BEGINING : In the late Middle Ages, the itinerant life of the nobles led them to prefer small and transportable works of art; splendidly illuminated manuscripts were much praised and the best painters, usually trained in Paris, continued to work on a small scale until the fifteenth century. In spite of the small size of the illuminated image, painters made startling steps towards a realistic interpretation of the world and in the exploration of new subject matters.

Many of these illuminators were also panel painters, foremost of whom was Jean Fouquet (c1420-1481), born in Tours in the Loire valley and the central artistic personality of fifteenth-century France. Court painter to Charles VIII, Fouquet drew from both Flemish and Italian sources, utilizing the new fluid oil technique that had been perfected in Flanders, and concerning himself with the problem of representing space convincingly, much like his Italian contemporaries. Through this he moulded a distinct personal style, combining richness of surface with broad, generalized forms and, in his feeling for volume and ordered geometric shapes, laying down principles that became intrinsic to French art for centuries to come, from Poussin to Seurat and Cézanne.

Two other fifteenth-century French artists deserve brief mention here, principally for the broad range of artistic expression they embody. Enguerrand Quarton (c1410-c1466) was the most famous Provençal painter of the time; his art, profoundly religious in subject as well as feeling, already shows the impact of the Mediterranean sun in the strong light that pervades his paintings. His Pietà in the Louvre is both stark and intensely poignant, while the Coronation of the Virgin that hangs at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon is a vast panoramic vision not only of heaven but also of a very real earth, in what ranks as one of the first city/landscapes in the history of French painting: Avignon itself is faithfully depicted and the Mont Ste-Victoire, later to be made famous by Cézanne, is recognizable in the distance.

The Master of Moulins , active in the 1480s and 1490s, was noticeably more northern in temperament, painting both religious altarpieces and portraits commissioned by members of the royal family or the fast-increasing bourgeoisie.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY : The twentieth century kicked off to a colourful start with the Fauvist exhibition of 1905, an appropriately anarchic beginning to a century which, in France above all, was to see radical changes in attitudes towards painting.

The painters who took part in the exhibition included, most influentially, Henri Matisse (1869-1954), André Derain (1880-1954), Georges Rouault (1871-1958) and Albert Marquet (1875-1947), and they were quickly nicknamed the Fauves (Wild Beasts) for their use of bright, wild colours that often bore no relation whatsoever to the reality of the object depicted. Skies were just as likely to be green as blue since, for the Fauves, colour was a way of composing, of structuring a picture, and not necessarily a reflection of real life.

Fauvism was just the beginning: the first decades of the twentieth century were times of intense excitement and artistic activity in Paris, and painters and sculptors from all over Europe flocked to the capital to take part in the liberation from conventional art that individuals and groups were gradually instigating. Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) used Fauvist colours in combination with theories of abstraction to paint an effervescent industrial age.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the first, arriving in Paris in 1900 from Spain and soon thereafter starting work on his first Blue Period paintings, which describe the sad and squalid life of intinerant actors in tones of blue. Later, while Matisse was experimenting with colours and their decorative potential, Picasso came under the sway of Cézanne and his organization of forms into geometrical shapes. He also learned from "primitive", and especially African, sculpture, and out of these studies came a painting that heralded a definite new direction, not only for Picasso's own style but for the whole of modern art - Les Demoiselles d'Avignon . Executed in 1907, this painting combined Cézanne's analysis of forms with the visual impact of African masks.

It was from this semi-abstract picture that Picasso went on to develop the theory of Cubism , inspiring artists such as Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Juan Gris (1887-1927), another Spaniard, and formulating a whole new movement. The Cubists' aim was to depict objects not so much as they saw them but rather as they knew them to be: a bottle and a guitar were shown from the front, from the side and from the back as if the eye could take in all at once every facet and plane of the object. Braque and Picasso first analysed forms into these facets (analytical Cubism), then gradually reduced them to series of colours and shapes (synthetic Cubism), among which a few recognizable symbols such as letters, fragments of newspaper and numbers appeared. The complexity of different planes overlapping one another made the deciphering of Cubist paintings sometimes difficult, and the very last phase of Cubism tended increasingly towards abstraction.

Spin-offs of Cubism were many: such movements as Orphism , headed by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) and Francis Picabia (1879-1953), who experimented not with objects but with the colours of the spectrum, and Futurism , which evolved first in Italy, then in Paris, and explored movement and the bright new technology of the industrial age. Fernand Léger (1881-1955), one of the main exponents of the so-called School of Paris, had also become acquainted with modern machinery during World War I , and he exploited his fascination with its smoothness and power to create geometric and monumental compositions of technical imagery that were indebted to both Cézanne and Cubism.

