Paris 1928 Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities

On 25th March, 1928,

a young American composer arrived in Paris

with grand ambitions.

He wanted to capture the distinctive atmosphere of the city

in a piece of music.

The composer's name was George Gershwin

and his inspiration came from the streets themselves.

Gershwin was overwhelmed by the noise,

the pace, and the energy of this city.

And he used that energy, including the energy of the traffic itself,

to create one of the most exhilarating pieces

of music of the century,

and he called it An American In Paris.

MUSIC: "An American In Paris" by George Gershwin

It is a glorious piece of music

and it captures the spirit of Paris perfectly -

elegant, exuberant, and romantic.

Like so many others before him,

George Gershwin thought Paris

was the most exciting place on the planet.

But you know what?

I think that it was never more exciting than in the year

he actually wrote that piece - 1928.

1928 was the high point of an unusually creative decade.

It was the year that the Surrealists

brought their irrational world order to the people.

When European emigres set the city alight with their ambitious dreams.

When visiting Americans launched sparkling careers.

And when utopian modernists redesigned the world.

One city, one exceptional year.

But like all the best parties, it would come to a dramatic end.

This is the story of Paris in 1928 -

the Bash before the Crash.

In the early 1920s, Paris was still recovering from the First World War.

There were food queues and damaged buildings,

disillusionment and grief.

But by the end of the decade,

Paris had somehow rebuilt its reputation

as the most glamorous city in the world,

attracting the finest artists, writers and thinkers of the day.

It was the great interwar utopia,

where everything was up for grabs -

and everyone was living in the moment.

The centre of this party in 1928 was in Montparnasse,

a cheap run-down neighbourhood on the Left Bank.

And the centre of Montparnasse

was a cafe called La Coupole, which had just opened its doors.

In 1928, La Coupole was the largest restaurant in Paris

and its interior is an Art Deco masterpiece,

with Jazz Age colours, Cubist mosaics,

and 33 famous pillars,

each of which was painted by an artist from Montparnasse.

John, so, what was so appealing about Paris in the 1920s?

Where to start? Um...

The people coming to Paris in the '20s came here for three reasons,

one, because they were rich,

women came here to buy their trousseau,

to get a French maid, to get a French chef,

the men came here to go to the brothels,

to buy art, to hunt and so on.

At the other end of the spectrum,

you came here because you were poor,

because food was cheap.

If you had to starve in a garret

while you learn to become a great musician or a great writer,

you could starve longer in Paris

than you could in any other civilised city in the world.

And then, in the middle were people who came here

because you could do stuff that you couldn't do elsewhere.

What made Paris so attractive to artists?

Everybody who came here believed that they were going to succeed

BECAUSE it was Paris.

You could go and learn from Matisse,

you could go and visit Picasso

and he would explain what he had been doing.

I mean, that's priceless, where else does that happen?

It was a magnet, it drew people from all around the world.

And within this crucible, new movements were formed.

After all, you cannot point to another city where

so many artistic movements began and rose to their peak.

It was a great time to be an artist, really.

I wish I'd been there, frankly.

So, what was Paris's next big art movement?

Well, it would be stranger than anything before or since.

It was called Surrealism -

and its ring-leader was a mischievous

and highly original writer called Andre Breton.

Breton had been a doctor during the First World War.

Like many people, the conflict changed him...

..and it led him to a revelation.

Breton concluded that Europe was rotten to its core.

Reason, logic, capitalism -

the great motors of Western Civilisation

had led the world into the most terrible disaster in its history.

What was needed now was a fundamental change.

A revolution that would come from within every single one of us.

Breton's antidote to the horrors of war

was to celebrate the absurdity of the human experience.

And so, Breton and his friends opened a very unusual office.

TYPEWRITER CLACKS

-WHISPERS:

-How are you recovering from the First World War?

Have you ever done...? Tell me your secrets.

Who do you lust after? What's the worst thing you've ever done?

Tell me about your nightmares. All this is confidential,

you can tell me. I used to be a doctor.

