This series offers a complete, up-to-date survey of the phenomena of the 1900s and the first years of the new millennium through an original, transversal and interdisciplinary analysis of artistic culture in the twentieth century. It provides an extraodinary repertory of images and a vast source of information, enriched through fact-finding windows and technical information, by experts in the field. The essays investigate and interpret in chronological order the transformations of the world's artistic culture, the major personalities and different movements that have characterised the developments of modern and contemporary art. 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. Generously illustrated the book examines the early avant-garde movements, seen as complex syntheses of late nineteenth century artistic culture but also as an alternative to the traditional language of figurative art, open to relationships with other disciplines and cultures, in the years between 1900-1919. 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.