A Twentieth Century Man - Félix Fénéon, Surrealist Mentor

A TWENTIETH CENTURY MAN: RE-EVALUATING FÉLIX FÉNÉON, SURREALIST MENTOR

ABSTRACT Félix Fénéon’s biography deserves reappraisal. Current scholarship on his life and work, notably Joan Halperin’s Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, reflects a limited view of his accomplishments. From the current perspective, Fénéon was a quintessential man of the fin-de-siècle.

Involved in the most avant-garde political and cultural movements of the end of the 19th century, Fénéon coined the term Neo-Impressionism, edited groundbreaking symbolist poetry, and may have been responsible for the bombing of the restaurant Foyot in 1894. Most biographical accounts falter at the turn of the century, although Fénéon was an influential figure in publishing and the art market for the next several decades.

In the later half of his life, Fénéon demurred from the spotlight, becoming a dealer/collector and eminence gris for a new generation of artists and writers. Since he preferred to work behind the scenes, much tangible evidence is lost to scholarship. Nonetheless, it is clear that Fénéon helped define the leading edge of the avant-garde well into the 20th century. His work – both before and after the turn of the century - had a particularly profound influence on the development of surrealist thought. This dissertation introduces, for the first time, the compelling aesthetic and political affinities shared by Fénéon and the surrealists. It also reveals the diverse personal affiliations between Fénéon, Breton and others in the surrealist circle, proving the extent to which Fénéon continued to play a significant role as art world facilitator long after his contemporary biographies lose interest. Re-examining Fénéon’s long career through the lens of his influence on surrealism, situates this thoroughly modern man firmly in the 20th century.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Gavin Parkinson, for his encouragement and for being an endless font of knowledge about essays in obscure journals.

I am exceedingly grateful to my husband, Benoit Wirz, for his patience, wise advice and early mornings. I could not have completed this without my son, Arlo, who provided endless wonderful breaks, or without my exceptional nanny, Ashley Glover. I would also like to thank my classmates, whose perspectives were invaluable.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction / A 20th Century Man

1

Part 1: Neo-Impressionism / A Superior Reality

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Part 2: Symbolism / The Fortuitous Encounter

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Part 3: Anarchy / The Black Mirror

18

Part 4: Humor / Those Joyful Terrorists

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Part 5: Non-Western Objects / Fénéon, That’s It

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Conclusion / Portrait de M. Félix Fénéon

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Bibliography

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List of Illustrations

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Illustrations

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Introduction / A 20th Century Man

In late January, 1925, just after the publication of the second issue of La Révolution surréaliste, Louis Aragon and André Breton exchanged a reminder to each other through the minutes of the Centrale surréaliste to be sure to add Félix Fénéon to the periodical’s mailing list.1 By then, Fénéon already had several careers as an influential fin-de-siècle art critic and journalist, editor and gallerist. [FIG. 1] His cv also included the ignominious entry of his 1894 arrest and prosecution in an anarchist round-up and mass trial, and his ultimate acquittal on the accusation of being an accomplice of Émile Henry, who had planted a bomb at the Saint-Lazare train station that injured twenty people and killed one.2

Fig. 2. Alphonse Bertillon, Félix Fénéon, 1894. Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris.

Fig. 1. Édouard Vuillard, À la Revue blanche [Portrait de Félix Fénéon], 1901. Guggenheim, New York.

Perhaps this close call led to future circumspection. Alfred Jarry, who described many of his acquaintances using an aphoristic formula beginning

1

Breton and Aragon, Cahier de la permanence surréaliste, p.35.

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 270 and 274; as well: p. 283.

2

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with ‘he who…’, called Fénéon, “He who is quietude.”3 Two of Fénéon’s contemporaneous biographers – the French editor and critic Jean Paulhan and the American scholar of Impressionism John Rewald – repeatedly mentioned his reticence, his shying away from public notice, and the lengths he went to (including returning letters and destroying documents) to be forgotten.4 By the mid-1920’s, Fénéon was in his 60s and officially retired from public life. Nonetheless, in spite of his efforts, this coterie of young men on the cusp of founding a new movement were still seeking his approval, still sending him their new work.

The definitive biography on Fénéon, Halperin’s 1988 Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, understandably focused on his early critical output, since the author also edited Fénéon’s collected writings.

Given Fénéon’s documentary destruction, it is mainly through these texts that a biography can be unearthed. Halperin’s book peters out at the turn of the century, however, whereas Fénéon lived until 1944 and was working productively during most of that time.5 Moreover, the biography decontextualizes the fullness of this quintessentially modern man’s life and his embeddedness at the very fulcrum of fin-de-siècle culture. [FIG. 3]

3

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 7. “celui qui…”; “celui qui silence.” This phrase is imperfectly translatable, as “silence” in French does not function as a verb. All translations are the author’s except where otherwise noted.

4 Rewald, Félix Fénéon: L’Homme qui désirait être oublié, p. 80.

5 Cowling, ‘Review of Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris’, p. 278.

2

Fig. 3. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Panneaux pour la baraque de La Goulue, à la Foire du Trône à Paris, 1895. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

(Felix Fénéon’s portrait is at bottom right.)

