The collection kicks off on the fifth floor with the Fauvists, a group of painters including André Derain, Maurice de Vlaminck and Georges Braque, who gathered around Henri Matisse at the beginning of the twentieth century, and whose paintings are characterized by vivid colours that often bear no relation to the reality of the object depicted. In Georges Braque's L'Estaque (1906) in room 2, colour instead becomes a way of composing and structuring a picture, with trees and sky broken down into blocks of vibrant reds and greens; Matisse's Luxe 1 is another fine example, the colourful nudes recalling the primitive figures of Gauguin."Primitive man" – in harmony with nature and uncorrupted by civilization – was a popular subject with contemporary artists, and one that influenced Picasso. Inspired by African masks and sculpture, Picasso began organizing form into geometrical shapes and pioneered Cubism. In his Femme assisedans un fauteuil (1910) in room 3, different angles of the subject are shown all at once, giving rise to complex patterns and creating the effect of movement. Hung alongside Picasso's works, and almost indistinguishable from them, are Braque's Nature morte au violon (1911), Femme à la guitare (1913) and others. The juxtaposition of these paintings illustrates the intellectual and artistic dialogue that went on between the two artists, who lived next door to each other at the Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre. Another artist heavily influenced by the new Cubism was Fernand Léger (room 4). In paintings such as Femme en rouge et vert (1914) and Contraste de Formes (1913), Léger creates his own distinctive form of Cubism based on tubular shapes, said to be inspired by the modern machinery of World War I in which he fought. Another product of the horror of the 1914–18 war was the nihilistic Dada movement, a revolt against petty bourgeois values. Room 7 displays work by leading members, including Marcel Duchamp, who selected everyday objects ("ready-mades") such as the Hat Rack (1917), and elevated them, without modification, to the rank of works of art, simply by taking them out of their ordinary context and putting them on display. As well as the Hat Rack, you can also inspect Duchamp's most notorious ready-made – a urinal – which he called Fontaine and first exhibited in New York in 1917.
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