They called it the Bureau Of Surrealist Research -

and its purpose was to capture

the disruptive energy of the unconscious.

The Bureau Of Surrealist Research asked the public

to come in to the office and confess.

Now, as a member of the public, you could confess pretty much anything.

If you had an awful secret you'd been keeping,

if you lusted after a colleague or even a family member,

if you'd committed a crime and not yet got caught,

or even if you'd had some unsettling dream or nightmare,

this was the place to reveal everything.

And that was all part of Andre Breton's plan to explode

bourgeois conventions, to liberate people's unconsciouses,

and to change their lives for good.

The Bureau was open to the public every day from 4.30 to 6.30

in the afternoon. Except Sundays.

There was just one problem.

Not that many people took up the offer to confess

their deepest secrets to a complete stranger.

The office files remained largely empty.

But Breton didn't give up.

In the name of the Surrealist revolution,

he decided to write a surreal fantasy of his own -

a book called Nadja,

which he published in 1928.

Nadja is a love story - without the love and without the story.

It's the tale of an illicit affair set in a strange, haunting Paris.

And it begins with something

that only a great city like Paris can provide -

a chance encounter.

It is a late autumn afternoon.

Workers are going home for the evening.

Breton is drifting aimlessly along the street

when he catches sight of a beautiful and mysterious woman.

Without hesitation, he approaches her.

He asks her name.

She tells him - Nadja.

And it turns out she's everything he's been looking for.

The next day, they meet in a secret square in Paris,

and Nadja begins to tune in

to a city that Breton can't even see.

She senses crowds where there are none.

She's sees bloody visions of the French Revolution

in the empty streets,

and even predicts that he'll write a novel about her.

Breton is captivated,

but it's not love that's hooked him.

It seems in Nadja,

he's finally found the perfect symbol of Surrealism -

a beautiful enigma with no rational explanation,

a pathway to the unconscious itself.

Breton's haunting book poses more questions than answers.

Who was Nadja? What happened to her?

Did she even exist?

But one thing is certain -

Breton had turned Paris into a great Surrealist dreamscape.

A place that was as seductive and mysterious as Nadja herself.

While Andre Breton conjured up surrealist fantasies

in the cafes of Montparnasse,

one man would close the gap

between dreams and reality even more dramatically.

And he would do it, very discreetly, in the suburbs.

Seven miles east of downtown Paris

was a sleepy neighbourhood called Perreux-sur-Marne.

It was an ordinary place, full of teachers,

dentists and retired accountants going about their business

and in their midst, was a young man who seemed to fit in just perfectly.

This man lived quietly and carefully.

He always wore a suit.

He worked to a strict routine.

He walked his dog at the same time every single day.

And in the evening, his idea of fun was a game of chess.

All in all, he seemed as unremarkable as all the other

residents of Perreux-sur-Marne.

But this man was actually an undercover Surrealist

and his name was Rene Magritte.

Magritte was born in Belgium in 1898.

He had his first exhibition as an artist in Brussels in 1927,

but it was so unsuccessful

that he left for Paris to join the Surrealists.

This one's the...

-the button.

-'Oui?'

-Monsieur Moir?

-'Oui.'

-C'est James Fox.

HE SPEAKS IN FRENCH

Magritte lived on the top floor of this building

with his wife from 1927 to 1930.

Now, Magritte didn't actually have a proper studio space here,

so most of his painting was done in his sitting room.

But if that doesn't sound perfect, it obviously suited him,

because it was here that he started to paint

his first Surrealist paintings,

some of the most famous paintings of the 20th century,

and what's more, 1928 was the most productive year of his entire career.

That year, he made more than 100 pictures.

That's what? More than one every three days.

In his paintings, Magritte played with the bizarre and often amusing tension

between dreams and reality.

This painting is called The Treachery Of Images. We see a pipe.

And underneath it, a sentence that reads "This is not a pipe."

Now, at first, it seems nonsensical

but Magritte is, of course, completely right.

Because that ISN'T a pipe.

You can't smoke it. You can't even hold it.

