Paris The Luminous Years

In the early decades of the 20th century, a storm of modernism swept through the art worlds of the West, uprooting centuries of tradition in the visual arts, music, literature, dance, theater and beyond. The epicenter of this storm was Paris, France.

Ernest Hemingway’s 1923 passport

PBS

PARIS THE LUMINOUS YEARS tells the story of Paris from an unprecedented point of view, not as the familiar, glamorous backdrop for the revolutions that exploded there, but as active protagonist, catalyst and midwife to modernity.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce with early reviews of Ulysses, 1922.

PBS

The film spotlights now-famous key figures in the art world’s first international avant-garde, including Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Igor Stravinsky, Ernest Hemingway, Serge Diaghilev, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland, Josephine Baker, Marcel Duchamp, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Beach, Janet Flanner and many more, as they recount their individual stories of why they came to Paris, whom they met, what they made there, and how being in Paris transformed them and their work.

Paris The Luminous Years, Monday at 9 p.m. on PBS-HD 6.