With over sixty works illustrated and an extensive iconographic apparatus, this volume documents the youthful production of Picasso, Miró and Dalí, masters who have played a key role in the beginnings of Modern art. Despite their different birth dates and circumstances, there is something that strongly links their early works, but their story cannot be put together in a conventional manner. The exact point of departure is a uncertain, but the point of arrival is Dalí’s visit to Paris in 1926. The apparent end therefore becomes a beginning, and invites us to move back in time, in a seemingly backwards journey, but one that illuminates. Dalí cited Picasso and anxiously accepted the psychological drama of the path to be chosen. What is seen in outline then, however, found its inspiration years earlier, when Miró and Dalí each investigated their own genius loci rooted in the beginnings of modernity. This situation too looked back in time, to 1917: did Miró and Picasso run into each other in Barcelona? Was the return to order necessary? Could the new artistic currents survive? The answer of the young Miró was bold: was he not just bringing up-to-date the proposals the young Picasso had made on the very threshold of Modernity?