During the years of the turn of the century, Paris was the capital of modernity. An undisputed centre for fashion and the market in luxury goods, it was also the centre of the mass market and the popular leisure market and of the new media: advertising, poster art, etc. Paris offered the right conditions for an independent art: influential critics, abundant publications, intellectual gatherings of all sorts, gallery owners and clients interested in the avant-garde. Any modern artist had to try his luck here and the fact is that many of them, arriving from all over the world, produced their best work in those brief Paris years, under the shock of the city of entertainment.