Félix Fénéon: Anarchist, Critic, Writer, Collector

 

 

‘’One spring evening in Paris in 1894, an elegant young man was strolling alone near the Luxembourg gardens. . . . He jumped on the platform of a departing bus and climbed to the top open deck. He had just sat down, arranging the folds of his Inverness cape, when an explosion rocked the street. . . . “Another bomb,” someone said. . . . The thin lips of the elegant young man lifted slightly in a smile.”
 
 
These lines,  reminiscent of a script for a BBC detective drama, open the definitive and only
biography of the French critic, editor, and art dealer Félix Fénéon (1861–1944), an obscure but much revered figure in the history of French modernism. Some art historians (T. J. Clark, for instance) have regarded him as “the best art critic after Baudelaire.” For specialists in art of the fin de siècle, his writing is unavoidable. From 1883 until he stood trial for criminal association in 1894, he edited and wrote for numerous Symbolist and anarchist “little magazines” while clerking in the Office of the Ministry of War. He signed his name to several singularly precise and perceptive texts that explicated, in vivid detail and highly technical language, the new formal mechanisms employed in experimental painting of the period, especially that of Georges Seurat and the school of pointillist painting he initiated, which Fénéon christened “Neo-Impressionism.”
 
The bulk of Fénéon’s art writing has never been translated. For anglophone audiences, he is probably better known for his “Novels in Three Lines,” a litany of more than one thousand mini-tragedies and absurdities published anonymously in 1906 during the half year he spent writing news items for Le Matin, an American-style mass-circulation newspaper founded by a disciple of William Randolph Hearst. These faits divers, of which Luc Sante published an acclaimed translation in 2007, make for reading that is melancholy but piquant. They include random reports such as “On the left shoulder of a newborn, whose corpse was found near the 22nd Artillery barracks, a tattoo: a cannon.” Or: “The sinister prowler seen by the mechanic Gicquel near Herblay train station has been identified: Jules Ménard, snail collector.”
 
A recent exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, “Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond,” aimed to introduce Fénéon to a general audience and “explore how he shaped the development of modernism.” Long overdue, this show––organized by MoMA’s Starr Figura; Isabelle Cahn of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; and Philippe Peltier, formerly of the Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac, also in Paris––arrived at the timeliest possible moment. Beautiful and perturbing, the show was important in the way it raised and put into discernible relation, even if it failed to fully intellectually engage, some of the most urgent topics of today––when mounting calls for restitution are increasingly forcing Euro-American museums to address the colonial origins of their collections, and when, at least in the United States, domestic terrorism, as both an actual fact and a strategically weaponized accusation, is again a hyperpotent force in the political imagination.

 
The exhibition was anchored by dozens of paintings by artists Fénéon made famous as a writer or, later, as a dealer for the blue-chip Paris gallery Bernheim-Jeune—such as Seurat, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, and so on—yet its more thought-provoking aspect was the very intentional spotlight it placed on two areas of Fénéon’s activity that remain shrouded in mystery, even after this show: his precise involvement with anarchism in the 1890s, and his vast collection of African and Oceanic sculptures, amassed in the early twentieth century and referred to by Fénéon with the calculated vaguery les arts lointains (“art from far away”). That the curators did not tackle these mysteries more aggressively was a missed opportunity. Did Fénéon plant a bomb in an act of propagande par le fait? What specific relations of trade, theft, or expropriation enabled nearly five hundred pieces of “art from far away” to come to Paris and into Fénéon’s personal possession? More than simply neglecting to bring new archival concreteness to these sorts of questions, which would, if answered, have important historical ramifications, the catalogue and exhibition––though the latter interspersed items of evidence from the Parisian Préfecture de Police throughout its display of art objects––nevertheless maintained a calculated ambiguity with regard to the realm of the evidentiary, lingering in the arena of “it is possible” while declining to communicate with clarity what is and is not known, or how and why reliable details of Fénéon’s activity as a collector and political actor have been rendered irretrievable, if in fact that is so.

 
The tense political moment framed by the exhibition is usefully encapsulated in an illustration that appeared in Le Père Peinard: Réflecs hebdomadaires d’un gniaff (roughly, “Old Papa Workhorse: Weekly Reflections of a Cobbler”), the venue in which Fénéon published his last pieces of art criticism. These final reviews departed drastically from the critical voice for which Fénéon is best known, with its involuted syntax, its deep dives into the dictionary for “Fénéologisms,” its coolly clinical, even supercilious tone. Le Père Peinard was written entirely in the potty-mouthed slang of a fictional prolo narrator who refers to bosses as “cake-gobblers” and grammar books as “something to wipe my ass with,” and who is pictured on the masthead as a towering figure swinging his leather razor strop overhead as police, bankers, lieutenants, and clergymen flee page right in fear.6 The November 1893 issue of the magazine contains an illustration, unfortunately not on view at MoMA, titled “Balance Sheet of Victims of the Social State.” It was executed by Maximilien Luce, one of the Neo-Impressionists championed by Fénéon, who was represented in the exhibition by a pointillist painting of a bathing worker and two portraits of Fénéon, one made during the 1894 internment of anarchists at Mazas prison and the other, from 1901, showing the writer restored to freedom and to high fashion, posing in the aforementioned Inverness cape in front of a wall of Japanese prints.
 
Luce’s “Balance Sheet” is a panoptic summation of the reciprocal, interlocking advances of insurrectionary actions and state repression in what is sometimes called the “First Wave of Modern Terror.”  It was published in Père Peinard at a pivotal moment: less than two weeks after a Spanish anarchist killed some thirty operagoers at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, and three months before Émile Henry, the twenty-one-year-old son of an exiled Communard, brought this new civilian-targeted terrorist tactic to Paris, aiming a bomb at random bourgeois patrons of the Café Terminus in retaliation for the state’s public execution of Auguste Vaillant, who had bombed (with no casualties) the French parliament. The protagonist of Luce’s image is a woman in the pensive pose of Dürer’s Melencolia I, 1514. Gazing into space, she takes a break from the task before her—her desk is strewn with papers, where she appears to be crunching numbers, balancing out two columns of figures. In one column: 35,000 KILLED, 20,000 DEPORTED MAY ’71, 90,000 MISERY; 71,000 INSANITY, 40 FOURMIES, RAVACHOL. And in the other: 80 HOSTAGES MAY ’71; SIX DOZEN COPS, 1 TSAR, A HANDFUL OF BOSSES, 25, BARCELONA THEATER. Above that balance sheet is another pair of lists in two columns marked AUTHORITY and REVOLT. On one side, PROSTITUTION, MISERY, FAMINE, SUICIDE, INFANTICIDE, CHICAGO, and FOURMIES (i.e., the 1886 Haymarket massacre and the 1891 “Fusillade de Fourmies,” in which French troops in the eponymous town gunned down striking workers). And on the other list, names of streets and cities where anarchist bombs exploded and prominent assassination victims, notably TSAR N°2., i.e., Alexander II of Russia, who in 1881 was killed in a bombing orchestrated by Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will). That spectacular act instigated an official endorsement of tactical violence at that year’s International Anarchist Congress of London and a widespread philosophical embrace, in the decades that followed, of a premise neatly summarized in this closing couplet of an anarchist poem: “This alone, this always, will succeed / The miracle and magic of the deed.”
 
