This fantastical portrait by Paul Signac has an extremely long title and a very strange subject. Called “Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890”—the portrait casts its sitter as a sort of circus ringleader. A tall, goat-bearded man with short hair and impossibly high cheekbones holds a delicate cyclamen flower in front of him like an offering to an imagined lover. He wears a long coat and carries a cane and jaunty tophat, and we have no idea where he is. Instead of a street scene behind him or a dimly lit interior, the 29 year old Félix Fénéon stands in front of a swirling, hallucinogenic vortex of color, pattern, and texture. It’s a very weird picture.
The wild backdrop is made weirder on learning that Félix Fénéon was not a carnival barker or tap-dancing showman. Fénéon was a cultural critic, curator, journalist, dandy, and according to the Parisian police, an illusive and extremely dangerous anarchist.