What it actually is is a picture -

an arrangement of coloured paint on a canvas.

And it's a reminder - a really important reminder -

that it's all too easy to confuse images with reality.

But perhaps Magritte's most eye-opening work of the period

was this one - The False Mirror.

Now this has to be one of the more intimidating paintings

in the history of art.

Because as we look at it,

it looks back at us.

It's filled with Surrealist features -

not least the absence of eyelashes.

But one of the most enigmatic of them

is this beautifully painted cloudy sky.

Now, when you first look at the painting,

you presume that sky is actually a reflection,

this eye is looking out at a beautiful world,

with a beautiful sky and it's being reflected on the surface of the iris.

But that is not what Magritte intended.

Actually, that sky exists behind the iris inside the head.

So, when you look at this painting,

you're actually looking through someone's eye, into their mind.

And that's what Magritte did so well.

He took the interior world and he brought it outside.

Today, Magritte's paintings are among the most famous images

in 20th-century art.

At the time, however, they were virtually unknown.

They simply gathered dust in his suburban sitting room

while he carried on painting.

As news of the Surrealist revolution

spread through Europe,

two flamboyant characters from Spain joined its ranks -

Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel.

Dali had just been kicked out of art school

and Bunuel was hungry to make his first movie.

Inspired by Andre Breton, as soon as they arrived

in Paris, they decided to make the perfect Surrealist film.

They had only one rule -

nothing rational was permitted.

A man attacks a woman. He turns round. What does he see?

A flying toad?

Bad!

A bottle of brandy?

Bad!

Two ropes?

Yes, but what are they attached to?

A cannon?

Bad.

An armchair?

Bad.

A grand piano?

Yes!

And on top of it, a donkey.

No - two rotting donkeys!

Yes!

They called their film Un Chien Andalou and it premiered here,

at the legendary arthouse cinema, the Studio Des Ursulines.

Everyone who was anyone came to see the film.

Pablo Picasso was here, the architect, Le Corbusier was here,

Andre Breton and the entire Surrealist movement were here.

Now, understandably, the two young film-makers were extremely anxious.

In fact, Luis Bunuel was so nervous about being attacked

that he kept stones in his pockets for self-defence.

And he was right to be vigilant.

PROJECTOR WHIRS

OPENING MUSIC PLAYS

Dali and Bunuel had exploited the new language of cinema

to create surreal scenes

that couldn't have been achieved in any other medium.

The result was sometimes shocking,

sometimes funny and usually unpleasant.

But one sequence stood out from all the others.

Bunuel himself sharpens a cut-throat razor.

He lifts it to the face of an unfortunate woman.

And then,

he slices open her eye.

I've watched that scene hundreds of times before

and I know it's fake,

but I still find it almost unbearable.

And I think it's not just out to shock.

I think it's symbolic.

It's Dali and Bunuel saying to us, "You don't need your eyes any more.

"Because we are taking you into a world of the imagination."

In the end, the stones remained in Bunuel's pockets,

because the audience loved it.

Un Chien Andalou went on to become a landmark in cinema history

and it was, in many ways, the unforgettable culmination

of Andre Breton's great Surrealist revolution.

You know, we may think of Surrealism

as little more than a curiosity from 1920s Paris,

but the Surrealist revolution did work,

and it did change the way we see the world today.

After all, you may never have heard to Andre Breton or Luis Bunuel,

but if you hear the word "surreal",

you'll know exactly what it means.

If the Surrealists wanted to reinvent the world

after the Great War,

some people came to Paris to reinvent themselves.

By 1928, there were 200,000 foreigners in the city.

Many of them, emigres from war-torn countries -

all dreaming of a better life.

But at least one of them would turn their dreams into reality.

Tamara Gorska was wealthy and beautiful,

and married to one of the most dashing men in Eastern Europe.

But in the midst of the Russian Revolution, he just vanished.

Now, she searched the whole country for him,

eventually, found him in prison,

and, somehow, she helped him escape.

Together, they fled the country,

and some time in 1918, they arrived in Paris.

