“It would not be a commonplace portrait at all, but a carefully composed picture, with very carefully arranged colors and lines. A rhythmic and angular pose. A decorative Félix, entering with his hat or a flower in his hand.”
With these words, in 1890, Paul Signac described to Félix Fénéon the extraordinary portrait he was dedicating to him. In it, Signac paid homage to Fénéon’s distinctive appearance, his generous but enigmatic personality, and his innovative approach to modernism.
This painting, a masterpiece in the Museum’s collection, will be the centerpiece of Félix Fénéon, the first exhibition dedicated to Fénéon (1861–1944). An art critic, editor, publisher, dealer, collector, and anarchist, Fénéon had a wide-ranging influence on the development of modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In the late 1880s, he played a key role in defining the new movement known as Neo-Impressionism, a term he coined himself, whose artists, including Signac, used tiny dabs of color that would mix in the eye of the viewer. Over the next five decades, he championed the careers of artists from Georges-Pierre Seurat and Signac to Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and Amedeo Modigliani.
He amassed a renowned collection of paintings by these artists and many others, and he was also a pioneering collector of art from Africa and Oceania. The exhibition will feature some 130 objects, including major works that Fénéon admired, championed, and collected, as well as contemporary photographs, letters, and publications that trace key chapters in his biography. Together these works reveal the profound and lasting legacy of Fénéon’s keen eye and bold, forward-looking vision.
“The art world is the same as the rest of the world,” says British artist, writer, and punk-rocker Billy Childish. “What it requires is new, more, and now.” Childish has worked defiantly and prolifically outside of the mainstream since his expulsion from art school in the early 1980s. To the polymath—whose paintings, poems, novels, and music draw heavily from his autobiography—art is a deeply personal experience that should not rely on external validation, whether from critics or audiences. From his painting studio located on a historic dockyard in Kent, United Kingdom, Childish speaks passionately about the freedom that comes with self-validation. When asked about his perspective on the future of art, he demurs. “People think we’re continually ascending a mountain to success or to enlightenment,” he says. “It’s here and now and this is it.”
‘We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting,’ wrote William Wordsworth
When, in 1840 or so, a well-meaning houseguest called Margaret Gillies made a drawing of the 70-year old Mrs Wordsworth, everyone agreed that it was an excellent likeness; but her kind act was rewarded with a testy and somewhat ungracious sonnet from the sitter’s husband. He preferred to visualise Mary in her salad days: ‘’tis a fruitless task to paint for me, / Who, yielding not to changes Time has made, / By the habitual light of memory see / Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade, / And smiles that from their birth-place ne’er shall flee / Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be’.
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