picasso said the ethnic primitivism evoked in these masks moved him to "liberate an utterly original artistic style of compelling, even savage force" leading him to add a shamanistic aspect to his project.

Drawing from tribal primitivism while eschewing central dictates of Renaissance perspective and verisimilitude for a compressed picture plane using a Baroque composition while employing Velazquez's confrontational approach seen in Las Meninas, Picasso sought to take the lead of the avant-garde from Henri Matisse. John Richardson said Demoiselles made Picasso the most pivotal artist in Western painting since Giotto and laid a path forward for Picasso and Georges Braque to follow in their joint development of cubism, the effects of which on modern art were profound and unsurpassed in the 20th century.

Girl with a Mandolin (Fanny Tellier) is a 1910 Cubist painting by Pablo Picasso. The artwork was one of Picasso’s early Analytic Cubist creations, through which he aimed to reduce organic forms to geometric shapes. It shows the model Fanny Tellier in the nude, with her hands on a mandolin. Tellier volunteered to model for Picasso but, according to the latter, eventually refused to continue sitting for him after the painting took longer to complete than she had expected. Picasso accordingly left the portrait unfinished, though later suggested that he could have done nothing further to improve it.

Picasso painted Girl with a Mandolin late in the spring of 1910, shortly before leaving Paris for the Catalan town of Cadaqués. It was a response to Woman with a Mandolin, a more abstract treatment of the same theme by his friend Georges Braque, and followed two other works by Picasso under the same title. It has been analysed as a partial move away from naturalism, though comparatively legible and close to the visible form by contrast with later Cubist works, and as an important step in Picasso's movement towards focusing on the study of geometric planes. It has also been interpreted both as a de-eroticised nude and as containing autoerotic implications. The art historian T. J. Clark called it "the most ingenious of Picasso's portraits".

The Return to Order (French: retour à l'ordre) was a European art movement following the First World War that rejected the extreme avant-garde art of the years up to 1918 and emphasized the classical ideals of order and rationality. The movement is often thought to be a reaction to the war, though strands of the Return to Order began before its outbreak, such as the Noucentista movement in Spain. Futurism, which had praised machinery, dynamism, violence and war, was rejected by most of its adherents. The return to order was associated with a revival of classicism and representational painting. Among the many artists who participated in the movement were notable figures in modernism such as Picasso and Braque, Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir, and much of the Italian Futurists.

Artists of the Return to Order placed high emphasis on the classical ideals of rationality, quality of line, illusionism and order, in opposition to the preceding decades of irrationality and emotional turbulence which characterised the artworks of the avant-garde. Although taking classicism as its foundational inspiration, artists were keen to re-interpret the essence of classical art through the lens of modernism, and a link was often made between the idealism of the classical period and the “Plastic-like” art of the modern era. Many of the works made during the period display modernist tendencies alongside classical subjects and techniques.