Paulhan called Fénéon “that happy man” because he had the critical sense that led him to be among the first to publish Rimbaud and champion Seurat, but he remained an influential figure in avant-garde artistic circles well into the 20th century.6 Even as he ceased writing for public consumption, he continued to advocate for young artists and dealers as well as young writers.7 Apollinaire, in an article in the Mercure de France, in 1914, mentioned Fénéon’s ongoing enthusiasm for new work in his position as director of the Bernheim-Jeune gallery: “He combines his gifts as a writer on art with his role as informant, which he assumes from time to time, to anonymously provide

6

Paulhan, F. F. ou le critique, p. 19: “Cet homme heureux” – which is also a pun on Fénéon’s first name.

7 th Fénéon’s influence in the arts in the first quarter of the 20 century is vast, and beyond the scope of this text, but includes – in painting alone – promoting the work of the Fauves, Cubists and Futurists. As an interesting example, from Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, np: “At this time Matisse… was really beginning to be fairly well known, so much so that to everybody's great excitement Bernheim Jeune [sic], a very middle class firm indeed, was offering him a contract to take all his work at a very good price. It was an exciting moment.

This was happening because of the influence of a man named Fénéon. Il est très fin [sic], said Matisse, much impressed by Fénéon. Fénéon was a journalist, a French journalist who had invented the thing called a feuilleton en deux lignes [sic], that is to say he was the first one, to hit off the news of the day in two lines [sic]. He looked like a caricature of Uncle Sam made French and he had been painted standing in front of a curtain in a circus picture by Toulouse-Lautrec [sic].

And now the Bernheims, how or wherefor [sic] I do not know, taking Fénéon into their employ, were going to connect themselves with the new generation of painters.”

Fénéon’s influence even extended to Matisse’s name. He suggested hyphenating it to HenriMatisse, to differentiate him from another working painter, Auguste Matisse. See Fénéon and Halperin, Oeuvres plus que complètes, p. 1057 (Index).

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bimonthly, in the most delicious way possible, important news concerning the arts.”8 In fact, the two men went together to the Bateau Lavoir to see Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon for the first time.9 Moreover, the auction of part of Fénéon’s collection in 1941, revealed that, among many Seurats and Signacs, he also owned a 1924 painting by André Masson titled L’Homme attablé [FIG. 4] and Colombe, from 1925, by Max Ernst [FIG. 5] – part of a series of such doves the artist executed with handmade decorative cork frames.10 During that decade, Fénéon was also at the forefront of literary trends, publishing James Joyce’s Dedalus in his position as editor of Éditions de la sirène.11

Fig. 4. André Masson, L’Homme attablé, 1924. Private Collection.

Fig. 5. Max Ernst, La Colombe, 1925. Private Collection.

8

Apollinaire, “Revue de la quinzaine,” p. 431: “Il combine ses dons d’ecrivain d’art avec le rôle d’informateur, qu’il assuma quelque temps, pour nous donner anonyment chaque quinzaine, et de la façon la plus savoureuse, des nouvelles importantes qui concernent les arts.”

9 Penrose, Picasso: His Life and Work, p. 131. Penrose reports that on viewing the painting, Fénéon remarked to Picasso: “That’s interesting my boy you ought to devote yourself to caricature [sic].” Most comments about this episode have interpreted Fénéon’s remarks as evidence of conservatism, but the most likely explanation is that the man who was renowned for his acid wit was merely making a sly joke, and that the line survived in retelling because of its humor, a sense of which was somehow lost in the ensuing scholarship.

10 Collection Félix Fénéon, np. The Masson painting is referred to as L’Homme in the Fénéon catalogue, however its dimensions and general timeframe match those of the abovementioned painting, L’Homme attablé, which is currently in a private collection. No prior research has noted the existence of these two surrealist works in Fénéon’s collection.

11 Rewald, Félix Fénéon: L’Homme qui désirait être oublié, p. 75.

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In fact, Halperin’s focus on Fénéon’s writing unbalances a more holistic understanding of Fénéon as a mentor and facilitator – both in the foment of the anarchist years of the fin-de-siècle, and his later work as a dealer/collector and eminence gris.12 Fénéon becomes a man of the 20th century by shifting the emphasis to his equally significant later work, and by understanding how the influence of the early work and deeds found echoes in the subsequent century. In particular, Fénéon’s aesthetic and political affinities with the surrealists are an uncannily fertile ground to explore this more expansive view of a quite modern man. There are two periods in Fénéon’s life that are especially conducive for such associations. Fénéon’s work and actions prior to the end of the 19th century influenced the early years of the foundation of surrealism, including the interval of La Révolution surrealiste. In the 20th century, even as Fénéon’s prior critical reputation in Breton’s circle deepened, Fénéon continued to write, edit, and facilitate new developments in the arts, and those actions evince both direct and indirect relationships between him and the surrealists. In order to compare his work and its influence, this essay is structured so that Fénéon’s ‘present’ is intercut temporally with the surrealist ‘present.’

The first parts of the text explore that initial period when the surrealists were defining their ideals, and point to linkages between Fénéon’s pre-1900 biography and the development of a surrealist point of view. Surrealist writings often disclosed a preoccupation with precursors - particularly a handful of artists of the Post-Impressionist circle and certain writers associated with symbolism - as way of establishing a legitimizing foundation and as a form of

12

Paulhan, F. F. ou le critique, p. 64: “[Fénéon] disait: ‘Je n’aime que les travaux indirects.’”

Translation: “[Fénéon] said: I only like indirect occupations.”

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self-definition.13 Fénéon’s associations with Seurat, and his background as a publisher/editor of Lautréamont and Rimbaud led to a particularly profound influence. In addition, fin-de-siècle anarchist acts - like Fénéon’s – fascinated figures such as Breton, Soupault and Aragon, while anarchist thought helped fuel a movement that began with Dada outrages and had a decidedly political thrust from its inception. The transition to Fénéon’s post-1900 biography occurs through this anarchist line of inquiry, as shifting politics had ramifications in the more mature stages of surrealism.

