Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities

Vienna in 1908 was a seething hotbed of vice, tension and villainy. Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss, Sigmund Freud revealed the Oedipus complex, Egon Schiele produced startling pictures of humanity stripped bare, and music and architecture took radical new steps. But a struggling artist named Adolf Hitler arrived in the city and put Vienna – and the whole of Europe – on a path of destruction.

Paris in 1928 was a city dedicated to decadence. The artists drawn there were desperate to explore new ideas. Out of this ferment grew surrealists such as Dalí and Magritte, creating work that demolished all preconceptions. The city was also a refuge for black innovators such as dancer Josephine Baker. Art historian James Fox digs into the staggering cultural changes the city undertook.

New York in the early 1950s undertook a cultural revolution of world-defining importance. Every branch of the arts experienced a transformation - from the modern art of Jackson Pollock, the literature of Jack Kerouac to the cinema of Marlon Brando. Art expert James Fox tries to decipher just why this city at this particular time laid the foundations of the world as we know it today.