The book by Paola Utevska (1911–2001) and Dmytro Gorbachev (b. 1937) presents a series of essays in which the vicissitudes of the development of Ukrainian art of the 11th - mid-20th centuries are highlighted in chronological order in the person of its most interesting representatives, i.e. from Olimpius Pecherskyi to Kazimir Malevich, the works of which are kept mainly in museums of Ukraine or decorate Ukrainian cities.
A significant temporal range made it possible to concisely highlight the processes of formation of the main artistic directions and techniques based on the presentation of the creative product of such masters as: Andriychyna Mnogoghrishny, Hryhoriy and Dmytro Levytskyi, Olympii Halyk, Volodymyr Borovykovskyi, Taras Shevchenko, Petro Levchenko and Serhii Vasylkivskyi, Mykola Pymonenko and Oleksandr Murashko, Georgy Narbut and Oleksandra Ekster, Oleksandr Bogomazov and Fedir Krychevskyi, Anatol Petrytskyi, David Burlyuk, Oleksandr Arkhipenko.
The book is a kind of short history of Ukrainian visual art, as it comprehensively touches on all its types - from architecture to book graphics.