The final parts focus on later aspects of Fénéon’s biography, noting how his sense of humor was an antecedent to a lineage of subversive humor that underlies surrealism. The insouciant tone of Fénéon’s performance in the Procès des trente, matched the type of humor extolled in Breton’s early essays in Les Pas perdus and which animated his friendship with the wellspring of ‘umor’, Jacques Vaché.14 Fénéon’s own avant la lettre humour noir is best experienced today in reading his arch perspective on violence and mayhem in Nouvelles en trois lignes. Later, this savage wit found parallels in both the surrealist enthusiasm for faits divers and in Breton’s Anthologie on the same subject, which was in many ways a response to upheavals of the times. If Vaché was Fénéon’s first devil-may-care doppelgänger, Marcel Duchamp can be compared to Fénéon – beyond his humor – as the inheritor of Fénéon’s most modern characteristics. Fénéon also had a concrete relationship with surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, in conjunction with these

13

Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, p. 41. For the purpose of clarity, I will follow Balakian’s nomenclature: “In this study Symbolism with the capital S will refer to the French literary school of the period 1885-1895, while it will be written with the small ‘s’ when designating the general characteristics of the form found in works which lie chronologically and geographically outside of the specific literary school.”

14 Breton, “The Disdainful Confession,” p. 6.

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indirect tonal affinities. Apart from the note mentioned above, evidence exists pointing to a relationship based on a similar interest in tribal artifacts, and a shared viewpoint regarding their aesthetic and political significance. Reevaluating Fénéon’s biography in terms of his direct and indirect influence on surrealism – artistically, politically and culturally – creates a more nuanced portrait of this complicated man who was a critical actor in so many movements of the nascent century.

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Part 1: Neo-Impressionism / A Superior Reality

Fénéon, Breton and Artistic Influence Fénéon first encountered Seurat when he saw Une Baignade, Asnières at the Salon des Indépendants in 1884.15 [FIG. 6] Evolving from an up-and-coming art critic to an art world influencer, Fénéon fostered Seurat’s work through seminal essays. He developed a new school around the painter and bestowed the name Neo-Impression on it.16 He also shepherded Seurat’s legacy, long after his death, by devoting several years of the 1930s to being the true author, although un-credited, of César de Hauke’s catalogue raisonné on Seurat.17 Although his work on Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists is Fénéon’s most lasting achievement in art criticism, his art world influence actually increased in the first quarter of the 20th century. As artistic-director of the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, from 1908 until 1924, Fénéon not only burnished the reputations of his favored artists of the fin-de-siècle through retrospective exhibitions, he also introduced new and important talent. [FIG. 7]

Fig. 7. Bernheim-Jeune in 1910, Boulevard de la Madeleine and rue Richpanse.

Bernheim-Jeune Collection, Paris.

Fig. 6. Georges Seurat, Une baignade, Asnières, 1884. National Gallery, London.

15

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 73.

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 302. These artists included “Signac, Camille and Lucien Pisarro… Luce… Angrand, and… Cross.”

17 Rewald, Félix Fénéon: L’Homme qui désirait être oublié, p. 80.

16

6

Fig. 8. Paintings and Sculptures of Morocco at Bernheim-Jeune, 1913. BJ-Matisse, Paris.

André Breton, from an early age, certainly understood a great deal about Fénéon’s place in the art world. Breton had visited the Bernheim-Jeune gallery on rue Richepanse and spoken to Fénéon as early as the summer of 1913, when he went to see an exhibition of Matisse’s Morocco paintings.18 [FIG. 8] Breton’s friendship with Apollinaire, which began in 1915, likely reinforced this already existing acquaintance.19 Due to shared aesthetic interests and a long professional history, Fénéon also had a warm relationship with Apollinaire.20 In any case, Breton became a regular presence at Fénéon’s gallery, commenting in a letter to his friend Théodore Fraenkel from that same year, 1913, that he had been moved by “the beautiful bucolic scenes” at an exhibition of paintings by K.-X. Roussel at Bernheim-Jeune.21 By the late 1910s, as he was developing his formative friendships with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, Breton’s aesthetic tastes had evolved as well.

The three friends had planned on writing a book that never materialized on “Henri Rousseau, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Marie Laurencin, Braque, Juan

18

Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 34; and Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 17.

19 Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 74.

20 Fénéon was actually the first to publish Apollinaire. His essay “Trois histoires de châtiments divins” appeared in La Revue blanche in October 1902, and other contributions soon followed. See Apollinaire, “Trois histoires de châtiments divins,” p. 208 (E-book BNF/Gallica); and Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 302.

21 Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 37: “de belles scenes bucoliques”

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Gris, Chirico [sic].”22 Fénéon, unsurprisingly, was an active participant in the careers of all these artists, with the exception of Gris and de Chirico, where the link might in any case be possible but unproveable.