Much writing on anarchist propaganda of the deed, as historian Mike Davis has stated, “reifies violence on the left in abstraction from the ruling-class and state violence to which it was almost always a reaction . . . the image of totally autonomous, self-propelled Terror—the political equivalent of Satanism––has always had a certain sublimity, but it is a myth.” Certainly, Luce’s illustration communicates that reactivity, while underlining the asymmetrical count of fatalities, conveying the message that symbolic or retributive violence was the logical––and only available––counterbalance to the countless casualties of government-protected capitalism. The thrust of this message is relayed in the caption of the image: words spoken to the feather-penned penseur by a worker peering impatiently over her shoulder: “OK, Madame History, it’s a hell of a mess to tally the victims. Come on, don’t break your head and listen up: whichever side the victims, responsibility lies with the high-up do-nothing fuckers [jean-foutre de la haute].”
 
Luce’s address to the allegorical figure “Madame History” articulates both a sense of urgency (she seems to be taking a little too long to complete her calculations) and a cynicism (her confused expression suggests she is perhaps a bit too dumb, or too much in the pocket of the high-up fucks, to see that her numbers just don’t add up). In France in the early 1890s, during the short period now known as the “era of attacks,” the political calculations of many artists and anarchists in Fénéon’s circle aligned with those in Luce’s “Balance Sheet.” The show communicated this tendency in large part through ephemera generated in the process of criminalizing such beliefs, which propagated in symbiosis with the swift growth of police forensics and surveillance, as so many turn-of-the-century novels document. At MoMA, evidence of this feedback dynamic came in the form of crime-scene photographs from the restaurant bombing allegedly perpetrated by Fénéon, an 1894 police informant’s list of known anarchists, and photographs executed by Alphonse Bertillon, chief of the identification bureau for the Paris police, who invented the standard mug-shot format. The curators present Luce and Fénéon as his subjects, along with the “violent Christ” Ravachol (François Claudius Koenigstein), an anarchist thief who bombed the homes of several judges and became a folk hero after being executed, fêted with popular songs like “La Ravachole,” with its chorus intoning: Vive le son d’l’explosion!

 
In terms of actual art, this penchant for bombast was only barely represented in the works exhibited. This is due, in part, to an emergent schism—which seems to have hardened precisely in this late-nineteenth-century moment of intense art-world involvement in anarchism—between pure (or autonomous) form and political content. “The anarchist painter is not the one who represents anarchist scenes,” Signac asserted in 1902 (a few years before Fénéon signed him to a lucrative contract at Bernheim-Jeune), “but the one who, without worrying about riches, without wishing for recompense, struggles with all his individuality against bourgeois and official conventions.” The few works that did relay assertive political messages helped illuminate the very different species of anarchism espoused by the various art-world actors showcased in the exhibition. Among these were two paintings by Signac, who, despite his conviction that a true anarchist concerned himself exclusively with “form, composition, and color,” did paint several didactic “anarchist scenes.” On view were Le Démolisseur (The Demolition Worker), 1897–99, in which shirtless men take a pickax to buildings to herald the coming destruction of the social order, and Au temps d’harmonie: L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir (reprise) (In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age Has Not Passed, It Is Still to Come [Reprise]), 1896 (originally to be titled “In the Time of Anarchy”), a rather wince-inducing glimpse into the painter’s vision of a utopian future, where men are at leisure to paint, read, and play bocce while women pick berries, fold laundry, and entertain babies. Equally didactic but more conceptually rich was the frontispiece of Camille Pissarro’s Turpitudes sociales (Social Disgraces), 1889–90, a rarely exhibited album of twenty-eight pen-and-ink drawings that represents, by far, the veteran Impressionist’s most explicit visual articulation of his own anarchist politics, and one that throws light on the specificity of Fénéon’s, as an anarchism untethered from ingenuous moralism, with a very different capacity to harness money, violence, and irony.
 
In the Turpitudes frontispiece, Pissarro pictures himself in the guise of Father Time or the Grim Reaper with an hourglass and scythe; he sits on a mountaintop gazing over the Parisian skyline toward the Eiffel Tower––the already iconic “spread-legged whore” of iron, then the tallest building in the world, newly constructed for the 1889 world’s fair honoring the French Revolution’s centennial, and a bitter symbol, for artists in the 1890s, of the annexation of revolutionary ideals by a spectacular and spectacularizing form of capitalism. The letters ANARCHIE beam out from the rays of a sun that rises behind the tower, which was, Pissarro explained in a letter, “not yet high and wide enough to conceal the star that lights us up.” The twenty-eight drawings that follow this allegorical self-portrait spell out the theme of redemption through violence that is implicit in it. Beginning with a fat banker clutching a bag of money, standing atop a pedestal to be worshipped, these drawings (unfortunately not included in the show) alternate images of the Bourse and café terraces with scenes of breadlines, factory work, robberies, suicides, drunkards, starving families, and workplace accidents, concluding with an image of men at the barricades wielding shotguns and raising a flag.

 The poor and their allies must not wait submissively for change or charity but enact social change by force––that is Turpitudes’ relentless argument, which Pissarro drove home with quotations on the facing pages of his images, all but one culled from La Révolte, a journal originally founded by the Russian anarchist theorist Peter Kropotkin. (For example: “It is the War of the dispossessed against their dispossessors, the War of the hungry against the fat, the War of the poor against the rich, the War of life against death.” The most revealing quotation, however, is the single line––“One is equal to another only if he can prove it, and worthy of liberty only if he can win it”—taken from Baudelaire’s prose poem in Paris Spleen (1869) “Let’s Beat Up the Poor!” Turpitudes, which contains several drawings clearly inspired by Paris Spleen’s prose portraits of the Parisian poor, willfully misunderstands and overwrites the poet’s ambivalent stance toward, so to speak, social-justice warriors. The sentence Pissarro quotes is, in the poem, spoken by an invisible “demon of action” into the ear of a narrator who has just spent some weeks devouring revolutionary political theory (implicitly, the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French father of anarchism). Upon leaving his living quarters, he hears the demon’s call when he encounters a beggar at a bar door, and feels compelled to pounce on him “with the fierce energy of a chef tenderizing a steak.” To the surprise and delight of the narrator, his victim, after a moment, gets up and gives back better. After being beaten “nearly to jelly,” the narrator retorts with pomp to the beggar: “Monsieur, you are my equal! Do me the honor of sharing my purse.”
 
