Drawing on first-hand interviews, acclaimed art historian Martin Gayford, in conversation with award-winning film director Hannah Rothschild, examines the interwoven lives of artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and David Hockney, and the teachers and contemporaries, numbering David Bomberg and Jackson Pollock, who influenced them in their quest to explore the boundaries of art, always posting the question, ‘what can painting do?’