Breton continuously revisited his aesthetic influences over several decades and Fénéon, or his most important artistic ‘discovery,’ was never far from Breton’s mind. This favoring of Seurat – as often happened with Breton – came to influence other surrealists. Most significantly, in the Spring, 1938 issue of Minotaure, Pierre Mabille published an essay praising Seurat’s lesser-known works in Conté crayon on white Michallet paper, which was accompanied by ten of these rarely seen drawings.23 [FIG. 9] Several of the works belonged to Fénéon’s collection.24 Breton and Fénéon evidently interacted over the years on a number of acquisitions of Seurat’s works. In the 1920s, Breton arranged for the purchase by Jacques Doucet of a study for Cirque from Fénéon’s collection.25 [FIG. 10] As late as 1958, in an exhibition at the Bateau-Lavoir titled Dessins symbolistes, Breton was extolling Seurat, who had two drawings listed in the catalogue, one belonging to the estate of Fénéon and the other to Breton, who in turn had bought it from Fénéon.26

22

Aragon, Lettres à André Breton, p. 162.

Mabille, “Dessins inédits de Seurat,” pp. 2 – 9.

24 De Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, pl. 599 and 675.

25 This transaction was completed in 1925. See Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 147. Perhaps Fénéon’s acquisitions of the Masson and Ernst paintings, which are from a similar time period, were precipitated through these dealings, since Breton also had Doucet buy Masson and Ernst works at this time. See Breton and Parinaud, “Radio Interviews with André Parinaud (1913 – 1952),” p. 76.

26 See Breton, Dessins Symbolistes, np; and De Hauke, Seurat et son oeuvre, pl. 325, 338, and 339. Breton owned three Seurat drawings in total, which all came from Félix Fénéon.

23

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Fig. 10. Georges Seurat, Le cirque [esquisse], 1891. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Fig. 9. Georges Seurat, Clowns et trois personnages, study for La parade, 1887.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Critical Echoes In many ways, Fénéon and Breton admired the same qualities in Seurat’s work. In their respective eras, both were disappointed by art which reflected “the very narrow concept of imitation,”27 and the art establishment’s preference for history and allegory.28 Both also responded to work that carried a double, interior meaning, a manifest sense of the artist’s sublimated psyche.29 Fénéon and Breton’s writings on this type of art echo each other across the decades. In his 1887 essay, “Le Neo-Impressionisme,” Fénéon wrote, “Objective reality is to them a simple theme consisting of the creation of

27

Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. 4.

Fénéon, “Le Neo-Impressionisme,” p. 71.

29 Fénéon, who often appropriated vocabulary from disparate fields, adopts the word sublimée “as Freud would later do – from its history in chemistry and alchemy.” See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 189. In a similar context he also employed the word synthétiser. Gauguin, another one of Breton’s heroes of the PostImpressionist period, “a few years later picked up the term synthèse to describe his own style of painting…” See Halperin, Félix Fénéon and the Language of Art Criticism, p. 88. It is this sense of interiority in painting, which Fénéon championed, that sets the orientation of the (Neo- and) Post-Impressionists, and later the surrealists.

28

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a superior and sublimated reality where their personality is transformed.”30 Forty years later, in 1928’s Surrealism and Painting, Breton put forth a similar thesis: “In order to respond to the necessity, upon which all serious minds now agree, for a total revision of real values, the plastic work of art will either refer to a purely internal model or will cease to exist.”31 Certainly, Breton apprehended an uncanny quality in Seurat’s work that Fénéon also detected.

Whereas Breton remarked on “Seurat’s disturbing insinuations concerning the way certain forms of figures ‘echo’ their background,”32 Fénéon pointed out Seurat’s extremely stylized human figures, which are depicted rigidly posed against the landscape of the Grande Jatte.33 [FIG. 11]

Fig. 12. Georges Seurat, Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte – 1884. Art Institute of Chicago.

Mentions of Fénéon continued into the late 1940s and early 1950s, after Jean Paulhan’s publication of a portion of Fénéon’s Oeuvres.34 At this stage, and in part as a response to surrealism’s faltering cultural influence in the post-World War II era, Breton was re-evaluating his political and artistic

30

Fénéon, “Le Neo-Impressionisme,” p. 74: “La réalite objective leur est simple theme à la creation d’une réalité superieure et sublimée où leur personalité se transforme.”

31 Breton, “Surrealism and Painting,” p. 4. Italics Breton’s.

32 Breton, “Artistic Genesis and Perspective of Surrealism,” p. 52.

33 Fénéon, “Les Impressionistes en 1886,” p. 37.

34 Breton, “Caught in the Act,” p. 130; and “Foreward to the Germain Nouveau Exhibition,” p.

241.

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values and reflecting on the twin legacies of anarchy and the art of the fin-desiècle. For Fénéon, as much as for Breton, “art and politics were a single cause.”35 Robyn Roslak, in her 1991 paper "The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony,” made a convincing case that the Neo-Impressionist’s divisionist technique reflected the period’s atomized anarchist zeitgeist.36 Michael Löwy, in his 2009 book Morning Star, claims art and revolution are siblings.37 If so, then in late 1945 and early 1946, in the series of speeches that help to ignite a revolution in Haiti, Breton conjoined these two realms in a spectacular fashion. According to Breton, the intent of the speech was “to align surrealism’s aims with the age-old goals of the Haitian peasantry,” since “the Haitian spirit, more than any other, miraculously [continued] to draw its vigor from the French Revolution.”38 The manuscript for the speech proves that Breton once again had Fénéon and Seurat’s school in his thoughts39 – perhaps as a result of the great man’s recent death and forthcoming (and widely publicized) final auction of his collection.40 In cataloguing artistic developments from Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, Breton quoted from Fénéon’s “Les Impressionistes en 1886” published in La Vogue.41

35

Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon, and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siècle, p. 122.

