Vincent van Gogh's life and work are so intertwined that it is hardly possible to observe one without thinking of the other. Van Gogh has indeed become the incarnation of the suffering, misunderstood martyr of modern art, the emblem of the artist as an outsider. An article, published in 1890, gave details about van Gogh's illness. The author of the article saw the painter as "a terrible and demented genius, often sublime, sometimes grotesque, always...

In his own words, Paul Gauguin "painted and dremed at the same time." Yet he forecast, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, much of what is basic to twentieth-century art. Painted subjectively, from what he remembered rather than from what he saw before him, much of Gauguin's work, in its simple lines and rich color, has a "primitive" look. Indeed, his wanderer's life took him to the coast of Brittany and to the Caribbean isle of Martinique,...