From the 20th to the 21st century includes thirteen texts on European artists and art movements. The first six deal with practices from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1960s traceable to the work of the Italian Futurists, Matisse, Léger, Dalí, Hartung, Tàpies and Brus, while the remaining seven deal with the work of contemporary artists in Spain. (José Álvaro Perdices), Portugal (Miguel Palma, Vasco Araújo), France (Xavier Veilhan), Belgium (Jan de Cock), Hungary (Orschi Drozdik) and Germany (Andy Hope 1930). This plural range of themes, periods and materials acquires unity thanks to the author's attention to the way in which the aforementioned creators have received and negotiated the stories –both social and aesthetic– that they have inherited and with which they live and work.

The book opens with an examination of a key moment, around 1910, when the futurists' interest in the physical construction and social production of the modern city began to be overshadowed by new issues related to the representation of "mental states". », the simultaneous expression of interior and exterior points of view, and the formal articulation of haste and speed, color and light. Welchman argues that the story is held hostage to modern compositionality and the facial objectifications of Matisse and Léger; that for Dalí it is an obscure and impossible object, while in the densely material semi-abstractions of Tàpies history is stratified with allegory, complicity and myth. Drozdik connects enlightened science and twentieth-century socialism with female subjectivity, while Veilhan evokes a museum of 'unnatural history', and De Cock y Perdices different systems of historical camouflage. Palma commits himself once again to the driving forces of the machine; Araújo, with the historical codification, and Andy Hope 1930, with a surprising re-arbitration of the omniverse of comics and the historical moment that he adopted for his name. The result of such a particular analysis is a novel and clarifying tour of the European art scene from the first avant-gardes to the present day.