"Instead of calling them Sunday painters, which would be inaccurate, or popular painters, which doesn't say enough, they would be more justly named painters of the sacred heart because, full of simple and modest humor, they create their work from a devout and strong heart." - Wilhelm Uhde

The Dina Vierny Gallery presents from March 16 to June 18 the exhibition "Les Primitifs Modernes" where works by Bauchant, Bombois, Jean Eve, Racoff, and Vivin are exhibited.

Henri Rousseau, universally recognized as the emblematic figure of the Modern Primitives, now carries in his shadow a whole generation of somewhat forgotten artists. It is these artists that the gallery proposes to rediscover in this exhibition.

It should not be forgotten that these painters, like Bauchant, had a real influence on the course of modern art. Bauchant, for example, is praised by Le Corbusier: "Bauchant, painter-poet, because he has no aesthetic concern, no scruples, and that naivety that allows everything to be dared, manages wonderfully, with a craftsmanship that too often escapes artists of intellectual classes."

In parallel with the exhibition "Henri Rousseau – The Archaic Innocence" at the Musée d'Orsay, which highlights the most famous representative of these artists, the Dina Vierny Gallery aims to highlight the other great "painters of the sacred heart."

Bauchant, Bombois, and Vivin were exhibited alongside Séraphine and Henri Rousseau at Wilhelm Uhde's exhibitions in 1929 and 1932, where he ardently defended them, alongside Braque and Picasso.
The work of Jean Eve and Racoff remained more confidential, although their work offers an equally particular and innovative approach to painting, contrary to the formalist history of modern art.

They are all painters who have reconnected with sincerity, truth, and the inventions of the "image makers" who freely developed their expression until a culture of court and then mass culture imposed itself.
All these self-taught painters have, in their own way, destroyed the prejudice of clumsiness and questioned the pictorial tradition that dominated since the Renaissance. As Dina Vierny, who devoted a very large part of her life to defending the work of these artists, very aptly said, "they are first and foremost full-fledged artists who reconnect with great art, that of the Middle Ages, which prefers the realm of instinct to the universe of knowledge."