Still life is an art form which gives us valuable insights into changes of mentality and philosophy. Each still life is emblematic of a specific time and place and of a certain metaphysical perspective. This overview features sixty works from antiquity to the present and analyzes the history and significance of each.

«This book on the art of the twentieth century is published almost ten years after the end of the so-called «short century»—which, in terms of art, was anything but short—and is a valuable tool for reflection. The author has placed a series of works in sequence, accompanied by easy to understand critical commentary. With concise introductions devoted to every significant art movement and more than 400 color illustrations, this volume enables the reader to become familiar with the fascinating and complex world of contemporary art from futurism to pop-art, dada to conceptual. Presented are some of the most famous artists of the twentieth-century—from Arp to Brancusi, Bacon to Basquiat, Gris to Koons, Gaudi to Schnabel, Warhol to Grant Wood—and their greatest masterworks—never before have they been so accessible as they are in this format.»

Paris, February 1909. An article by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Martinetti appears in Le Figaro. It is the Manifesto of Futurism, the movement that expressed concepts of movement and speed through simultaneous visions and dynamic lines and interpreted in an all-embracing way the new collective myth of modernity.

A revolutionary movement, founded in 1924 by André Breton, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams. The surrealist circle was made up of many great artists, including Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Joan Miró, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalí.

Post-Impressionism is a movement in France that represented both an extension of Impressionism and a rejection of that styles inherent limitations. The term Post-Impressionism was coined by the English art critic Roger Fry for the work of such late 19th-century painters as Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others. Most of these painters began as Impressionists; each of them abandoned the style, however, to form his own highly personal art. Impressionism was based, in its strictest sense, on the objective recording of nature in terms of the fugitive effects of colour and light.The Post-Impressionists rejected this limited aim in favour of more ambitious expression, admitting their debt, however, to the pure, brilliant colours of Impressionism, its freedom from traditional subject matter, and its technique of defining form with short brushstrokes of broken colour. The work of these painters formed a basis for several contemporary trends and for early 20th-century modernism.

Trompe-l'oeil, a French term meaning to trick, the eye, describes a painting that deceives the spectator into thinking that the objects in it are real, not merely represented. To successfully fool the eye of the viewer, trompe-l'oeil artists choose objects, situations and compositional devices using as little depth as possible. A heightened form of illusionism, the art of trompe-l'oeil flourished from the Renaissance onward. The discovery of perspective in fifteenth-century Italy and advancements in the science of optics in the seventeenth-century Netherlands enabled artists to render objects and spaces with eye-fooling exactitude. Both witty and serious, trompe-l'oeil is a game artists play with spectators to raise questions about the nature of art and perception.