Armchair Travel: VIENNA, PARIS, NEW YORK

James Fox in Harry’s Bar, Paris.                                                                                             Photo: BBC/Nathalie Biancheri

James Fox in front of Gustav Klimt's Kiss at the Belvedere, Vienna.                                        Photo: BBC/Helen Shariatmadari

     A new three part series begins, Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities (BBC4 9.00pm Wednesday 20), with Dr James Fox visiting three cities and looks at artists, thinkers, writers and musicians that changed the ways we understand our world. This first episode takes on Vienna in 1908, the year Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss, Sigmund Freud uncovered the Oedipus complex, Egon Schiele, a major figurative painter, produced pictures of startling intensity.
Music and architecture too, also took radical new directions. It was also the year another artist, who would devastate Europe, arrived in the city... a young Adolf Hitler

Dr James Fox continues with stories of three cities where artists, thinkers, writers and musicians create new directions. This week in Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities (BBC4 9,00pm. Wednesday August 27) it is the Paris of 1928, the First World War is over and everyone yearns of a better life and a new beginning. It was the year artist Salvador Dali, René Magritte and film-maker Luis Bunuel brought their eccentric and strange new perceptions to the city, Writers from Ireland James Joyce, from America, Ernest Hemingway, and musicians, George Gershwin and Cole Porter came to explore a decade of renewed creativity and freedom. Black artists like Josephine Baker arrived to enjoy a world without prejudice.

In the final part of  Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities (BBC4 9,00pm. Wednesday September 3) Dr James Fox visits New York, the city of 1951 New York City when jazz spawned 'bebop', Jackson Pollock dripped and stippled new dynamism to American painting. Jack Kerouac defined the `beat generation' with his book On the Road, and a young Marlon Brando has an Oscar-winning performances as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, and David Ogilvy introduced the real 'Mad Men' to advertising.