“One is equal to another only if he can prove it, and worthy of liberty only if he can win it.” This line, in Baudelaire, is a hypothesis tested with a brutal and sarcastic thought experiment. Inserted into Pissarro’s album alongside a drawing titled “The Beggar,” it becomes something different. Glossing this drawing in a letter some months later, Pissarro explained: “This pariah does not have the energy to take by force the abundant victuals displayed in the vitrine behind him, preferring to starve to death. Strange!!!” As his exclamation makes clear, for Pissarro the “demon of Action” is not a joke. Armed insurrection and, more immediately, individual reclamation of wealth by force are being prescribed, in Turpitudes, as necessary remedies for economic inequality. More broadly, Pissarro’s calculated (mis)quotation of Baudelaire agitates against the poet’s cynical and aestheticizing stance in relation to social problems, rewriting history so that a Baudelaire is more in line with a Kropotkin, sharing a clear voice of advocacy, proposing solutions.
 
Pissarro pictured himself as an avenger, the Grim Reaper, but he never used his body to actualize the album’s threat. Turpitudes sociales was in fact made bespoke as a teaching instrument for Esther and Alice Isaacson, Pissarro’s London-based, thirtysomething, comfortably middle-class nieces, who were, as their uncle chastised them in one letter, “not very au courant with political matters.” It was a call to arms kept muffled within a familial, domestic sphere. Did Fénéon, by contrast, act on the violence Pissarro advocated in private? And if he did, what would it tell us about a man, nicknamed “Father Laconic,” who spoke next to nothing about his personal beliefs?

 
In her biography of Fénéon, Joan U. Halperin, also the editor of his complete works, made the allegation that her subject was in fact responsible for an unsolved bombing that took place on April 4, 1894, when a terra-cotta-potted hyacinth loaded with explosives was placed on the outside windowsill of the luxurious Restaurant Foyot. MoMA’s catalogue repeats her proposition, saying “it is believed that Fénéon set the . . . bomb himself,” while elsewhere simply noting, “His culpability remains a point of question.” Maintaining the did he/didn’t he ambiguity––with a strong lean in the direction yes!––lends a frisson of radicalism; and today, as in the late nineteenth century, the dawning age of the mass press, bombs are catnip for publicity. But there was something that felt exploitative about the atmosphere of unchecked facts. Striving to ascertain whether or not Fénéon was “guilty” would have been a worthy––even if ultimately futile––task for a museum with a sophisticated research apparatus; but perhaps answering the question matters less than acknowledging the uncertainty; acknowledging this uncertainty helps illuminate the conundrums of causality, swinging between coincidence and conspiracy, that the Foyot bombing inevitably raises as a particular violent act; acknowledging the uncertainty would also have helped to get at the ambiguities around the ethics, or sincerity, of Fénéon’s politics, an ambiguity felt particularly palpably in the context of a show that examined his anarchism of the 1890s amid the full trajectory of his work and life history.
 
Fénéon’s sympathy for violent tactics is not in doubt. Signac recalls him asserting, in 1894, that recent dynamitings had “done more than the twenty years of Kropotkin’s or [Elisée] Reclus’s brochures.” He also reported that Fénéon particularly admired the “logic” of Henry’s attack on Café Terminus, regarding his strategy of taking casualties indiscriminately from the moneyed voting populace as “most ‘anarchist.’” Fénéon and Henry were acquainted, and the bombings of the Foyot and the Terminus do seem connected. Indeed, an explicit relation was asserted in Henry’s parting words: “My head is not the last you will cut off; yet others will fall, for the starving are beginning to know the way to your great cafés and restaurants, to the Terminus and Foyot.” At the same time, no one was formally charged for the Foyot explosion, which did not kill anyone. Fénéon was simply caught up in a sweep and charged as part of an association de malfaiteurs composed of “militants” and “thieves.” Though mercury and eleven detonators were found in his office, he may have been hiding them for others and there is extremely little evidence to support Halperin’s claim that Fénéon was responsible for an actual bombing. In the rather scathing opinion of historian Philippe Oriol, Halperin’s case is based on a “totally Margaret Mitchellesque conception of research.”
 
As an alternative, Oriol floats various theories raised in 1894, noting how frequently the police, and entities like the Okhrana, the Russian tsar’s secret service, which kept a Paris office, were involved in staging what were essentially false-flag attacks meant to validate the state’s repressive anti-anarchist tactics. That the Foyot bomb was more of a bomblet, not powerful enough to kill, might support this theory. Oriol also raises the fact that the single victim wounded by this ostensibly random attack makes one question its true randomness. The man who lost an eye was Laurent Tailhade, a poet and strident anarchist sympathizer who some months prior, following Vaillant’s bombing of the Senate, had declared to much fanfare: “What matter the victims, if the gesture is beautiful!” One wanting to make a punch line of gauche caviar intellectuals could hardly have plotted a more perfect attack. Some sense of how the incident went down in (ruling class) history can be grasped from Restaurant Foyot’s entry in the 1911 Gourmet’s Guide to Europe:
 
“”When the Anarchists thought that to blow up a restaurant would be a warning to aristocratic diners, Foyot’s appeared to them to be very handily situated . . . but the only person hurt was an Anarchist poet who had been so false to his tenets as to have taken a very pretty lady to dine à deux in this restaurant of the well-to-do, and to have given her Truite Meunière. . . . Needless to say, Paris laughed. “
 
 
Fénéon was friendly with Tailhade, and as Oriol notes, it stretches the imagination that he would have placed a bomb outside a glass window through which he could have easily seen and recognized his fellow dandyish writer. At the time, since no one else was injured, friends assumed the bomb was intentionally thrown at Tailhade, perhaps by police agents provocateurs. The historical significance of the Foyot bombing lies precisely in the profound aporia it produces around intention and causality. Was this a supreme instance of coincidence––one anarchist writer acting by the deed, only to injure another––or rather, a plan masquerading as weaponized chance procedure?

 Another theory raised at the time was that the bomb was thrown at Tailhade by a spurned lover. Le Matin (Fénéon’s future employer) quoted a certain “Jacques Prolo,” an avowed anarchist, who swore that “only a woman would have dreamed of hiding dynamite in flowers.”To my mind, however, the flowerpot is, if not a smoking gun, an intriguing detail that points—perhaps—toward a perpetrator with a decadent literary sensibility. Someone who would have found it amusing to play on the verb planter, used for both bombs and flowers, someone who might be familiar with Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Bad Glazier,” another tale of pointless cruelty at the expense of the working poor, in which the narrator makes “a war machine” out of “a little flower pot.” The poet Stéphane Mallarmé was a character witness for Fénéon in the Trial of Thirty, at which he vehemently denied his friend’s involvement in any violent activities, avowing that for Fénéon “there are no better detonators than his articles.” Nevertheless, Mallarmé was clearly taken with the spectacular activation of “accident” in the public sphere, and with the metaphorical collapse of explosion and blossom, fuse and stalk, made possible by what he referred to, in a poetic tribute to Tailhade, as “the sinister flowerpot.”
 