36 Roslak, “The Politics of Aesthetic Harmony: Neo-Impressionism, Science and Anarchism,” p. 387.

37 Löwy, Morning Star: surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism, utopia, p. 47.

38 Breton and Duche, “Answers to Other Questions (1941 – 1952): Radio Interview with Jean Duche,” p. 201.

39 Breton, “Manuscrit de la troisième conference,” p. 4.

40 M. Saint-Clair (Maria van Rysselberghe), Galerie privée, p. 63: “Il a été beaucoup parlé de Félix Fénéon ces temps derniers, à l’occasion de la vente retentissante, qui a rapporté, je crois, bien, une demi-douzaine de millions.” Translation: “There has been much talk of late of Félix Fénéon, due to the resounding success of the sale [of his collection], which generated, I believe, six million.” See also, Salmon, La Terreur noire, p. 245.

41 Fénéon, “Les Impressionistes en 1886,” p. 35. Fénéon’s articles on Seurat for La Vogue – which eventually became Les Impressionists en 1886, the only self-authored book Fénéon published in his lifetime, were a classic of art criticism. It is likely that Breton had read them well before the mid-1940s: “His two articles in La Vogue made him, in the eyes of his

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Breton and Fénéon’s shared aesthetic values were not the only connection to Fénéon acknowledged by Breton. Evidently, as Breton reviewed his own career in his later years, he came to associate himself and his work – also literary, artistic and political – with Fénéon and his legacy.42 Halperin’s description of Fénéon’s role as advocate, rather than mere critic, can also apply to Breton: Perhaps this one-to-one relationship of critic to artist is due to a kinship in vision, where the difference in craft only brings the two visions closer together, allowing for an exchange, or dialogue… This adherence to a certain vision, to a way of painting created in the critic’s own formative years, sets the poet-critic apart from the professional critic.43

When Jean Paulhan sent Breton that copy of Fénéon’s Oeuvres in 1949, Breton responded with warm enthusiasm regarding Fénéon.44 In appraising Fénéon’s writing, Breton exclaimed, “What power of expression this book reveals! As concerns painting he is really the only one to have understood everything.”45 Fénéon had been among the first to note a sublimated interiority in the work of Post-Impressionist artists, and had been vocal in prescribing more than merely optical meaning in creating new works of art, presaging the psychological focus of Breton’s movement. In effect, in linking his own career’s significance to Fénéon’s he was also creating a continuum in which he and Fénéon marked not just the end-points of an artistic revolution, but its highest summits.

colleagues, the chief interpreter of contemporary art.” See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 88.

42 Breton, “C’est à vous de parler, jeune voyant des choses,” p. 15.

43 Halperin, Félix Fénéon and the Language of Art Criticism, p. 88.

44 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 374 (Notes).

45 Ibid.

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Part 2: Symbolism / The Fortuitous Encounter

Illuminations, and a Youthful Turning Point In 1886, the same year as his Impressionistes, Fénéon founded the petite revue La Vogue.46 He continued his prolific “travaux indirects” through the last decade of the century, editing La Revue blanche from 1896 until 1903.47 [FIG. 12] No less a discoverer of avant-garde poets than of artists, Fénéon edited and encouraged “names now so famous one has to remind oneself that when he found them they were not only unpublished but so far in advance of those around them that they were usually unappreciated by anyone else,” and among these were Arthur Rimbaud and the Comte de Lautréamont (nom de plume of Isidore Ducasse).48 The first of Fénéon’s most influential tasks of this period was editing Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Even at this time, Rimbaud was a “mythic shadow,” his portrait and his biography known sketchily or to only a few.49 His manuscript for Illuminations, circulated by Verlaine in loose, lined sheets – unnumbered50 - was ultimately molded by Fénéon, who described the eventual narrative arc he imposed on the text in a 1887 essay for Le Symboliste, “Arthur Rimbaud: les Illuminations.”51 [FIG. 13] According to Halperin, since only one copy of this edition of Illuminations was sold upon its

46

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 64. His cofounders were Gustave Kahn, Charles Henry and Jules Laforgue.

47 Fénéon and Halperin, Oeuvres plus que complètes, p. xxiii – xxiv (Chronologie).

48 Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon, and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siècle, p. 122.

49 Fénéon, “Arthur Rimbaud: les Illuminations,” p. 572: “ombre mythique.”

50 Fénéon, “Arthur Rimbaud: les Illuminations,” p. 574 (Footnote). Fénéon described Rimbaud’s manuscript in a letter to Henri de Boullaine de Lacoste: “…d’une liasse de feuilles de ce papier tout rayé qu’on voit aux cahiers d’école. Feuilles volantes et sans pagination… pourquoit me serais-je fait scruple d’arranger à mon gout ce jeu de cartes hasardeux?”

Translation: “a bundle of sheets of that lined paper that one sees in school notebooks. Loose sheets without page numbers… why should I have had scruples about arranging to my liking this deck of cards?”

51 Fénéon, “Arthur Rimbaud: les Illuminations,” p. 572 – 573.

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publication, Fénéon wrote this article, “which had a resounding effect,” to publicize the text.52

Fig. 12. Félix Vallotton, Félix Fénéon à la Revue blanche, 1896. Private Collection.

Fig. 13. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of Honte from Illuminations, ed. 1886.

Private Collection.

