The dual aim of this work is to acquaint readers with the writings of certain artists – from the most famous to the most obscure – and to offer readers a history of 20th-century art.
While relying the various known literary forms (journal, essay, correspondence, etc.), these writings rarely studied as a whole nonetheless constitute a distinctly separate group within the body of art texts. Inasmuch as they are characterised by the voices of authors whose preferred means of expression, a priori, is not verbal language, they allow readers to penetrate the intimate realm of a "thought in progress."
This essay sheds light on how artists from 1900 to the present have perceived art and the world – a perception which can never be reduced to that of an historian, an aesthetician, or a critic.

Anna Guilló, a visual artist and teacher-researcher in Plastic Arts and Art Sciences at Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, is also editor of the review La Voix du regard.