This essay develops, up to the field that, not without misunderstandings, is called Contemporaneity, the investigation begun by the author with the book O Plano de Imagem (1996), whose purpose was to elaborate an "archeology of modernity". It starts from an anti-formalist conception of Modernism, which allows a critical reinterpretation of the legacies of Picasso, Duchamp or Malevich, as well as the place of some European artists and movements of the 60s — English Pop, Beuys, Arte Povera — to highlight the that differentiates or opposes them to the context of American art in the same period (Warhol, Minimalism, Conceptual Art).