Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890 by Paul Signac. Collection: Museum of Modern Art.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has forced museums and art galleries everywhere to close their doors for months on end, leaving vast troves of art hanging, unseen, in empty galleries. Major exhibitions that took years of planning and preparation, with works of art on loan from institutions around the world, were abruptly shuttered or postponed. One of the exhibits affected by these closures was Félix Fénéon: The Artist and the Avant-Garde, a major retrospective originally scheduled to run from March 22 through July 22, 2020, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fénéon was a fascinating figure from the demimonde of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Paris. An anarchist, art critic, and influential art dealer, Fénéon also wrote faits divers for Le Matin. These brief summaries of recent accidents, crimes and scandals read like plot summaries for noir novels (they were later collected and published by New York Review Books as Novels in Three Lines, reviewed in Geist 69). MoMA’s Fénéon exhibition re-opened in late August of 2020 with sharply limited attendance, but travel restrictions made it inaccessible to all but a few lucky New Yorkers. Fortunately, the exhibition catalogue, a weighty and lavishly illustrated coffee table book, makes a pretty decent substitute. With reproductions from Fénéon’s personal art collection, and essays on “Fénéon’s Art Criticism” and on his relationships with artists such as Matisse, Seurat and Signac, the catalogue’s most absorbing section is the one exploring Fénéon’s involvement with the anarchist movement. In 1894 Fénéon was one of thirty suspects arrested in connection with an anarchist bombing of the restaurant at the Hôtel Foyot. “At the trial, Fénéon famously and successfully pitted his wit against the prosecutor, brilliantly deploying logic while avoiding a discussion of the charges. His exchanges with the court were reported in the press. […] Despite the fact that detonators were found in his possession, the court acquitted Fénéon.”
