Dutch painter Vincent Willem van Gogh moves from Antwerp to Paris

Vincent van Gogh invites Paul Gauguin to come and paint with him at Arles, in the south of France

Vincent van Gogh enters a psychiatric asylum in St Rémy as a voluntary patient

A change of palette by Pablo Picasso takes him into what becomes known as his Blue Period

Henri Matisse completes his painting Luxe, Calme et Volupté

Pablo Picasso's palette becomes warmer as Blue evolves into Rose

Henri Matisse, in the south of France, paints The Open Window, Collioure, the first of his many works on this theme

Matisse, Derain and others, exhibiting in Paris their shockingly colourful new works, are dubbed fauves ("wild beasts") by a critic

Pablo Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein prefigures cubism in its mask-like treatment of her face

A large retrospective exhibition in Paris gives Paul Gauguin a growing posthumous reputation

Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, a violent transition into cubism, is a turning point in western art

Georges Braque's Houses at L'Estaque introduces analytic Cubism

The French critic Louis Vauxcelles describes Braque's latest landscapes as being composed of cubes, resulting in the term cubism

Henri Matisse completes two large paintings, La Danse and La Musique, for the staircase of Sergei Shchukin's house in Moscow

Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre in Paris

Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2 creates a stir

Georges Braque's Fruit-Dish and Glass adds papier collé (a type of collage) to the conventions of cubism

Guillaume Apollinaire coins the term Orphism for Robert Delaunay's distinctive style of abstraction

The cubist movement enters its second phase, deriving from the use of collage and known as Synthetic cubism

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is recovered two years after its theft when the thief, Vincenzo Perugia, tries to sell it to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

Claude Monet begins the great cyclorama of water-lilies, Nympheas, that he donates to the French nation

The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire is the first to use the term Surrealism

Amedeo Modigliani's first Paris exhibition is immediately closed by the police because it contains paintings of nudes

Pablo Picasso's massive painting Guernica is exhibited in the Spanish pavilion at the World Fair in Paris

Henri Matisse completes the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, with every detail designed by himself