And then there is the centerpiece of the exhibition, a picture gifted to MoMA by David Rockefeller, that has hung on the museum’s walls off and on since 1947. I am referring to the most flamboyant of the many extant portrait-tributes to Fénéon: Paul Signac’s Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890. Although it predates the Foyot bombing by four years, it is difficult not to see this as a prophetically incriminating picture, delighting in the notion of the writer as a revolutionary bomb-thrower. Fénéon appears before a pinwheeling vortex of patterned colors, striding forth in a perfect profile that matches his mug shot, while gingerly proffering in his outstretched right hand a cyclamen with a curiously long, wispy stem. He holds the flower away from his body with cautious delicacy. Though the bloom is often interpreted as a dandy’s chivalrous offering to a person outside the frame of the picture, the outstretched arm can also read as a threatening gesture; an explosion that seems to ramify out from the flower, the background’s burst of riotous color echoes in its compartmented structure the five petals blossoming from the base of the stem held in Fénéon’s hand. The aestheticization of violence that Fénéon, and this exhibition as a whole, invites us to contend with is encapsulated in this motif of bomb-as-flower.
 
 “‘I’m telegraphing Ravachol!’ cried Nini Colonne of Pantin. She was committed for insanity; the comrade’s death being somewhat notorious.” Referring back to the attacks of the 1890s in connection with a diagnosis of mental incapacity, this is the most explicit of several references to anarchist terrorism among the thousand faits divers Fénéon wrote a little more than a decade after his acquittal. It is hard to know how to interpret the tone: sympathy for the impulse to resurrect the violent Christ? Or an avowal that sanity is contingent on recognizing distance from that moment of militancy? It is striking how closely the subjects of the “Novels in Three Lines” echo those of Pissarro’s Turpitudes sociales. Most frequent, by far, are accidents, domestic violence, and suicides. But the radical difference in tone captures the dynamic of aestheticization that makes Fénéon’s attitude toward violence, even already in the 1890s, so qualitatively different from someone like Pissarro’s. With Fénéon, very much as with Baudelaire, the possibility remains open that violence is regarded as an end in itself, an object of aesthetic fascination, and not a means to an end of social progress. The violence recorded in the “Novels in Three Lines”––with their dead babies tattooed with cannons, their tramps burning to death in shelters, their women shot or strangled by jealous lovers––may be a vehicle for Fénéon’s “contained outrage,” as Luc Sante suggests, but it is also impossible to disentangle from the commercial character of the writer’s task in an established genre invented to sell newspapers—a kind of mass-market “Let’s beat up the poor!” And in the transition from the era of propagande par le fait to that of the faits divers, the meaning of fait migrates from deed to fact; the “Novels in Three Lines” are consumable in quantity like so many acidic bonbons; they are fait accompli, and do not compel their reader to act.

 
Fénéon left Le Matin at the end of 1906 to become an art dealer at Bernheim-Jeune, where his most lasting and lucrative achievement was probably launching the career of Henri Matisse––a painter who, as is well known, took pains to stress his art’s luxuriant, balming hedonism and its compatibility with bourgeois sensibilities. At the same time, in 1912, Fénéon gave the Italian Futurists––the paradigmatic champions of art-as-violence among the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, and future Fascist collaborators––their first Parisian exhibition. Most likely, it was after becoming a dealer that Fénéon began to amass his collection of African and Oceanic sculpture. (Apparently, it has been impossible to determine whether Fénéon began collecting as early as 1904, i.e, before artists like Picasso and Matisse, or as late as 1919, when collecting so-called art nègre had already become an established transcontinental fad.
 
MoMA’s exhibition closed with a room of Matisses, Futurist paintings such as Luigi Russolo’s The Revolt, ca. 1911, and seventeen sculptures from Fénéon’s now-dispersed collection, most created in what were then French colonial possessions: On view were objects from the present Democratic Republic of Congo and Côte d’Ivoire, but also Burkina Faso, Papua New Guinea, British Columbia, and Madagascar. An exquisite heddle pulley attributed to the so-called Master of Bouaflé—a carver whose works all seem to have passed through the hands of dealer Paul Guillaume––was the only object attributed to a semi-named artist, among sixteen others marked as “Unrecorded.”The room contained many visually arresting pictures and sculptures. But it was also unsettling, because so much was left unsaid about the violence of what was on display, especially with respect to the art “from far away,” as Fénéon would say.
 
In the context of a show foregrounding anarchism, in which so many of the European protagonists were preoccupied with theorizing theft and property, it would have been immensely instructive to place a more public spotlight on the provenance histories of Fénéon’s non-Western sculptures. For the conditions of their acquisition would show, in exaggeration, the dynamics of violent taking, or asymmetrical exchange, that anarchists decried in the relations between rich and poor in European nations. Whether or not they contained objects now universally understood to have been “stolen”––like the bronzes of Benin analyzed in Dan Hicks’s recent book The Brutish Museums––collections like Fénéon’s, formed before World War II, originated in acts of spoliation, perhaps in the guise of a coercive “trade,” which nowadays are being classified as a form of theft. (Guillaume, for instance, acquired sculptures by advertising in military publications to colonial soldiers. As Hicks emphasizes, we still lack a nuanced “theory of taking” that would address the multifarious forms of imperial looting that created the present imbalance, such that “90% of the material cultural legacy of sub-Saharan Africa remains preserved and housed outside of the African continent.” The numbers here are a bit like those being tallied in Luce’s “Balance Sheet”––lopsided to an ostentatious degree, despite Madame History’s slowness to acknowledge what is plain to see. As Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy stated in their 2018 report The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics, yet to be acted on by the French museums whose collections it addressed, “Destruction and collection are the two sides of the same coin.”
 
The challenge presented by the current debates around restitutions––beyond the obvious threat that they are a mere “beautiful gesture,” a ruse for colonial nations to evade the more substantive work of economic reparations––is that the very concept of restitution reifies a legalistic framework defined by Euro-American capitalism and established in relation to these objects in part through the actions of “promoter-purchasers” like Fénéon. As the MoMA exhibition demonstrated, Fénéon played a pivotal role in a twinned process of aestheticization and financial speculation through which Euro-American collectors recategorized certain African and Oceanic sculptures that had been imported from the colonies to the metropole, shifting their classification from ethnographic specimen to art object. In his 1920 “Survey on the Distant Arts,” Fénéon framed these objects around the question “Will They Be Admitted to the Louvre?” thereby contributing to the deconstruction of Eurocentric norms of beauty and aesthetic quality and, in the process, doing something to “promote a more harmonious, egalitarian world,” as MoMA’s exhibition blurb states. At the same time, it was precisely in this process of artification—which often involved baptism by auction––that the paths of provenance were effaced. In this case, the aestheticization of violence lies not so much in the aestheticization of an explosion than in the capacity to overlook one, or in the capacity to forget that “property is theft,” as an old anarchist might say.
 