The war, meanwhile, had affected many artists: in Switzerland, Dada was born out of the scorn artists felt for the petty bourgeois and nationalistic values that had led to the bloodshed, a nihilistic movement that sought to knock down all traditionally accepted ideas. It was best exemplified in the work of the Frenchman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), who selected ready-made, everyday objects and elevated them, without modification, to the rank of works of art by pulling them out of their ordinary context, or defaced such sacred cows as the Mona Lisa by decorating her with a moustache and an obscene caption.

Dada was also a literary movement, and through one of its main poets, André Breton, it led to the inception of Surrealism . It was the unconscious and its dark unchartered territories that interested the Surrealists: they derived much of their imagery from Freud and even experimented in words and images with free-association techniques.

Strangely enough, most of the "French" Surrealists were foreigners, primarily the German Max Ernst (1891-1976) and the Spaniard Salvador Dalí (1904-89), though Frenchman Yves Tanguy (1900-55) also achieved international recognition. Mournful landscapes of weird, often terrifying images evoked the landscape of nightmares in often very precise details and with an anguish that went on to influence artists for years to come. Picasso, for instance, shocked by the massacre at the Spanish town of Guernica in 1936, drew greatly from Surrealism to produce the disquieting figures of his painting of the same name.

World War II interrupted Paris's position as the artistic melting pot of Europe. Artists had rushed there at the beginning of the twentieth century and after World War I, contributing by their individuality, originality and different nationalities to the richness and constant renewal of artistic endeavour. Although at the outbreak of World War II many artists emigrated to the US, where the economic climate was more favourable, Paris remained full of vibrant new work. Sculptors like the Romanian Brancusi (1876-1957) and the Swiss Giacometti (1886-1966) lived most of their lives in Paris, for example.

The last coherent French art movement of the century, largely of the 1950s and 1960s, was Nouveau Réalisme , which concentrated on the distortion of the objects and signs of contemporary culture, and loosely encompassed artists and sculptors such as Dubuffet, Arman, César, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint-Phalle.

Jean Dubuffet (1901-85) pioneered the depreciation of traditional artistic materials and methods, fashioning junk, tar, sand and glass into the shape of human beings. His work (which provoked much outrage) influenced both the French-born American, Arman (1928-) and César (1921-), both of whom made use of scrap metals - their output ranging from presentations of household debris to towers of crushed cars. Even more controversially, the Swiss Daniel Spoerri (1930-) used the remnants - including the crockery - of his dinners and glued them onto a canvas.

Nouveau Réaliste sculpture is best represented by the works of another Swiss, Jean Tinguely (1925-91) whose work was concerned mainly with movement and the machine, satirizing technological civilization. His most famous work, done in collaboration with Niki de Saint-Phalle (1926-) is the exuberant fountain outside the Pompidou Centre, featuring fantastical birds and beasts shooting water in all directions.

Later artists wanted to reassert their position as individuals and, though influenced by their cultural context, were not attached to any clear manifesto. Perhaps the most important post-World War II French artist is Yves Klein (1928-1962). He redefined the void and the immaterial as having a pure energy. He also patented his own colour, International Klein Blue, which he used on his monochromes, also signalling painting simply as pure colour. Klein and Duchamp laid the foundations for several currents in contemporary art.

Since Nouveau Réalisme, young French artists, like their counterparts abroad have shown a proclivity to mix styles as well as media. A number of smaller but less coherent movements have cropped up in France, notably Support, Surface and the graffiti-inspired Figuration Libre , while French artists have also been drawn towards the international currents of Italian-pioneered Trans-Avant Gard . The geometrically abstract Support, Surface emerged in Nice in 1969, founded by the likes of Claude Villat (1936-), and represented in sculpture by Jean-Pierre Pincemin (1944-). The Nantes artist Jean-Charles Blais (1956-) is one of the leaders of Figuration Libre (which began in 1981), and is known for high-relief abstracts which combine traditional painting techniques with the montage of found objects. Louise Bourgeois (1911-) is a major influence on young contemporary artists, a still-prolific sculptress producing oddly erotic and remarkable combinations of wrought iron, old clothes and other material. A recent trend has been towards massive mise-en-scène works, such as Christian Boltanski 's (1944-) large, auto-referential installations, or the work of the Bulgarian Christo (1935-) and his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude (1935-), who cover buildings using different materials, and wrapped Paris's Pont-Neuf in woven polyamide fabric in 1985, in order to focus attention on the structure itself rather than its function. Jean-Marc Bustamante (1952-) constructs in situ installations, using building materials in his art, while Jean-Luc Vilmout (1952-) often co-opts the buildings themselves, resulting in a blurring of the aesthetic and the functional. Finally, in painting, the Lyonnais Marc Desgrandchamps (1960-) is a name to look out for, although he may be hard to spot given that his work runs a gamut of styles from abstract to photorealism.