Those effects resounded mid-way into the twentieth century, when André Breton, in a famous 1949 article for Le Figaro littéraire, “Caught in the Act,” excoriated the “swindlers” responsible for publishing La Chasse spirituelle as a newly discovered work by Rimbaud.53 Breton strenuously asserted that the “unworthy text” was a forgery,54 and quoted no less than the authority of Félix Fénéon’s 1887 essay to attest to Rimbaud’s groundbreaking originality.55 Breton was certainly in a position to judge the merit of this disputed text, since Rimbaud – and particularly les Illuminations – had been a

52

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 68.

Breton, “Caught in the Act,” p. 134.

54 Ibid.

55 Breton, “Caught in the Act,” p. 131. Breton writes that Fénéon was one of the first to point out that Rimbaud was “the one who broke down the door leading to that ‘beyond.’”

53

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guiding light since Breton’s first foray into poetry.56 In fact, in the same essay, Breton admitted that for himself and for his surrealist peers, “in their youth, the discovery of Rimbaud [had] been the turning point.”57 Poetry became the center of Breton’s life in 1913, at the impressionable age of seventeen, with the discovery of symbolist work like Rimbaud’s.58 Both Philippe Soupault and Louis Aragon read Rimbaud in their formative years, and – at this stage – they also assigned him pre-eminence in their poetic pantheon.59 In 1918, however, these three men, confronted by “the effect of the shock provoked by the encounter with Lautréamont,” added another writer to their firmament.60

Les Chants de Maldoror, Seminal Surrealist Text Once again behind crucial events, Fénéon was the unnamed editor of the 1890 publication of this unknown poet’s only completed work, Les Chants de Maldoror, which eventually became the most seminal work of the surrealist movement. Isidore Ducasse had “privately printed” the baroquely violent and sexual prose-poem in 1869, through the Lacroix publishing house, but the entire edition, which remained unsold in Paris, ended up at the Brussels bookseller Rozez.61 For the next twenty years, copies of it remained a secret

56

Breton, “Caught in the Act,” p. 153. Breton, like Fénéon, preferred Les Illuminations to Un saison en enfer. For Fénéon’s opinion, see Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 69.

57 Breton, “Caught in the Act,” p. 131. Italics Breton’s.

58 Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 26.

59 Soupault, Mémoires de l’oublie: 1914-1923, p. 31; and Aragon, Lettres à André Breton, p.

225. See letter from Aragon to Breton, from the front, November, 1918: “’Il tout le temps avec Lautréamont’ écrit d’A[ndré] B[reton] T[heodore] F[raenkel]. Jalousie sans raison au nom d’Arthur ma seule amour [sic].” Translation: ‘He’s all the time with Lautréamont’ wrote T[heodore] F[raenkel] of A[ndré] B[reton]. Unreasonable jealousy in the name of Arthur my only love [sic].”

60 Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 39: “l’effet du choc provoqué par la rencontre … de Lautréamont.” See also Breton, “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism,” p. 10.

61 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 172.

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shared among poet friends, eventually finding their way to Parisian intellectual circles through Huysmans and Leon Bloy.62 Fénéon, however, did not work from those rare printed copies of the edition, but rather from the manuscript itself, editing and shaping Lautréamont’s text in 1890, just as he had done for Rimbaud.63 [FIG. 14]

Fig. 14. Les Chants de Maldoror, frontispiece and title page, 1890.

In 1918, Philippe Soupault was convalescing at a military hospital on the boulevard Raspail, when he discovered one of these decades-old editions of Les Chants de Maldoror in a bookstore across the street:

62

Grubbs, “The Pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse,” p. 98; and Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 141 n. 124) 63 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 172 and 389 (Notes). Léon Genonceaux, who published the book in his name, mentions in his preface to Les Chants de Maldoror “use of the original manuscript.” Many scholars believe that Fénéon lent this manuscript, which has never been found, to John Gray, a poet closely associated with Oscar Wilde and his circle, for publication in English, and that Gray either lost or destroyed it. In particular, Gray’s comment in an 1891 letter to Fénéon has been offered as evidence: “Ce manuscrit me caresse les doigts – quelque chose qui a passé sous la main d’un poète qui est mort de faim! [sic] – c’est trop attendrissant.” Translation: “This manuscript caresses my fingers – this thing which has passed under the hand of a poet who died of hunger! [sic] – it is too touching.” See Fénéon and Gray, Correspondance: avec les contributions de John Gray a la Revue blanche, p. 38. (Others are more inclined to believe Gray was referring to poems by Jules Laforgue, who had been one of Fénéon’s co-founders at La Vogue and who had died in 1887. See Fénéon and Gray, Correspondance: avec les contributions de John Gray a la Revue blanche, p. 38 (Note). It seems most likely that Grey referred to the Maldoror manuscript, since Laforgue died of tuberculosis, and Fénéon, being a friend, likely would have known the correct cause of his illness. Ducasse, however, died during the siege of Paris in 1870, convenient circumstances for attributing his death to starvation.)