 A History of Violence. By  Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen. Artforum,  April, 2021.

 

Every exhibition tells a story, usually about an artist or groups of them. Occasionally, however, some shows focus on non-artists: individuals who work as art dealers, curators, critics or collectors. Essential to a functioning art world, they don’t make things. They make things happen.

 
Such shows have been on the rise in New York lately, revealing the broader contexts of modern art. The latest is the bountiful “Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde — From Signac to Matisse and Beyond” at the Museum of Modern Art. (Its immediate predecessors include last year’s “Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern” at MoMA and “Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art” at the Jewish Museum.)
 
The suave and brilliant Félix Fénéon (1861-1944) is the ideal subject for a show of this kind, since he was one of the busiest, most fascinating players in Parisian cultural circles in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. A confirmed dandy, he worked as a critic, editor, translator, curator, journalist, publisher, gallerist, private dealer and prescient collector, not only of the French avant-garde but also of non-Western art, especially African sculpture whose aesthetic value he was early to recognize. And like many artists and writers of his generation, he was a self-identified anarchist, surveilled by the police and, once, arrested. In short, just reading the detailed chronology in the show’s treasure of a catalog can be exhausting.

 
The current exhibition was just beginning to be installed when the lockdown began and will go on view for the first time when the museum reopens on Aug. 27. An amazing show, it began as a collaboration between Isabelle Cahn, chief curator at the Musée d’Orsay, and Philippe Peltier, a former department head at the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, where a much larger group of the non-Western material was exhibited. The Modern’s presentation — organized by Starr Figura, curator of prints and drawings, working with the curatorial assistant Anna Blaha — unites the shows.
 
Its deftly laid-out mix of art, artifacts, publications and archival material retraces Fénéon’s life and times. We see him in photographs and portraits, along with examples of the art he supported, including numerous pieces from his own collection. Among them are two stunning groups: 18 drawings and paintings by Georges Seurat, the artistic passion of his life, and 18 sculptures, primarily from Central and West Africa.
 

Going by the photographs here, Fénéon had a preternatural sense of modern cool. He was tall and elegant, never less than impeccably attired. His distinctive profile and small goatee evoked both Uncle Sam and the devil, earning him the nickname the Yankee Mephistopheles.
 
The son of a Swiss schoolteacher and a French salesman from Burgundy, he won prizes in school and while in his teens worked as an apprentice reporter, writing unsigned pieces for a local newspaper. After a year of mandatory military service, he arrived in Paris at the age of 20, having placed first on a competitive exam for jobs at the Ministry of War. There he was considered a model employee, rising quickly to the position of chief clerk, even as his anarchist sympathies deepened.
 
By 1883, Fénéon was writing art and literary criticism for small publications, some of which he co-founded. He also contributed unsigned tracts that railed against the oppressions of the Third Republic. By the next year, he had asserted in his writing, “the purpose of all government should be to make government unnecessary.” In April 1894, he was arrested with 29 others and accused of conspiracy in the bombing of a restaurant. Jailed for four months — awaiting what became known as the Trial of the Thirty — he taught himself English and translated Jane Austen’s “Northanger Abbey” into French. His witty ripostes on the stand, reported in the press, may have contributed to his acquittal.
 
Today, Fénéon is perhaps best remembered for his critical insights, which he began publishing in 1883. His career as an art critic largely ended with the notoriety of the Trial of the Thirty, after which he excelled as executive editor of the literary magazine La Revue blanche. He was the discoverer of Georges Seurat, and coined the term Neo-Impressionism for the art movement that Seurat spearheaded with Paul Signac and the erstwhile Impressionist Camille Pissarro. This was in 1886, the year Seurat’s great masterpiece, “Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte,” was first exhibited. Pleased with Fénéon’s writing on his work, Seurat gave him the final study for “La Grande Jatte,” which begins the show, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

 
For Fénéon, the Neo-Impressionists’ use of the latest scientific theories of light and color and their straightforward dotting technique represented progress over the messier, more intuitive paint handling of Impressionism. Their style downplayed the emotions and bravura skills of the artist, increasing the autonomy of the art object, a concept basic to Western modernism. Autonomy was also a cardinal principle in his political views. For him art and society developed along parallel tracks but both required radical new ideas for progress.
 
This show exudes a certain warmth of feeling. The works formerly in Fénéon’s collection attest to both the pleasure and the rigor he sought in art. They come together with striking clarity in Henri-Edmond Cross’s “The Golden Isles” (1891-92), a small painting that reduces an expanse of sea to mostly regular dabs of blue. (Think Milton Avery and Alma Thomas.) Also from Fénéon’s collection is “The Folding Bed,” a rare nude by Édouard Vuillard, a study in creams and whites, including the pale figure nestling in the bedclothes.
 
The high regard that the artists he admired felt for Fénéon is evident in the portraits, most notably Signac’s depiction of him as an ascetic yet flamboyant ringmaster. Shown in profile, in a gold topcoat against a psychedelic pinwheel of patterns, he holds a top hat, cane and gloves in one hand, a single flower in the other.
 
The title rambles pretentiously, supposedly imitating those that scientists gave to their papers: “Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890.” Fénéon disliked the painting, but kept it on his walls until Signac died in 1935.
 
In the late 1890s, Félix Vallotton and Vuillard painted portraits that paid homage less extravagantly. Both place Fénéon at the office of La Revue blanche, in a black frock coat, leaning fiercely into his desk, which is piled with papers. (The strict diagonal of his back confirms the military posture of his photographs.) True to their own sensibilities, Vallotton gives the office an austere, geometric rigor while Vuillard opts for an implicitly domestic softness.
 
In one of the exhibition’s most elaborate, if somewhat challenging stretches, various forms of printed matter surveying Fénéon’s publications, political activities and the Parisian watering spots where young artists and radicals often mixed. We see posters designed by the likes of Toulouse-Lautrec, Steinlen and Bonnard for the city’s best-known cafes — the Moulin Rouge, Le Chat Noir, the Folies-Bergère. Among these are Vallotton’s stark black-and-white woodblocks of police officers charging street demonstrators, an anarchist being arrested, another going to his execution. Some material documents the Trial of the Thirty, including Fénéon’s unusually dapper mug shot.
 
The show’s second half concentrates primarily on Fénéon’s final employment: his 18 years as dealer of contemporary art at the famed French gallery Bernheim-Jeune. It includes paintings by artists he brought to the gallery, like Matisse, Bonnard and Kees van Dongen, as well as a small group of paintings by the Italian Futurists, whose first Paris show Fénéon organized at the gallery in 1912.
 
