In this richly illustrated book, Romy Golan explores murals, whether painting, photography, tapestry, etc. In Europe from the 1920s to the 1950s. Starting with the installation of Monet's Nymphéas at the Orangerie, she finished with the huge tapestries of Le Corbusier for the Chandigarh site in India. Between the two, she paints a broad portrait of what she sees as the paradox of murals, which are not sure to really be part of the walls and ironic replay the contrast, crucial in the discourse on the architecture, between the "good" or the integrated, and the "bad" or pure complementary ornament. The monumental wall painting was a focal point of the critical debate of the twentieth century: many artists and critics saw it as a corrective to the plagues of pictorial modernism, the fragmentation of the image by the cubists, an antidote to the commodification of painting from easel to the loss of the sense of the public finality of art, to the erosion of the aura and more generally to the alienation of man in the modern condition. Others, artists and critics alike, saw very well that wall painting offered no solution to any of these problems and that a return to the wall format as it existed in the premodern world would be an anachronistic and futile posture - d where the hesitant, self-discrediting character of the works discussed in this book. To show us this, Romy Golan puts objects as strange as mosaics designed to be dismantled, paintings that look like large photographs, tapestries that serve as portable wool walls. It is true that today, murals (apart from those found in the street) have few attractions and evoke an obsolete art, or so politically connoted and a Now gone. In short, the mural does not interest many people, not to mention the mosaic, tapestry, photomural. It was without counting the reading of this work which puts all the mural art in its artistic, political, social context in a great fresco which covers in particular France, Italy, Germany and the USSR. Romy Golan shows that the uncertain relationship of these objects to the wall is symptomatic dilemmas that troubled the art, artists and architects of Europe in the heart of the twentieth century.