The upheaval that took place in the public consciousness after the First World War opens a new cultural era and at the same time ends the European "beautiful era". This time was marked by the fading of faith in progress, the reorientation of attention from the knowability of things to their existence, and the crisis of historicism as the main explanatory principle of the 19th century. All these trends, together with the rapid development of science and new visual media - photography, cinema, illustrated newspapers and advertising - give rise to the concept of "visual culture".Shifting attention from the temporal continuity of specific "stories" to The "spatial", discontinuous correlation of various visual practices and their artifacts has led, on the one hand, to the weakening of the idea of the autonomy of art, and, on the other hand, to the flourishing of interdisciplinary methods for its study. The central problem in this change of emphasis was the problem of visual topology. Together with it, studies of various kinds of "places", "locuses", "distances", "perspectives", spatial (optical) illusions in works of art and other visual artifacts, as well as interest in the places of stay and the variety of types of material embodiment of visual images. New research trends that make themselves felt already in the mid-late 1920s give rise to a new retro perspective - in other words, form a different vision of one's own genealogy. This leads to the creation of the original concept of the birth of modernity () as the starting point for the emergence of modern, i.e. characteristic of post-war Europe, visual culture.This publication includes texts by Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Krakauer, Roberto Calasso, Rosalind Krauss and John Berger, who help to reveal the context of the formation of visual culture of the 19th–20th centuries.