There are unfamiliar knockouts, among them is Luigi Russolo’s “Revolt” of 1911 with its screeching red chevrons from the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. Matisse’s 1905 study for “The Joy of Life,” from the National Museum of Art in Copenhagen, is better than the iconic final work in the Barnes Collection. It’s more robustly painted and the curlicue figures are absent. In this final gallery, the non-Western pieces form a phalanx down the center; examples of European modernist paintings hang on the walls. It’s provocative — one of the most invigorating sights in a New York museum at the moment.
 
After La Revue blanche closed in 1903, Fénéon worked as a journalist at daily newspapers, first Le Figaro, then Le Matin. There, in 1906, in the months before he started at Bernheim-Jeune, he wrote hundreds of briefs for a column called “News in Three Lines,” several of which are on display here.
 
These capsule accounts of scandals, murders, accidents and crimes of passion are exquisitely wrought. Their wry compression and uninflected prose startle and please, making the inequities of everyday life they highlight all the more savage and shocking. In one, he wrote: “Finding his daughter insufficiently austere, Jallat, watchmaker of St. Étienne, killed her. It is true he has 11 children left.” They are the living ancestors to Cubist collage, the Surrealists’ exquisite corpse drawings and all kinds of 20th-century poetry. In them, Fénéon the aesthete and Fénéon the anarchist meet, and the non-artist becomes an artist of lasting achievement.
 
Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde — From Signac to Matisse and Beyond
Through Jan. 2 at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, Manhattan; 212-708-9400, moma.org. The museum reopens Aug. 27; timed tickets must be reserved online.

 Félix Fénéon, the Collector-Anarchist Who Was Seurat’s First Champion. By Roberta Smith
The New York Times, August  27, 2020.

 

Sometimes leftist politics matter for art writers. Three passionate modern admirers of Nicolas Poussin, an aloof reactionary, were leftists: Anthony Blunt, Richard Wolheim, and T. J. Clark. Clement Greenberg, who when young was devoted to radical politics, borrowed his historiography from Marxism. And Louis Aragon, Henri Matisse’s champion, remained a communist to the end of his life.

 
Even now, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Harvard’s modernist, is a passionate Marxist. And although the Soviets quickly turned against their modernists, October, once the most influential academic publication dealing with contemporary art, is named after Sergei Eisenstein’s famous 1928 movie about the Bolshevik revolution.
 
So far as I can see, none of the efforts of Buchloh, Clark, Greenberg, October, or Wollheim (who was my teacher) have had any real political effect. Blunt’s has, but of course his espionage on behalf of the Soviets turned out to be deplorable.
 
Félix Fénéon (1861–1944) was an activist when young, an anarchist (like many of his artist friends) who later became a communist. He never gave up his leftist convictions. While supporting himself as a clerk for the French War Department, he probably helped with an 1894 bombing in Paris, for which he was tried but not convicted.
 
Unlike many anarchists, Camille Pissarro for example, he was a proponent of violence. Fénéon was also an important collector who, because he disliked the reactionary taste of the French museums, considered leaving his modernist art to the Soviet people, until the German Soviet pact of 1939.
 
Some years ago, the rehanging of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection set Paul Signac’s “Portrait of Félix Fénéon” (1890) at the entrance to the galleries devoted to the permanent collection. This was a little surprising, for the larger public likely did not know of either this particular Signac or his subject.
 
But it was appropriate, for Fénéon played a significant role in establishing the reputations of some of the early French and Italian modernists who are prominent in the museum. An extremely sociable, very private man who had a complicated love life, he knew many of the leading artistic and literary figures in Paris during his long lifetime. Always fantastically discreet, Fénéon was very good at compartmentalizing his life.

 
Fénéon was close friends with Pissarro, Georges Seurat, and Paul Signac. He played an important role in Parisian art life as editor of La Revue blanche, which published Pierre Bonnard, Felix Vallotton, and Édouard Vuillard. And when working for the art gallery Bernheim-Jeune from 1906 until 1924, he contributed significantly to the very successful commercial career of Henri Matisse. The catalogue for the MoMA exhibition, Félix Fénéon. The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde, quotes the painter and collector Maurice Boudot-Lamotte, who wrote, “Fénéon, as a good anarchist, planted Matisses among the bourgeoisie from the back room at Bernheim- Jeune as he might have planted bombs.”
 
Fénéon was a marvelously original, extremely self-effacing writer whose Novels in Three Lines, identified as his and gathered in a book only posthumously, are fascinating narratives based on actual events. A translation by Luc Sante from 2007 includes more than a thousand of these laconic stories, some of which, like this, one come out as only two lines long:
 
“Mlle Clara Peyron, 65, had her throat cut in Hyères.
The murder had no other motive than covetousness.”
 
The MoMA exhibition — the first exhibition devoted to Fénéon — was originally scheduled to open with 130 objects on March 22 and run through July 25, 2020. Since I could not see it, this is a review of the catalogue, written by Starr Figura, Isabelle Cahn, and Philippe Peltier, with a brief Preface by by Joan Ungersma Halperin, who is the author of a full biography from 1988.
   
The catalogue gathers together a great deal of the art Fénéon admired (and, often, collected), along with new essays by numerous scholars, including good essays on his political activities, his work as an art dealer, and his personal collection. He collected many of the artists he championed, and was a major pioneering collector of art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas.

 
The authors write:
 
“Fénéon was part of the ever-widening circle of artists, dealers, and collectors who were passionately engaged with these objects in the early twentieth century. Most approached them with a romanticizing view that reduced them to the embodiments of an idealized, precivilized state. Fénéon’s interest also stemmed from his anarchist anticolonialism.”
 
The catalogue supplies a useful map of Paris showing where he lived and worked. And we learn that Signac’s painting, whose complete title is “Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890” was one that Fénéon didn’t much like.
 
In general, however, while providing new information, The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde doesn’t change our general picture of the man as provided by Halperin, whose prior research is repeatedly cited. I would love to read a good translation of Fénéon’s criticism, for that might encourage some young American art writer to imitate him. Halperin’s book provides many short samples of his devilishly difficult French, which she analyzes and translates.
 
Usually accounts of patronage are frustrating because they lack concrete financial details. It’s important to know how much art cost, for that reveals who could afford to purchase it. Fénéon was not highly prosperous, and so it would be instructive to learn how much he paid, for example, for the 53 paintings and 180 drawings by Seurat that were in his collection at one point or another, many of which are now in MoMA or other major museums.
 
Fénéon had no real successors in his dual role as writer and gallerist, for reasons that deserve spelling out. Crossover figures such as Frank O’Hara, a celebrated poet and important MoMA curator, Robert Pincus-Witten, a remarkable critic before he became an art dealer, and Jean Frémon, managing director of Galerie Lelong as well as a marvelous writer, do not have the wide-ranging influence that Fénéon had. But nowadays most art dealers are probably too busy to be significant creative writers. Even Fénéon, it is true, stopped writing criticism in 1893, well before he became a dealer.
 
