Timothy Mathews examines work by a range of writers and painters working in France in the twentieth century. This book engages with canonical figures—Guillaume Apollinaire, Marguerite Duras and Jean Genet, Roland Barthes, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte—as well as more neglected individuals including Robert Desnos and Jean Fautrier. Integrating theoretical and material approaches to reading and viewing, Mathews engages with the distinctive features of different literary genres and different types of painting to develop an original history of artistic ambition in twentieth-century France.