Broadly speaking, the situation that preceded ours can be summed up as follows: formed by tradition artists worked for a rich or fairly rich clientele, or for the State who commissioned them; their works were periodically made the object of official exhibitions (salons presided over by a committee or inspired by amateurs or connoisseurs), or in the form of private shows, both indeed appealing to the same “élite”—on whom Proust has left us some exemplary pages. The rest of the public was composed for the most part of people who had no access to art, who never entered a museum or a gallery, much less a salon, still less the studio of an artist; in short, for whom art had no existence except some names—Rembrandt, Raphael, Michelangelo—who remained names. Between the “élite” and the no-man's-land, a “fringe” public, made up of those who wanted to have, for reasons of taste, of curiosity, or for other motives, an initiation to art, to have some idea of it, and who went periodically to museums, to exhibitions, or who gathered information by reading. It is noteworthy that school hardly played any part: artistic teaching being most often reduced to “drawing lessons” where one learnt to copy Egyptian or Roman plaster casts, engravings, pictures, in short, to copy a design. As for books, they became confused with the same grisaille of printing and line-drawings, which, indeed, reappeared in the windows of bookshops and even in the town…