15

In the row marked ‘Mathematics,’ I noticed a paperback book with a beige cover. The title: Les Chants de Maldoror. The author: Comte de Lautréamont. This copy, which washed up in this bookstore following circumstances impossible to discover, had a brief inscription in lead pencil: ‘rare’… I bought this book because I had flipped through an issue of the journal by Paul Fort and André Salmon, Vers et Prose, in which they had published the first canto of the Chants de Maldoror…

A title, a name. Simple curiosity. One never knows…64

This simple act of curiosity would end up providing the young surrealists with the philosophical kernel from which much of the rest of the movement would germinate. Soon Soupault introduced Breton to Maldoror.65 Shortly thereafter, they sent hand-written copies in sections to Aragon at the front.66 In the last six months of that year, they all became consumed with the book, and began to research its origins.67 By 1919, they discovered the single extant copy, in manuscript, of Ducasse’s Poésies in the Bibliotheque national and Breton proceeded to copy it by hand as well.68 These years at the turn of the decade were rife with Lautréamont activity. In April 1919, the Dada group (as they were then) published Poésies in their new journal, Littérature.69 In the following year, they published a standalone edition under their equally new imprint, Au sans-pareil. This endeavor had close ties to another avant-garde publishing house, Éditions de la

64

Soupault, Mémoires de l’oublie: 1914-1923, p. 51 – 52: “Au rayon ‘mathemathiques’, je remarquai un ouvrage broché sous une couverture beige. Le titre: Les Chants de Maldoror.

L’auteur: Comte de Lautréamont. Cet exemplaire, echoué dans cette librarie à la suite de circonstances qui’il me fut impossible de découvrir, portait une brève inscription au crayon à la mine de plomb: ‘rare’… J’achetai le livre parce que j’avais feuilleté un numéro de la revue de Paul Fort et d’André Salmon, Vers et Prose, dans lequel avait publier le premier chant des Chants de Maldoror… Un titre, un nom. Simple curiosité. On ne sais jamais…”This account contradicts Aragon’s timeline of the Lautréamont origin story – see Aragon, Lautréamont et nous, p. 22 – but is rather more believable given the corroborating information in Aragon, Lettres à André Breton, and it is the version preferred by Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 67.

65 Soupault, Mémoires de l’oublie: 1914-1923, p. 53.

66 Aragon, Lettres à André Breton, p. 167, n. 1 and 175, n. 4.

67 Soupault, Mémoires de l’oublie: 1914-1923, p. 53.

68 Aragon, Lettres à André Breton, p. 264, n. 1.

69 Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 89. Other contributors at the time included “Jean Paulhan and ex-Apollinaire intimates Jacob, Cendrars and André Salmon.” See Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 85.

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sirène.70 At the time, Blaise Cendrars, who was part of Breton’s protosurrealist circle, was head of La Sirène. In 1920, however, he would turn his position over to Fénéon’s management.71 In the two-year period the followed, La Sirène, presumably under Fénéon’s guidance, re-issued a new edition of Maldoror and also published Lautréamont’s Préface à un livre future.

By the mid-1920s Lautréamont had definitively superseded Rimbaud’s influence among surrealists. Although Jonathan Eburne, in his 2008 book Surrealism and the Art of Crime, attributes the surrealist affinity for Lautréamont to the work’s capacity for “poetic negation,” Breton and his fellow enthusiasts were more likely to admire the Comte’s poetry for its generative effects.72 Firstly, the surrealists were aware that the Poèsies, in essence, contradicted many of the dark impulses of Maldoror.73 Most importantly, however, the analogous turn of phrase that initially sparked the surrealist’s fervor – “as beautiful as…” – eventually became the creative key to the surrealist edifice.74 The impulse to ‘merge antinomies’ derived directly from the uncanny metaphor created by Lautréamont.75 According to Breton, the metaphors at the heart of surrealism emerged from the poetry of Rimbaud and Lautréamont:

70

Aragon, Lettres à André Breton, p. 225, n. 1. Breton was stopping by the offices of la Sirène as early as 1918, when he wrote to Aragon that he had run into Jean Cocteau there.

71 Rewald, Félix Fénéon: L’Homme qui désirait être oublié, p. 75.

72 Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 69.

73 Soupault, Mémoires de l’oublie: 1914-1923, p. 97.

74 Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), Les Chants de Maldoror, p. 263. Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Matta, René Magritte, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and Salvador Dali were among the many artists directly inspired by Maldoror. For Max Ernst, the creative impulse came from the “the fortuitous meeting of distant realities.” See Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, p. 51 and p. 191. In addition, the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste in 74 December 1924, features a photograph by Man Ray of a felt-covered bulk, tied up in ropes, containing within a sewing machine and an umbrella. See Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 50.

75 Breton, “Ascendant Sign,” p. 105.

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Without consulting or even knowing each other, Isidore Ducasse and Arthur Rimbaud set an entirely new course for poetry by systematically challenging all the habitual ways of reacting to the spectacle of the world and of themselves by throwing themselves headlong into the marvelous.76

That it was Fénéon, tireless, iconoclastic editor, who made the publication and widespread knowledge of these two poets possible, is nothing less than one of those marvelous coincidences that Breton called hasard objectif.77 Cultural inheritance, in the sense of an intellectual family tree that gives rise to new discourses, was a constant source of contemplation for Breton. He believed that the modern tradition arose from the “the great rebels of the past” who had opened poetry and thought to new means of expression.78 For Breton, the convergence of these writers, at this time, and the profound influence they had acted as a “historical determinant” that shaped surrealist thought, and more broadly, our modern sensibility.79

76

Breton, “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism,” p. 10.

See Breton, “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism,” p. 11. “Certain situations in life that are characterized by the fact that they seem to be part at the same time of the real and an ideal series of events, so that they constitute the only observation post available to us inside that prodigious mental domain of Arnheim that is objective chance.” Italics Breton’s.

78 Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, p. 5.