But they'd lost everything

and with a small child to bring up and a husband too depressed to work,

Gorska felt her life had fallen apart.

But then, she began to look around her.

The streets of Paris were full of women enjoying new freedoms,

confident, glamorous women living for the moment -

not dwelling on the past.

And Gorska realised she too could take control of her life.

She enrolled in art school,

gave herself a fabulous make-over,

and changed her married name Lempitska

to the more French-sounding Tamara de Lempicka.

And she made a crucial decision.

De Lempicka didn't want to be a poor, starving artist.

She wanted to paint the kind of portraits

that rich investors wanted to buy.

She focused on modernity's most alluring new characters -

sexually liberated, independent and glamorous women.

Women like herself.

Paris also unlocked de Lempicka's wild side.

Tamara de Lempicka had plenty of sexual confidence.

And after parties, she'd come here,

to the Bois de Boulogne, to pick out a lover

from amongst the prostitutes.

One evening, she was walking here when she saw a woman

who was attracting a lot of attention -

de Lempicka thought she was the most beautiful woman

she'd ever seen in her life.

But rather than asking her for sex as everyone else did,

de Lempicka asked if she would model for her.

The prostitute considered the proposal

and eventually said, "Yes, why not?"

The woman's name was Rafaela and she became the subject

of some of de Lempicka's most erotic paintings.

Here is Rafaela,

reclining seductively in de Lempicka's studio.

It is a voluptuous painting,

constructed almost entirely of curves.

In fact, even the bottom of the canvas seems to echo

the shape of Rafaela's hips.

And it is filled with the promise of sex.

Rafaela looks expectantly up at the artist,

her red lipstick seems to glow like a warning light,

and that red dress is on the verge of coming off.

And here, it has come off to reveal Rafaela's flesh in all its glory.

But in some ways, it's not really like flesh.

De Lempicka's art is all about surface,

and here, she's used tiny, almost invisible brushstrokes -

borrowed from the Renaissance masters,

so that the skin becomes too perfect to be real.

Almost as if it's been manufactured by machine.

But de Lempicka's most famous painting

is of her favourite subject - herself.

Few paintings capture the glamour of the 1920s

better than this one.

It's all shine, sheen and shimmer.

and an almost pornographic flaunting of consumer products.

De Lempicka's car, of course, came from Bugatti,

and her outfit came from Hermes.

This is the image of the new woman -

a woman in the driving seat of her own destiny.

A woman leaving the past behind and hurtling into a brighter future.

And that's what Tamara de Lempicka did.

Together with the help of Paris,

she reinvented herself completely.

Europeans weren't the only foreigners

flooding into Paris in the '20s.

By 1928, there were about 40,000 Americans living in the city,

and more were arriving every single day.

They left an America that had become increasingly isolated,

backward and illiberal.

And with Prohibition, you couldn't even get a drink.

Paris appeared to be the very opposite -

and it had the added benefit of being ridiculously cheap.

No-one had quite as good a time in Paris

as the American songwriter, Cole Porter.

Born in the Midwest back in 1891,

Porter was a musical prodigy from the start.

He learnt the violin at six, the piano at eight

and wrote his first operetta at ten.

He moved to Paris during the First World War.

And though he had always been wealthy,

he found his money went further in Paris than anywhere else.

To call Porter's lifestyle "extravagant"

would be an understatement.

His home was filled with Art Deco furnishings,

floor-to-ceiling mirrors,

Chippendale chairs, platinum wallpaper,

zebra-skin rugs and top-of-the-range Steinway pianos.

Porter was the kind of man who didn't have one dressing gown,

he had 16 dressing gowns

and all of them cost him a fortune.

Porter spent most of 1928 hosting a string extravagant parties.

But it was also the year when, at the age of 36,

he finally found time to write his first hit.

It was a musical called, simply, Paris

and one of its songs has since become world famous.

