Evoking social and political environments, philosophical and scientific thought, biographies and places, Pernes gives life and meaning to images in a discourse that involves today's reader as much as the audience of the first History of Modern Art course he conducted in Serralves in 1997. De Olympia from Manet to Picasso's Guernica, Pernes traces the paths taken by the first vanguards in the realization of their "democratic vocation".

“This course doesn't let you know much about art history. If anything, it will leave you with the appetite, if I can do that, to study art history seriously” (Fernando Pernes).

Fernando Pernes, the first artistic director of the Serralves Foundation between 1987 and 1996, was a leading figure in art criticism in Portugal. He distinguished himself by his qualities as a pedagogue, promoter of modern and contemporary art and was one of the exhibition programmers most attentive to the new Portuguese artists who started to appear in the late 1960s.