OPUS 217. AGAINST THE ENAMEL OF A BACKGROUND RHYTHMIC WITH BEATS AND ANGLES, TONES, AND TINTS, PORTRAIT OF M. FÉLIX FÉNÉON IN 1890
PAUL SIGNAC, 1890
Okay. See the elegant man in profile, holding out a little flower? A few years after this, he plants a bomb in a Paris restaurant. That's Félix Fénéon. By day, a chief clerk at the French War Ministry. Also an anarchist. Also, somehow, the most important art critic in Paris. He coins the word Neo-Impressionism. He champions Seurat and Signac when everyone else thinks the whole little-dots business is a headache. You have to admit, the man has range. It's 1894. A bomb goes off at a restaurant called Foyot. The police search his office at the War Ministry and, get this, find detonators in his desk. So they put him on trial with a roomful of other anarchists. And he is delightful about it. The judge says he'd been spotted talking to a known anarchist behind a gas lamp. And Fénéon goes, tell me, your honor, which side of a gas lamp is its behind? The jury loves him. Acquitted. Of course. And then he goes right back to writing about painting. That is who Signac is painting. And look how he does it. Fénéon in strict profile, top hat and cane in one hand, the flower held out in the other, not even looking at it. While behind him the entire universe detonates. Spirals, stars, rainbow bands, a pinwheel of color spinning straight out of his fingertips. The bomber, standing there, not flinching, while the whole world goes off behind him. And that universe he's so calm in front of? Signac didn't invent it. He copied it off a Japanese print he owned, a pattern from a kimono. The wildest thing in the painting is wallpaper.