Blunt, Clark, Aragon, and the other leftist art writers had two quite distinctly different views of painting. Some of them advocated creation of political works that would raise public consciousness. Others were concerned with making great artworks accessible to all. Wollheim took this second position when he spoke of how “art has been segregated from those for whom it was made and turned into a preserve of the rich and arrogant” (The Image in Form. Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes, London, 1972).
 
What is the relationship between Fénéon’s politics and the art he admired? Patricia Leighton’s essay in the catalogue argues that the anarchism “that motivated his activity in the Parisian art world” is the lens through which “we can perceive the unity of what he wrote, who he supported, and why he thought it was important to do so.”
 
I don’t agree, for I’m not sure what constitutes anarchist visual art or how his practical activities supported his political cause. But just before he died, he destroyed his papers. And so there’s a lot that we don’t know. Often we speak of radical art, in terms borrowed from politics. But as everyone knows, notwithstanding the progressive political aspirations of many modernist artists, including some championed by Fénéon, those hopes for radical art have come to nothing. At least so far.
 
Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through July 25. The museum is temporarily closed, but the exhibition, which is organized by Starr Figura, Isabelle Cahn, and Philippe Peltier, with Anna Blaha, is available online.
 
The catalogue, Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde (2020) by Starr Figura, Isabelle Cahn, and Phillipe Peltier, with a Preface by Joan Ungersma Halperin, is published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
 
 
Félix Fénéon: Critic, Collector, Anarchist. By David Carrier. Hyperallergic, July 11, 2020.

 

Félix Vallotton’s 1896 portrait of Félix Fénéon, editor of the French literary magazine La Revue Blanche (The White Review, 1889–1903), shows a shadowy figure hunched in concentration over his desk, a pile of manuscripts at his side. He is dressed all in black, pen poised, the nighttime office illuminated only by a mint-green lamp. Its colour recalls, perhaps, the glass of absinthe Fénéon is said to have been drinking two years earlier, as he sat in a bar and watched a bomb explode at a cafe across the road popular with diplomats and politicians. Rumours persisted that it was Fénéon himself who had placed the device in a potted hyacinth on the cafe’s windowsill, lighting it with the tip of his ivory cigarette holder. At his trial, detectives produced a vial of mercury and 11 detonators, which they had found in a closet at the ministry department where Fénéon worked. Fénéon claimed that his father, recently deceased, had come across them in the street and was eventually acquitted. Stéphane Mallarmé, a character witness, backed him up: ‘For Fénéon,’ he insisted, ‘there are no better detonators than his articles.’
 
An anarchist employed for years as a clerk in the War Office; an aesthete who shunned the limelight: Fénéon was a well-known and influential figure in the avant-garde circles of fin-de-siècle Paris. He worked tirelessly as a critic and editor to promote neo-impressionism – a term he coined in 1886 to describe the movement led by Georges Seurat. At La Revue Blanche, he published works by Claude Debussy, André Gide, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud; he commissioned the first French edition of James Joyce’s work and himself translated texts by Jane Austen and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Yet, he was a chameleonic figure who preferred to promote the work of others while remaining an enigma. ‘I aspire only to silence,’ Fénéon insisted, when urged to publish his collected essays. He tended to write anonymously or under pseudonyms (Porfiry, after the detective in Crime and Punishment, 1866; Gil de Bache, the name of a 17th-century Portuguese pirate; or, simply, ‘Hombre’). In 1895, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec sketched Fénéon’s face emerging from a swirl of cigarette smoke, as if liable to vanish at any moment; in 1890, Paul Signac placed him at the centre of an abstract Technicolor whirl, proffering a lily to a figure out of sight. Signac’s portrait – despite the fact that Fénéon considered it his friend’s worst work – now forms the centrepiece of an exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, one of a trio of recent shows exploring Fénéon’s championing of art and artists and his impact on modernism. (Last year, a two-part sister exhibition ran at the Musée de l’Orangerie and the Musée du quai Branly in the critic’s adopted hometown of Paris.)
 

 
Yet Fénéon’s lasting legacy may be his own writing. In May 1906, working night shifts at the newspaper Le Matin (The Morning, 1884–1944), Fénéon began writing an anonymous column comprising brief, noir-ish news items, each no more than three lines long, drawn from the newswires, local reports and reader correspondence. Faits divers – also known as chiens écrasés, or flattened dogs – were a popular feature in French newspapers: Proust read them daily over breakfast, while Gustave Flaubert allegedly found the seed for Madame Bovary (1856) in an item from a provincial journal. But it was Fénéon who turned the faits divers into an art form, using them as a space for avant-garde experiment, based on the narrative power of a well-constructed sentence. These true stories of murder, lust and revenge condense whole lives into mere adjectives, devastating personal dramas into throwaway asides. Each of Fénéon’s fragments contains the richness of a novel, distilled into an epigram: their eloquence derives from his ability to say just enough, and to leave the rest to the reader’s imagination. He can offer the spectacle of a drawn-out court case in a few clauses: ‘There was talk of a pervert, but finally Porcher, of La Grange, near Cholet, was constrained to admit his wife’s murderer was himself.’ He drops incongruous details to tantalize the reader into fevered speculation: ‘Nimble though she was at stealing jewels, Marie de Badesco was nabbed in Versailles. She got two years.’ (Imagine the backstory.) Careful word order ratchets up tension before releasing its blow at the last moment, for maximum impact: ‘A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.’
 
These pieces survive only because Fénéon’s lover, Camille Plateel, cut them out and preserved them in a scrapbook. (Apparently, his wife, Fanny, was doing the same thing.) But it’s notable that they have lasted not as news but as fiction. In 1960, a selection was published in Germaine Bree’s anthology Great French Short Stories. When, in 2007, New York Review Books Classics published an English edition, translated by Luc Sante, it was given the intriguing title Novels in Three Lines. This is a deliberately loose translation of ‘Nouvelles en trois lignes’, the title under which they appeared in Le Matin, where ‘nouvelles’ would ordinarily refer to ‘the news’. (It also means ‘short stories’.) The novel, as a form, is embedded in a sense of newness; an urgent impulse to expand its own possibilities has always been central to its identity and history. Fénéon made the news new – and turned it into literature. His style resonates in the work of several avant-garde writers of the 20th century, determined to find novel forms through which to interrogate identity and the human psyche.
 

