Late 20th century art can be characterized, in part, by the search for origins. This is something relatively new. Avant-garde artists at the beginning of this century believed they were writing the last page of an evolving history of art – and the first page of a new one – in which successive periods in art had produced an uninterrupted sequence of attempts to represent nature. When Wölfflin proposed a synthetic reading of the history of art, he was setting the foundation for a visual and ultimately abstract approach that could summarize all previous experiences...[+]