PARIS — It’s always wise to doubt those who praise an art exhibition as “groundbreaking”: a promise of false dawns, a cliché best left to the marketing teams. But at the Pompidou Center, the most important exhibition of the Parisian season really does feel like it’s unearthed something new . It rewrites the history of modern art by digging deeper than ever before, and scatters the art of the 20th century with shards of primordial basalt and bone.

So don your hard hat, grip your pickax, and descend into “Préhistoire” (“Prehistory”), a show of stunning ambition that stretches the last 100-odd years of European and American art to a geological time scale. It takes the standard definition of modernity — understood to mean progress, science, rationalism, acceleration and alienation — and, without junking it, reveals that modernity also has a flip side that extends deep into the earth .

The exhibition proposes that prehistory, a concept invented in the late-19th century that flowered in the years around 1900, offered artists and intellectuals a new experience of time, one that felt thicker and more material than the unmoored present we still call modern. Becoming modern, “Préhistoire” proposes, meant both speeding up and slowing down, and learning from an age before human sovereignty over time and the planet.