He was tall, thin, and very elegant.
He had this wispy little goatee.
And that's why people compared him to Uncle Sam.
He was an art critic, journalist, he was a publisher.
And also, an anarchist.
He was a clerk at the ministry of war.
That was his day job,
his other job; he plunged himself into the burgeoning art and literary
world of Paris.
In the 1890's there was a very special atmosphere in Paris.
There were extraordinary cultural achievements,
but it was also a time of incredible economic
and social hardship.
Anarchism was really a workers movement
for recognition of very bad living and working conditions.
Smoke stacks belching toxic chemicals, and people had to live sort of in the shadow.
And so the anarchists like Fénéon really wanted to overthrow all of those institutions
that perpetuated this great divide between the haves and have-nots.
Fénéon started writing about paintings he liked.
Fénéon saw this canvas which was hung in an exhibition but near the bar.
When Fénéon saw it he said "shock to his whole system".
Rather than mixing the colors on the palette he put dots of color
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 color theories.
Contrasting colors when places next to each other create a visual
or even psychological effect.
Fénéon was the one who coined the term Neo-Impressionism.
All the artists that belonged to this 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.
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 eventually acquitted.
That crime has never been solved.
Near his desk at the war office, they found six detonators and material to make a bomb.
Fénéon was fired from le ministere des armées where he was working
and so he had to start a new life.
In the 20th century, he became an art dealer which was surprising to many of his anarchist
friends, that he would join like the commercial side of the art world.
I think it was just another way that he could support the artists that he believed in.
He gave Matisse his first contract and then in 1912 he have the Italian futurists their
first exhibition in Paris, allowing them to explode into the European avant-garde.
Fénéon had a huge African art collection, and was very inspired by the different artistic
vision that they offered.
Fénéon launched the first inquiry into the appropriate contexts for these works.
And he said, "should they be admitted to the Louvre?"
Seurat,
Signac,
Matisse,
Modigliani.
All of these figures we probably would not know in the same way
if it were not for Félix Fénéon.
I'm not sure that he had eyes for what the public would like.
But he had eyes for what was going to be very important in the coming years.