Historical Context

 

Félix Fénéon was a French art and literary critic, dealer, and collector. The little caricature by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec depicts him as strange person with this wispy little goatee. He was tall, thin and elegant. He was born in Turin, raised in Burgundy and arrived in Paris after he was chosen for a job at an office in the Ministry of War. There he worked as a clerk for 13 years and eventually rose to a chief clerk and was considered a model employee. 

 

Around the same time was the period of his highest activity as an art critic, particularly between 1880s and 1890s. He wrote for various magazines and became especially known as a champion of Georges Seurat. His most famous piece of writing is an exhibition review titled ‘the impressionists in 1886’ where he coined the term Neo-Impressionism. The opening words refer to Impressionism are ‘heroic’ because it marked a stylistic shift in art but also he refers, I think, to this hope for egalitarian world that he thought could be born through art.

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Neo-Impressionism is a movement in French painting—both a development from Impressionism and a reaction against it—in which the Impressionist approach to depicting light and colour was made more rational and scientific. Georges Seurat was the founder of the movement. His friend Paul Signac was its main theoretician, and Camille Pissarro was briefly a leading adherent. All three showed Neo-Impressionist pictures at the final Impressionist exhibition in 1886.

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Seurat and Signac

 

The theoretical basis of Neo-Impressionism was divisionism, with its associated technique of pointillism—the use of dots of pure colour applied in such a way that when seen from an appropriate distance they achieve a maximum of luminosity. In each painting the dots were of a uniform size, chosen to harmonise with the scale of the work. In Seurat's paintings, this approach combined solidity and clarity of form with a vibrating intensity of light.

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This egalitarianism perhaps was present in the harmony achieved through coloured dots like in pointillism. Rather than mixing the colours on the palette he put dots of colour that would combine in the viewers eye. So that when you would step back it would create this harmonious whole. This process was based on scientific colour theories. Contrasting colours when places next to each other create a visual or even psychological effect.

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This Neo-Impressionist portrait of Fénéon emphasizes collector’s role in validating the symbolism of colour cherished by the “new” Impressionists. He holds a flower in his extended hand, recalling portraits of the Mughal rulers of India, who carry a blossom for their own contemplation. Here, however, the flower is proffered to someone beyond the frame, perhaps in homage.

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Anarchism

 

In the 1890's there was a very special atmosphere in Paris. For many it was a time of incredible economic and social hardship. Anarchism as a movement arose in response to bad living and working conditions of workers like exposure to toxic chemicals. Feneon was an avid anarchist. The idea was to overthrow institutions that were perpetuating the divide between rich and poor. As editors or a magazine Feneon and Chevrier presented their view for a total revision of the Third Republic in 1885. They wrote: “We are living in strange times. The people have lost their incentive, enthusiasm is snuffed out, hope is gone. A kind of deadening torpor, weariness or cowardice, weighs on public opinion, which seems no longer to exist…” 

 

10 years later in 1894 police found six detonators and material to make a bomb Near his desk at the war office. Fénéon was accused to have put a bomb on the window of a restaurant. He was imprisoned for more than three months, but he was released.

 

All the artists that belonged to the Neo-Impressinist movement were anarchists. Paul Signac's painting "The time of harmony" the original name of that painting was "The time of anarchy" meaning that the harmony and anarchy eventually are the same. Signac changed the title because there was a slew of anarchist bombings throughout Paris. Feneon and Neo-Impressionists believed that art could play a fundamental role in the formation of a more harmonious, egalitarian world. 

A few years later Paul Signac painted The Demolition Worker. Here, he depicts demolition workers tearing down the edifice of the old order and an antiquated social structure as a new dawn rises behind them.

 

Art criticism 

 

About a year before the incident in 1893 he stopped writing art criticism. Once he was fired from the Ministry of War he went onto become an editor of the literary journal La Revue blanche. There he featured Debussy as his music critic and published Marcel Proust.  Betting on numerous now-infamous artists and writers at the time like Marcel Proust, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, became his defining characteristic.

Collecting practice and Influence

 

from 1906 to 1925 he was a director of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, where he promoted the work of various avant-garde artists. Regardless of public opinion he curated the first and totally sensational exhibition on Italian Futurism which caused a scandal in 1912. The exhibition drew huge crowds and established the croup as an important modernist force. 

