Born in 1860 in a small Czech town, Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) was an artist on the forefront of Art Nouveau, the modernist movement that swept Paris in the 1910's, marking a return to the simplicity of natural forms, and changing the world of art and design forever. In fact, Art Nouveau was known to insiders as the "Mucha style" for the legions of imitators who adapted the master's celebrated tableaux. Today, his distinctive depictions of lithe young...

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) is one of the most famous French impressionist painters. Influenced in his early works by Raphael, and creator of more than 6,000 paintings, Renoir gave more importance to the human figure than to the landscape. His works, enriched by a palette that was exclusive and unique to the artist, show us life in Paris at the time. His greatest masterpiece remains the Bal du Moulin de la Galette.

Felicien Rops (1833-1898) is a very surprising artist. Engraver and drawer of exception, Felicien Rops captures and anticipates, with astonishing talent, the female body with great modernity. Abandoning the conventional forms of the time, the artist creates a world full of humour, tenderness and, at times, insolence for the jubilation of the spectator's eye. Many of Rops' most famous works dealt with erotic and sensual themes, often depicting nudes...

Né en 1872, Aubrey Beardsley fut, avec Oscar Wilde, une figure emblématique de la décadence qui marqua la fin du règne de la reine Victoria. Largement autodidacte, Beardsley témoigne d'abord dans ses dessins de l'influence des Préraphaélites, comme Burne-Jones et Rossetti. Par la suite, il adopte un style plus radical et novateur, en illustrant Le Morte d'Arthur de Sir Thomas Malory et participe à la création de la revue The Yellow Book. Mais...

Edvard Munch, nacido en 1863, fue el artista más popular de Noruega. Sus pinturas de aspecto meditabundo y angustioso están basadas en su propia pena y obsesiones, y fueron piezas clave en el desarrollo del expresionismo. Durante su niñez, la muerte de su madre, su hermano y hermana, así como la enfermedad mental de otra de sus hermanas, tuvieron una fuerte influencia sobre su arte convulso y tortuoso. En sus obras, Munch rondaba con insistencia...

Entre courbes et contre-courbes, Mucha créa, à la fin du XIXe siècle, une égérie nouvelle qui devait hanter les rues de Paris. Au fil des représentations de Sarah Bernhard, cette muse voluptueuse devint un véritable emblème de l'Art nouveau et offrit à l'affichiste succès et renommée. Néanmoins, le talent de l'artiste ne se limita jamais à la lithographie. Nourri par cette passion d'exalter, au mieux, la sensualité du monde qui l'entourait,...

The smoothly metallic portraits, nudes and still life's of Tamara de Lempicka encapsulate the spirit of Art Deco and the Jazz Age, and reflect the elegant and hedonistic life-style of a wealthy, glamorous and privileged elite in Paris between the two World Wars. Combining a formidable classical technique with elements borrowed from Cubism, Lempicka's art represented the ultimate in fashionable modernity while looking back for inspiration to such master...

Edvard Munch, born in 1863, was Norway's most popular artist. His brooding and anguished paintings, based on personal grief and obsessions, were instrumental in the development of Expressionism. During his childhood, the death of his parents, his brother and sister, and the mental illness of another sister, were of great influence on his convulsed and tortuous art. In his works, Munch turned again and again to the memory of illness, death and grief....

"I am not interested in myself as a subject for painting, but in others, particularly women…"Beautiful, sensuous and above all erotic, Gustav Klimt's paintings speak of a world of opulence and leisure, which seems aeons away from the harsh, post-modern environment we live in now. The subjects he treats – allegories, portraits, landscapes and erotic figures – contain virtually no reference to external events, but strive rather to create a world...

Burne-Jones' oeuvre can be understood as an attempt to create in paint a world of perfect beauty, as far removed from the Birmingham of his youth as possible. At that time Birmingham was a byword for the dire effects of unregulated capitalism – a booming, industrial conglomeration of unimaginable ugliness and squalor. The two great French symbolist painters, Gustave Moreau and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, immediately recognized Burne-Jones as an artistic...