"Permit me to be scared stiff!" Paul Klee wrote when he saw Van Gogh's paintings for the first time in Munich in 1908. "This is a brain suffering under the burning of a star." Klee's feverish response to Van Gogh was typical of the early 20^th-century German and Austrian painters known as Expressionists. Coined in 1910, the term Expressionist was meant to distinguish artists who painted their emotional response to the world rather than merely their sense impressions of it. Van Gogh's bright colors and bold brushwork, as in this self-portrait painted the year before he shot himself at age 37, seemed like one of the double doors (Cézanne was the other) through which modern art must pass. If, as Virginia Woolf said, "in or about December 1910 human nature changed"—she was referring to an exhibition of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and other Post-Impressionist painters, organized by her friend Roger Fry in London—we can actually see that shift by looking at Van Gogh's paintings and the art they inspired.