The year 1913 found Paris at the center of effervescent artistic and literary activity. Artists and writers from around the world found their way to the city, where they created some of their most significant work. The city was also an object of inquiry and representation, both visual and textual. Paris became a cipher for modernity, with its ambivalences and hesitations, and the imagined city coexisted with the real.

However, the spirit of 1913 was not local: the Modernist spirit was developed as an international idiom not only because of the wide geographical spread of the new aesthetic, but also because the modernist work often had the whole world as its reference and horizon.