# Romantic sponges, they say, do it

# Oysters down in Oyster Bay do it

# Let's do it, let's fall in love

# Cold Cape Cod clams, against their wish, do it

# Even lazy jellyfish do it

# Let's do it, let's fall in love

# Electric eels, I might add, do it

# Though it shocks them, I know

# Why ask if shad do it?

# Waiter, bring me "shad roe"

# In shallow shoals, English soles do it

# Goldfish, in the privacy of bowls, do it

# Let's do it, let's fall in love! #

Thank you, thank you!

-Cheers, James. What a great performance.

-Thank you, thank you.

So, what do we know about Cole Porter as a man?

Well, I suppose, one of the key things about him

is that he's a gay man, who is married, comes to Paris 1918,

because of the war.

And Cole Porter's from a wealthy family

but he depends on his grandfather

and that depends on behaving in a way that his grandfather

would approve of and grandfather's very much a man's man

and has constantly been trying to make Cole into a man and failed.

So, Cole's in Paris,

grandfather doesn't know what he's up to, really.

Paris is a much more liberal city for a gay man,

and he can tell grandfather and his mother what he's doing,

but it doesn't mean it'll reflect what he's actually doing.

What was Cole Porter actually up to in Paris?

Well, he had a lovely apartment, he's having great parties,

he's meeting young men,

he's meeting the demimonde, but also the beau monde,

he's meeting the important people of the day, and he's singing

and playing, entertaining and having a few drinks.

And what was going on in the 1920s?

Was he particularly successful professionally?

Well, he wrote loads of songs at Yale

and he continued to write all the way through,

but it wasn't until 1928 with Let's Do It

that he actually had a big hit.

-So, this was a big turning point for him?

-Completely, yeah.

And suddenly he gets that validation of actually being taken seriously

and that leads to being taken seriously for Anything Goes

and into his Hollywood career where he was perhaps most successful.

The music is playful as well as the words.

And you can play around with it,

you can pull it this way and that's very elastic. Great piece.

You it played beautifully. Thank you very much.

Thank you, you're a great audience.

If many Americans spent the evenings listening to music,

they spent the days

in a remarkable English language book shop by the Seine.

Called Shakespeare And Company,

it was founded by a young American woman named Sylvia Beach.

This is the fiction room,

going from floor to ceiling, literally.

'Sylvia Whitman is the current owner.'

Poetry nook in the corner.

-It's the perfect place for poetry, a nook.

-It is, it's quite romantic.

What was Shakespeare And Company like back in the 1920s?

Well, I wish I could go back in time, it sounds amazing!

Sylvia Beach opened her Shakespeare And Company in 1919

and it was really a Mecca for all of the great writers of the day.

So, she had Fitzgerald, John dos Passos, Ford Maddox Ford,

Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound. These are all people

-that would drop in.

-Everyone was there in the '20s.

Hemingway himself used to come to Shakespeare And Company?

Absolutely, yes!

He actually described himself as "Sylvia Beach's best customer"

and she didn't deny it.

He was in Paris, I think they first met in 1921,

and he was living here with his first wife, Hadley,

and he was hungry, he was poor, he was unpublished

and he was working really hard on his writing

and he had a letter of introduction to Sylvia

and he turned up in her book shop with that letter of introduction,

but he didn't need it because instantly,

there was a warmth and an affinity between them

that turned into a beautiful relationship

that lasted until he died. It lasted 40 years.

By 1928, Ernest Hemingway was a Parisian old hand.

A hard-drinking journalist, he was officially in Paris

as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star.

Hemingway wrote hundreds of pieces of journalism

during his time in Paris.

These are just some of them.

They cover a whole range of subjects.

There is an interview here with Mussolini

whom Hemingway calls "Europe's prize bluffer".

There's another story here about a Paris to Strasbourg flight

and I love the way it begins. It begins,

"We were sitting in the cheapest of all the cheap restaurants

"that cheapen the very cheap and noisy street,

"the Rue De Petit Champs, in Paris."

And there's a story here about Hemingway himself

being gored by a bull in Pamplona.

But all of these pieces are written

in this crisp, economical, journalistic prose

that was tailored to being sent by telegram across the Atlantic.