Thomas Bernhard’s 1978 collection The Voice Imitator is characterized, like his major novels, by a resounding rage, an obsession with corruption and madness, and a satirist’s ability to skewer the absurdity of the human condition. It comprises 104 stories, each no more than a page long, many taken from the news and presented in the straightforward, deadpan style of an extended faits divers. We meet a paraplegic aristocrat trapped under a powerful hypnosis, who spends her days sitting on the shore of Lake Geneva, waiting for a chauffeur to bring her the newspapers; elsewhere, we learn that 180 people have died from a flu epidemic, ‘not from the flu but as the result of a prescription that was misunderstood by a newly appointed pharmacist’. The pharmacist, the narrator informs us with macabre relish, ‘will probably be charged with reckless homicide, possibly, according to the paper, even before Christmas’. Another piece reports that a team of speleologists entered a cave ‘in ideal weather conditions’, but did not reappear; nor did two rescue teams dispatched in turn to rescue them. ‘At this point the department of the Salzburg Provincial Government responsible for speleology commissioned a firm of building contractors in the Pongau to wall up the cave between Taxenbach and Schwarzach, and this was done before the New Year.’ Here the story ends, without comment on this palpably inadequate resolution.
 
When tragedy is consumed as entertainment, Bernhard seems to suggest, we can’t expect respite, progression, closure. Intrinsic to these stories is a sense that nothing matters; that sentiment is futile in a cruel and arbitrary world, where at any moment a hairdresser may suddenly go mad and decapitate a duke, a suicide epidemic may break out among children, teachers or librarians, or a ‘paterfamilias who had for decades been praised and beloved for a so-called extraordinary sense of family’ may murder his children one Saturday afternoon, ‘admittedly in especially humid weather’.
 
Bernhard’s speech on receiving the Austrian State Prize for Literature in 1967 pinpoints the sense of pointlessness that his short-form prose lays bare: ‘There is nothing to praise,’ he insisted, ‘nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is absurd, indeed it is all absurd, when one thinks of death.’ In Suicide – sent to his publisher ten days before the author killed himself, in October 2007 – the French writer and artist Édouard Levé used similar terms to express his disillusionment with conventional, linear narrative form. ‘A dictionary’, wrote Levé, ‘resembles the world more than a novel does, because the world is not a coherent sequence of actions but a constellation of things perceived. It is looked at, unrelated things congregate, and geographic proximity gives them meaning. If events follow each other, they are believed to be a story. But in a dictionary time doesn’t exist: ABC is neither more or less chronological than BCA.’
 

Levé was deeply influenced by the work of Georges Perec, and there is certainly something of Fénéon’s spirit in the Oulipo’s experimentation with creating meaning and pattern under formal constraints. In his 2004 novel Newspaper, Levé, like Bernhard and Fénéon, plays with the possibilities of an absent or invisible authorial voice, taking even further the unsettling effect of the faits divers. Newspaper is structured entirely in the form of a daily paper, its stories divided into sections. We move from ‘International News’, an unremitting chronicle of genocide, terrorism and ecological disaster, through ‘Society’, in which a story on the ageing population sits, in sinister fashion, next to a report on a hike in testimonies of the abuse of the elderly, to ‘Classifieds’, where rooms are advertised by the square metre and jobs are announced in deadening corporate language: ‘If you want to change the direction of your life, we invite you to join one of our teams as a commercial engineer.’ ‘Internet site seeks numerologists and astrologists. Work from home, flexible hours. Urgent.’ As the text builds, what emerges is a portrait of society in dissolution: of technological advancement tempered by acute loneliness and isolation, of random acts of cruelty and order broken down. The final section of the book, ‘Entertainment Guide’, intersperses horror and frivolity with no distinction between the two, a depraved society mirrored back onto itself. Game shows and weather reports mingle with soaps and dramas staging the murders and violence we’ve just read about in shock, this time for our enjoyment.
 
 Does a society generate its news or does news generate society? Do our newspapers reflect us or shape us? Are we complicit in the horrors we read about daily if we do nothing about them? In his story ‘Example’, from The Voice Imitator, Bernhard suggests that the closer our proximity to the news, the more dangerously desensitized we become: ‘The courtroom correspondent is the closest of all to human misery and its absurdity and, in the nature of things, can endure the experience only for a short time, and certainly not for his whole life, without going crazy. The probable, the improbable, even the unbelievable, the most unbelievable are paraded before him every day in the courtroom, and because he has to earn his daily bread by reporting on actual or alleged but, in any case, in the nature of things, shameful crimes, he is soon no longer surprised by anything at all.’
 
To read Newspaper, The Voice Imitator or Novels in Three Lines in one sitting produces a strangely numbing effect. The exceptional is presented as banal; individual stories merge into an uneasy chorus of misfortune. Each of these works shows a world overrun by faceless forces, power replicating anonymously, ordinary people taking extraordinary measures without recourse to state help. Fénéon’s stories bristle with bombings, thefts, misdirected bullets, jilted partners lurking outside hotels with guns, children brawling outside schools, misadventures on train tracks. In Novels in Three Lines, written within memory of the suppression of the 1871 Paris Commune – a short-lived attempt at radical socialist government – Fénéon’s own politics are strongly evident: his snippets abound with bitter demonstrations and strike action spurred by poverty, unfair labour conditions and widespread mistrust of government. ‘Women suckling their infants argued the workers’ cause to the director of the streetcar lines in Toulon. He was unmoved.’ Desperation and disillusionment prevail: ‘“If my candidate loses, I will kill myself,” M. Bellavoine, of Fresquienne, Seine-Inferieure, had declared. He killed himself.’
 
Today, as we consume our news in 280 characters and flicker constantly between screens bombarding our synapses indiscriminately with information, the faits divers seems a distinctly contemporary form. Between 2011 and 2013, the writer Teju Cole posted on Twitter a project titled ‘Small Fates’: faits divers – explicitly inspired by Fénéon – drawing on Nigerian newspapers and set in Lagos. Cole’s sidelong glances at contemporary life are pithy and poignant. ‘In Ikotun, Mrs Ojo, who was terrified of armed robbers, died in her barricaded home, of smoke inhalation.’ ‘“Nobody shot anybody,” the Abuja police spokesman confirmed, after the driver Stephen, 35, shot by Abuja police, almost died.’ ‘Precious Ogbonna, of Owerri, whom God gave 7 babies, nevertheless has an intact hymen, and has been charged with child-trafficking.’ In an accompanying essay published on his website, Cole explained that he had chosen the faits divers for the form’s ability to penetrate exceptional moments in ordinary lives: because ‘what there is to know about a city, beyond the statistics, beyond population, tallest buildings, GDP, is individual human experience’. Each fragment, he argued, ‘tells a truth, a whole truth, but never the whole truth (but this is true of all storytelling)’. It’s fitting that Fénéon, who always tried to disappear, will be remembered for those moments of everyday mania he condensed into bite-size form for immediate – and lasting – consumption.
 
 
The Man Who Made the News Novelesque.  Before Twitter, Félix Fénéon’s daily ‘novels in three lines’ made a literary art form of current affairs. By Francesca Wade. Frieze, May 22, 2020.