If the Vienna of the Belle Époque has been presented in three movements – the Oedipal rebellion of the Secession in pursuit of naked truth, the stripping-down of ornament in architecture, and the sensual and irrational paroxysm of expressionism – so will the story of Paris of the interbellum period be told in successive episodes: the return to order after World War I, the turbulence of the 1930s with surrealism in a key role, and goings-on in the German-occupied French capital during World War II. And if the urban fabric of the Vienna that lived an extraordinary artistic and intellectual heyday had been substantially completed by 1900, the same can be said of Paris, because the cities we visit today are not all that different, in its central areas, from the ones that were the hubs of the artists of the Secession and those of surrealism...

‘París 1918-1945: Picasso, Le Corbusier, Breton’ at Fundación March[+]