But Hemingway wasn't in Paris solely to write copy.

He'd come here to turn himself into a world-class novelist.

He wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises in 1926

and by 1928, he was working on his second and perhaps greatest book -

A Farewell To Arms.

A Farewell To Arms is the story of a romance

between an American ambulance driver and an English nurse

during the First World War. It is a powerful tale of love and violence,

but what makes it so remarkable is its style.

Take this passage for instance,

when the hero, Frederic,

first meets the woman with whom he'll fall in love.

"Miss Barkley was in the garden.

"Another nurse was with her.

"We saw their white uniforms through the trees

"and walked towards them.

"Miss Barkley was quite tall.

"She wore what seemed to be a nurse's uniform,

"was blonde and had a tawny skin and grey eyes.

"I thought she was very beautiful."

Now, what's amazing about that is the language

is stripped back to the bone.

The sentences are short,

the words are basic,

and there is no room for sentiment whatsoever.

You know, Hemingway famously wrote that prose is "architecture, not interior decoration".

And that idea - that style -

came absolutely from his time as a journalist.

As the novel develops, Frederic and Catherine fall in love.

They escape the war. They live happily. She gets pregnant.

But then tragedy strikes.

"It seems she had one haemorrhage after another.

"They couldn't stop it.

"I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died.

"She was unconscious all the time,

"and it did not take her very long to die.

"After a while, I went out and left the hospital

"and walked back to the hotel in the rain."

And that's it.

That's the end of the entire novel.

She dies, he leaves, and it's raining.

And, you know, it's the simplicity

that makes it so unbelievably powerful.

But the truth is,

it wasn't simple at all.

In fact, it took Hemingway 47 attempts

to get that ending so perfect.

For another group of Americans,

Paris offered a more fundamental kind of freedom.

During the First World War, hundreds of African-American soldiers

had fought in the trenches defending France.

After the Armistice, many of them drifted to Paris

and fell in love with the City Of Lights.

Paris gave them opportunities,

and in return, they gave Paris jazz.

Today, the city still has a thriving jazz scene.

THEY PLAY JAZZ RIFF

I asked drummer John Betsch

why so many African-American jazz musicians

came to Paris after the war.

It's very difficult for Europeans to understand

the INSANITY of the racist climate of the United States back then.

To be able to walk down the street and be called "monsieur"

instead of something else, to be able to walk down the sidewalk

and not have to get off the sidewalk

when a white person came towards you.

Yeah, that was very attractive, very attractive.

Now in 1928, what was life like

for an average black American musician in the United States?

Segregation is really, really hard to understand in today's terms.

Separate toilets, separate water fountains.

You could be killed easily

and nobody would do a thing about it.

What an astonishing thing, back in the 1920s

in the United States, they were nothing.

They were treated like second-class citizens.

And here, they were heroes, they were superstars.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly right.

As African-Americans found freedom,

Paris seemed to embrace their music.

The French even had a name for their new obsession -

they called it negrophilie - "love of everything black".

Jazz nights sprang up all over town

and it wasn't long before a star was born.

JAZZ PIANO PLAYS

One of the greatest performing artists of the Jazz Age -

Josephine Baker.

Born into poverty in St Louis, Missouri in 1906,

Josephine Baker, like many dancers in Paris,

had escaped a difficult start in life.

Josephine Baker had an eventful youth.

She was married aged 13, but allegedly broke it off

with a bottle of beer to her husband's head.

Her second marriage, at 15, gave her the name Baker,

but she abandoned him to become a performer.

Her first job in Paris was advertised with the toe-curling line,

"Come and see 25 Negroes in their natural state."

Baker had no choice but to play along with it.

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

But once on stage,

she stole the show completely.

She sent up the club-owner's casual racism

with a performance that was uninhibited, knowing and cheeky.

Paris had never seen anyone dance

with such inventiveness and freedom as Josephine Baker -

they fell head over heels in love.

But for an uneducated girl from the segregated South,

her instant fame wasn't always easy to handle.

