In March 2019, Luis Fernández-Galiano gave a series of lectures at the Fundación March that intended to condense the culture of the 20th century in four episodes with four cities as protagonists: a series that gathered large audiences and since conti

Luis Fernández-Galiano   This monograph collects the four lectures given at Madrid’s Fundación Juan March between 5 and 14 March of 2019. The series, ‘Four Cities: Episodes in the Cultural History of the 20th Century in the West,’ gathered a large audience, which multiplied

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If we could sum up fin-de-siècle Vienna with an image, it would be the Nuda Veritas that Gustav Klimt painted in 1899, a representation of the naked truth that the members of the Secession chose as an emblem. Defenders of a new way of creating and in

Luis Fernández-Galiano   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

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If Paris found itself at the close of the war caught between the euphoria of the city’s liberation by the American army and the trauma of the horror of the Holocaust, the United States saw the termination of hostilities under the dark shadow of the n

Luis Fernández-Galiano   If the gilded moment of Vienna ended with World War I and the artistic protagonism of Paris with World War II, the cultural scene of New York blurred from 1968 on. A good number of the abstract expressionists had died young. Peggy Guggenheim had retu