Carrà created this painting, for example, to commemorate the killing of an Italian anarchist, Angelo Galli, during a strike in Milan in 1904. Galli’s funeral turned violent when police refused to let mourning anarchists enter the cemetery.

 

And when working for the art gallery Bernheim-Jeune from 1906 until 1924, he contributed significantly to the very successful commercial career of Henri Matisse. Fénéon purchased at least eight paintings by Matisse (French, 1869–1954) for his personal collection, including Henri Matisse. Interior with a Young Girl (Girl Reading). 1905–06. Oil on canvas. 

While the job may have initially seemed at odds with Fénéon’s anti-capitalist anarchism, for him it was another way of affirming his commitment to modern painting.

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African art

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Fénéon was an Early Tribal Art collector. He was also one of the first European collectors of art from Oceania, and the Americas but mostly from Africa. Researchers debate whether he began collecting them in 1904 or only in 1919. But what is of the absolute significance is that he perceived the wooden artefacts brought back from the colonies not as exotic curiosities nor as objects for ethnographic studies, but as artworks in their own right, which stemmed from his anarchist anticolonialism.

 

Fénéon disagreed with the common terms such as ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ arts. Instead he favoured the term ‘far-reaching arts’. In 1920, he published an inquiry in which he asked 20 artists, critics, ethnographers and colonial officers to respond to the question: ‘Will art from remote places be admitted to the Louvre?’ 

In 1935, Feneon was a big lender to New York’s MoMA show titled ‘African Negro Art’.

 

His collection

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At the end of his life, Fénéon’s collection was comprised of over 1,200 pieces, a third of which was dedicated to these ‘remote arts’. Throughout his life, Fénéon would lend a great deal to exhibitions and shows, contributing to the exposure and recognition of the artistic genres he supported. He later in life became a commonist and disliked the reactionary taste of the French museums, considered leaving his modernist art to the Soviet people, until the German Soviet pact of 1939. After his death, his entire collection was auctioned.

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Fénéon was not highly prosperous, and so it would be instructive to learn how much he paid, for example, for the 53 paintings and 180 drawings by Seurat that were in his collection at one point or another, many of which are now in MoMA or other major museums.  

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For example, Following Modigliani death at the age of 35, Fénéon began exhibiting his work at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and purchased his paintings for his private collection, ultimately owning at least eight examples. Toward the end of his life, in need of funds for medical bills, Fénéon sold selected works to pay for medical treatment , including (Amedeo Modigliani. Jeanne Hébuterne with Yellow Sweater. 1918–19. Oil on canvas) to the American collector Solomon R. Guggenheim.

 

What he thougt of himself

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There’s a lot that we don’t know because just before he died, he destroyed his papers. Fénéon chose to remain in the shadows. Even in his own era he kept himself behind the scenes. During his lifetime he even refused offers to collect his writings in book form. He reply to one of such offers as follows: ‘I aspire only to silence.’ So he likely wouldn’t like my presentation.

 

Despite his preference to work invisibly, his influence was in fact so wide that he became known as the éminence grise of the Paris in the literary and art worlds, the shadowy "hidden power" whose decisions helped form the taste and values of a whole generation. He did not avoid being portrayed by artists and writers who knew him. Yet He spoke of himself as a simple “hyphen” between the artist and the public.

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In the same way that a portrait connects the viewer to the artist’s subject. The figure is absent, yet the portrait meets the viewer on shared ground. It can thus also be said to function as a “hyphen.” (The French term, trait d’union, says it better: “a connecting [por] trait.”) In fact, the anarchist ideal that Fénéon espoused carried this notion yet further: the interconnectedness of all beings.

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Feneon’s Legacy

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Seurat, Signac, Matisse, Modigliani. All of these figures we probably would not know in the same way if it were not for Félix Fénéon. Fénéon played a key role in the careers of leading artists from Georges-Pierre Seurat and Paul Signac to Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse.

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Feneon's collection was unique for its equal treatment of both Western and non-Western art. Even though As an organised movement Neo-Impressionism was short-lived, but it had a significant influence on several major artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, notably Gauguin, van Gogh, and Matisse, who worked with Signac and another Neo-Impressionist.

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Feneon defended the arts and condemned banality. When these artists were being criticised and dismissed, Fénéon promoted their ideas and exhibited their works. Fénéon did that through organising many exhibitions, sales, and bequests that helped secure the artist’s legacy as a pioneer of modern art.