"In this book, I aimed to explain to what extent and through which processes the visual arts have contributed to the formation of the ideology and cultural system of contemporary society and have directly and autonomously participated in the tensions, contradictions, and crises of our time.

Unable to separate the history of art from political and economic history as well as from the history of science and to outline the general framework of the history of the last two centuries, I structured my study on two levels, or rather according to two different scales of size: on the one hand, in a series of chapters, I described and developed briefly the most important poetic movements, thereby demonstrating how the great cultural themes of the last two centuries are identified and shaped in art, while attempting to provide sufficient illustrative documentation; and on the other hand, the pages with the analysis of the works aim not only to showcase the qualitative value of the works selected from the most significant, but to enable the reader to follow the processes through which the most prominent contemporary artists have contributed, with their own autonomous research in their own particular field, to the formation of culture." J.K. Argan

Continuing the great work of his mentor, Achille Bonito Oliva completes the history of art from 1970 to the present day.