Josephine had thousands of admirers and dozens of lovers,

both men and women.

But Paris was a difficult, even painful place for her -

she was insecure, unsettled by her fame, and often lonely.

And to keep herself company, she kept a menagerie of animals

in her hotel suite, rabbits, a snake a parakeet, a pig called Albert,

and eventually, a tame cheetah that she gave a diamond-studded collar.

Baker's eccentricity may have been born from loneliness,

but Paris loved it

and embraced her as one of its star attractions -

she was allowed to set up her own club,

become a French citizen, and she even worked

for the French Resistance during the Second World War.

Josephine Baker had more freedom here in Paris

than in any other city in the world,

and while like many other black artists,

she faced racial stereotypes throughout her career,

it was here where she became one of the most original

and distinctive artists of the 1920s.

Baker's road to success had been long and hard-fought,

but the unique openness and tolerance

of Paris had made it possible.

And in return, she gave the city her loyalty and her love.

# J'ai deux amours

# Mon pays et Paris

# Par eux toujours

# Mon coeur est ravi. #

Voila!

CHEERING

If most people in Paris seemed to be living for the moment,

there were some who were more interested in the future.

Architects and artists who wanted to build a better world -

a modernist utopia.

And they took their inspiration

from the straight lines and smooth surfaces of the new machine age.

The most enigmatic of these dreamers

was a Dutch painter called Piet Mondrian.

Piet Mondrian was quiet, meticulous,

if you met him, you could even say boring.

But he saw himself as a man with a mission.

What he wanted to do was drag Paris, Europe,

the entire world, into a brave, new age.

And he thought the best way to do that was through painting.

After the First World War, Mondrian came to settle in Paris

where he lived and worked in a squalid building in Montparnasse.

But inside, his studio seemed to belong to a different world.

This is an exact replica of Mondrian's studio in Paris,

and just how it would have looked in 1928.

What a space!

Now, in the late 1920s, this was pretty much

the most famous studio in all of Europe.

It was a legendary place and it was Mondrian's pride and joy.

He planned every single square inch of this studio,

the colour patches, the yellows and blacks and greys and reds,

even the little mirrors were meticulously placed on the walls.

The furniture was carefully chosen

and Mondrian even painted his paint box and his matchbox,

so they didn't disrupt from the overall colour scheme.

Now, Mondrian was clearly an obsessive compulsive

when it came to his studio,

but that was for a reason, because this, for Mondrian,

wasn't just a place to live and work, this was his prototype

for the utopia he was trying to bring to the entire world.

By 1928, Mondrian had developed and mastered his great signature style.

And one of his finest works from the period is this one.

This little picture is quintessential Mondrian,

a square painting by an equally square man.

Now, it looks pretty simple,

but actually Mondrian spent months on it,

varying the thickness of the lines by fractions of millimetres,

and experimenting with the different colours in different positions,

until, eventually, he arrived at this.

And what he arrived at is, to my mind, perfect.

And it was MEANT to be perfect.

Because, for Mondrian, this painting was a portrait of a pure, timeless,

universal reality - a reality that underpinned everything we see.

And in order to reach that reality, to capture that reality,

what Mondrian has done is distilled everything in the world -

all its messiness, all its variety,

to the most basic forms.

And the most basic forms are for Mondrian are the vertical line,

the horizontal line, black, white and the three primary colours.

Now, why did he choose those?

Well, for him, those forms

were the ingredients of absolutely everything.

With the colours on that canvas, you can make every colour.

And with the forms on that canvas, you can make every form,

the horizons, the trees, the buildings, the streets,

masses, voids, even people.

So for Mondrian, this painting was, I suppose, the cosmos in shorthand,

the visual DNA of the entire universe.

But as Mondrian was painting an ideal world,

others were out building it.

In the 1920s, around all of Europe,

a new kind of architecture was emerging -

an architecture that shared the same utopian modernist spirit.

And if this powerful movement had any one ring-leader,

it was a young Swiss architect who called himself Le Corbusier.

