Félix Fénéon

The anarchist, critic, curator, and collector Félix Fénéon was a pioneering advocate of art and literature in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His personal collection reflected key developments in avant-garde art that he chronicled within his art criticism. It included impressionist paintings by Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro; neoimpressionist and pointillist paintings by Georges Seurat and Paul Signac; Fauve masterpieces by André Derain and Henri Matisse; Cubist, Dada, and Futurist works; and objects from Africa, the Americas, and Oceania.

Born in Italy and raised in France, Fénéon moved to Paris after completing his studies in 1880. An avowed anarchist, Fénéon paradoxically supported himself as a senior clerk in the War Office from 1881 to 1894 while he frequented the weekly salon meetings of symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, moved in bohemian circles in the cafés of Montmartre, and gained renown as an art critic. During this period, he edited the experimental poetry of the Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Lucien Ducasse), Mallarmé, and Arthur Rimbaud.

In his capacity as a critic, Fénéon helped to shape a new style of art criticism that emerged at the turn of the century, channeling the experimental methods of the symbolist poetry and neoimpressionist art that he promoted. He appeared as a subject in several noted paintings and portraits by his artist friends, including Maximilien Luce, Signac, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Edouard Vuillard. He was an editor and contributor to La Revue Blanche and, in 1883, founded La Revue Indépendante, in which he published the poetry of Paul Verlaine. In 1886, he published his only monograph, Les Impressionistes, in which he assembled reviews of impressionist exhibitions of the 1880s, celebrated the new spirit of Seurat’s and Signac’s neoimpressionist style, and described pointillist aims and techniques. After his dismissal as a civil servant due to his political affiliations, Fénéon was implicated in and subsequently acquitted of antigovernment conspiracy in the “Trial of Thirty,” which highlighted the repressive regulation of the press in the Third Republic. Nonetheless, he continued to write for several independent journals and prominent dailies, including Le Figaro and, after 1906, Le Matin, in which he anonymously published a regular fait divers column entitled “News in Three Lines.”

In 1900, he organized the first retrospective of Seurat’s work, which was held at the offices of the Revue Blanche, having previously helped to inventory the contents of the artist’s studio following his death in 1891. From 1906 to 1925, Fénéon served as director of the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, where he continued to promote the work of Seurat and Signac, and held the first exhibition of Futurist art in Paris in 1912. During this time, he published several interviews with important collectors in the gallery’s journal, Le Bulletin de la Vie Artistique, including Isaac de Camondo (1919), Paul Durand-Ruel (1919), Ivan Morosoff (1920), Raymond Koechlin (1921), and Jacques Doucet (1921).

In 1941, Fénéon sold several important works from his collection at the Hôtel Drouot, including fifteen works on paper and nine paintings by Seurat. Following his death, his entire collection was sold there in four landmark sales in the spring and summer of 1947. The first two sales, which included paintings and works on paper, highlighted the scope of his interest in avant-garde art, including works by Derain, Max Ernst, Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Seurat, Signac, and other postimpressionist and Cubist artists. The third and fourth sales included Fénéon’s important collection of ethnographic objects from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. His prodigious acquisitions of such works throughout his life reflected his long-held conviction that non-Western art be introduced into the Louvre, which he had first espoused in his 1920 article “Seront-ils admis au Louvre?” (“Will they be admitted into the Louvre?”), published in Le Bulletin de la Vie Artistique. Using part of the proceeds from the sale, his widow, Fanny, established the Fénéon Prize in 1949 to support young writers and artists, an award still administered today by the Universités de Paris.