Art: Prophets of an Archaic Past

In Toronto, a major exhibition of Van Gogh and cloisonism

When did modern art begin? It is impossible to fix a date; the roots are too tangled in the subsoil of the 19th century. But one can point to some crucial events of its growth. One of them happened in France in the late 1880s, within a group of painters—some now familiar to us as secular saints or movie heroes, others still relatively ill-known —who kept venturing out of Paris toward more "primitive" places. Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard ranged among the megaliths, the cold...

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