In 1924, Le Corbusier founded

a small architectural practice in Paris with his cousin.

And it was here that he began to devise a new kind of home -

one that he was very happy to live in himself.

This is Le Corbusier's own apartment.

He lived and worked here for most of his life in Paris

and it really showcases his idea of the modern home.

For it couldn't be more different to the traditional high-ceilinged,

parquet-floored Parisian apartments.

Le Corbusier thought homes should be "machines for living in",

and this one is a showcase for his new design principles.

It's full of natural light -

one whole wall is almost entirely made of glass.

It's open plan. In fact, some of its most private rooms

don't have doors at all.

And every single feature is eminently functional.

He even built this bed just high enough so he could look out

at Paris when he was lying down.

For Le Corbusier, this apartment was peaceful, practical,

healthy, hygienic and beautiful.

And he wanted to make sure that others could live this life, too.

But Le Corbusier was not content

with changing one building at a time.

He wanted to transform whole cities

and Paris was first on his list.

He examined the city from every angle.

He watched its inhabitants eating, drinking and cavorting.

But where others had fallen in love with its beautiful buildings,

elegant boulevards and quaint little squares,

Le Corbusier saw a city on the verge of extinction.

"The city is crumbling

"and it cannot last much longer.

"It is unhealthy, antiquated, overcrowded.

"Surgery must be applied at the city's centre.

"And we must use the knife."

So, Le Corbusier set to work

planning a radical overhaul of Paris itself.

A plan so radical that it would transform the city completely.

So, this is the plan for Le Corbusier's new Paris.

And it WAS a new Paris,

because he basically hoped

to tear down much of the city centre.

A whole swathe of the right bank

which included parts of the Champs Elysees

were all going to be torn down

and he was going to replace it with this,

a network of 200-metre high skyscrapers,

with a huge superhighway connecting them all.

Le Corbusier's plan is startlingly modern.

Perhaps more modern than anything that came out of Paris in the 1920s.

Its sleek lines and hi-tech forms seem to belong

to the 21st century and beyond.

Only the cars betray its real age.

But his plan had a purpose.

Now this was partly an attempt to save Paris

but it was also an attempt to make the city cleaner,

healthier, more efficient - a city that was much more in tune

with the 20th century itself.

But all I can say is,

thank God no-one let him do it!

Le Corbusier may not have managed to change Paris,

but his dreams for modern architecture and modern life

have been a defining influence on the world we inhabit today.

And those dreams were fuelled

by Paris's audacious and optimistic spirit.

Paris in 1928 had been a truly exceptional place

where people forgot the past, dreamed of the future

and lived in the moment.

This was a place where the Surrealists

let their imaginations conquer reality.

Where painters, composers and dancers

found freedom to express themselves in dazzling ways.

And where Europe's most ambitious dreamers

fantasised about better worlds.

After a devastating war,

Paris had conjured up what was surely

the most exhilarating party of the century.

But 1928 would turn out to be the last hurrah.

In the following year,

the Roaring Twenties would be ended by one momentous event.

The Wall Street Crash was reported in Le Figaro

on Tuesday 29th October, 1929.

Now, it didn't make the front page.

It's actually this tiny little story on page three,

and that's because, to the French,

it must have seemed like a largely irrelevant

piece of international news.

But for the thousands of Americans who lived here in Paris,

it was catastrophic.

American expatriates read the news with dismay.

Their seemingly endless funds

had all but vanished and they queued up to leave the city.

Almost overnight, Paris changed.

The bars and cafes, once filled with carefree cosmopolitan customers,

were now empty.

But worse was to come.

In the 1930s, the Depression spread to Europe

and France endured a bitter and protracted recession.

In 1939, another world war started, and one year later,

Paris, the city of joy and liberty, fell to the Nazis.

Paris's reign as the world capital of the arts was arguably over,

but as it and the rest of Europe recovered from the Second World War,

another city, a very different city, would take its place.

MUSIC: "Rhapsody In Blue" by George Gershwin

In the next episode, we explore that city -

New York in 1951.