Dynamic Beauty: Sculpture of Art Nouveau Paris is the first book to seriously explore French Art Nouveau sculpture and the aesthetic and cultural climate that gave rise to it. Paris in 1900 marked the first time that the walls began to break down between the 'fine' and 'decorative' arts. Artists were as influenced by Symbolist poetry as by Japanese design, and fascinated by eroticism in equal measure to their excitement about the new technology of electric light. Aided by the Collas machine, artists and foundries created sculptures in various sizes for a newly emergent upper middle class that was paradoxically eager to live in both the modern world of the automobile and the ancien monde of collecting.