79 Breton, “Caught in the Act,” p. 153. Italics Breton’s.

77

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Â

Part 3: Anarchy / The Black Mirror

Fénéon and Propaganda of the Deed By the 1890s, the cultural milieu that Fénéon inhabited was equally artistic and political. Fénéon’s circle consisted of anarchist artists, like Kees van Dongen and Camille Pisarro, writers such as Paul Adam and Octave Mirbeau, and more extreme believers of ‘Propaganda of the Deed,’ like the previously mentioned Émile Henry.80 [FIG. 15] The group jointly collaborated on editing, illustrating and writing for petit revues, putting on theatrical performances and exhibiting artwork with decidedly anarchist inclinations. Fénéon often contributed works of cultural or art criticism to committedly anarchist publications such as Zo d’Axa’s L’En-dehors,81 while the more literary Revue blanche evolved under his editorship into “the leading anarchisant art journal of the 1890s.”82

Fig. 15. Kees van Dongen, Portrait de Félix Fénéon, no date. Formerly the collection of Félix Fénéon, current location unknown. Reproduced in Jean Paulhan’s F. F. ou le critique.

80

Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris, p.

40. Kees van Dongen recalled the circumstances of meeting Fénéon: “I had met a curious gentleman named Félix Fénéon. I had met him because he was an anarchist. We were all anarchists without throwing bombs, we had those kinds of ideas.”

81 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 254.

82 Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris, p.

28 and 73. See also, Salmon, La Terreur noire, p. 245, on Fénéon: “L’irrespectueuse Revue blanche lui dut sa mauvaise reputation, de si bon aloi.” Translation: “The disrestpectful Revue blanche gave him a bad reputation, of such good quality.”

18

Despite the typical distinction between intellectual, non-violent anarchists and the partisans of “Propaganda of the Deed,” Fénéon was the exception. His political essays, published anonymously – including a lengthy early text, “Patrie,” written under the by-line “hombre [sic]” – criticized the institutions of nationhood and called for the eradication of “tacit beliefs and taboo sentiments.”83 In several later essays, published in the Revue anarchiste and the Revue Libertaire, Fénéon’s decidedly militant politics became evident, as he responded to anarchist bombings with extreme sangfroid. Fénéon wrote of one explosion, “what intimate charm in the story of that bombing in rue des Bons-Enfants…” 84 [Fig. 16] This quote, from an 1893 essay entitled “L’Agitation,” refers to a bomb, set by Émile Henry in 1892 in sympathy with a miner’s strike in Carmaux, which killed a boy and four police officers.85

Fig. 16. La Dynamite à Paris: L’Explosion de la rue des Bons-Enfants, Le Progrès illustré, 1892. Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon.

83

Fénéon, “Patrie,” p. 97 (for by-line) and p. 89: “il ne peut plus être de croyances indiscutables ni de sentiments ‘tabou’.”

84 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 249. For more complete context, see Fénéon, “L’Agitation,” p. 929: “Combien plus seduisante la gloire anonyme du compagnon qui trouble le Tout-Barcelone des dernières, et quel charme intime dans l’histoire de cette bombe de la rue des Bons-Enfants…” Translation: “How much more seductive the anonymous glory of the comrade who troubled all of Barcelona of late, and what intimate charm in the story of that bombing in rue des Bons-Enfants…”

85 Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon, and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siècle, p. 320.

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Henry was by that time Fénéon’s close friend, and decades afterwards, Fénéon admitted to Jean Paulhan and others that he provided Henry with one of his mother’s dresses to use as a disguise when carrying out the plot.86 Henry was not arrested for this act, which remained unresolved when Fénéon audaciously praised it in his essay, but rather for the 1894 attentat at the Café Terminus in Saint-Lazare mentioned in the introduction of this text. By this time, Fénéon’s association with Henry was well known by the police. When Fénéon’s flat and office were searched after the Café Terminus bombing, they found a box of small mercury detonators, which Henry had presumably passed along to Fénéon for safekeeping.87 Due to this evidence and Fénéon’s provocative writings in the press, he was accused in the Procès des trente under the notorious “lois scélérates.” Among the 30 accused, all but three – including Fénéon – were acquitted.

In spite of his acquittal on lesser charges, Fénéon himself was probably guilty of a bombing that took place on 4 April 1894, just weeks before his arrest as Henry’s accomplice on the 28th of April, and less than two months after Henry was caught.88 Fénéon is now widely believed to have been responsible for the attentat at the restaurant Foyot that blinded Laurent Tailhade in one eye.89 In that officially unsolved incident, the perpetrator left a

86

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 270, and p. 394 (Notes). Halperin explains in the notes to this chapter that Jean Paulhan, Emile Compard, and Suzanne Alazet des Meules all confirmed this story in interviews.

87 The Paris police started a file on Fénéon in 1892. See See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 267.

88 See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 270.

89 See Salmon, La Terreur noire, p. 212 – 213: Tailhade “serait aussi l’unique victime d’un dynamiteur inconnu.

Inconnu? On n’a jamais nommé personne… Soixante-cinq ans plus tard, c’est-à-dire maintenant, peu avant que j’écrive tout ceci, un tres vieux temoin, quelqu’un qui serait le doyen de l’anarchie si Proudhon ne l’avait pas conduit à Maurras, m’a confié qu’un subtil homme de lettres s’était alors vanté à lui d’avoir posé la bombe qui explosa au seuil de chez

20

bomb disguised as a flowerpot on the windowsill of the restaurant Foyot.90 [FIGS. 17 and 18] This restaurant was located on the rue de Vaurigard across from Senate, and was a known gathering-place of the ton. That the explosion injured Tailhade is highly ironic.91 He was an avowed anarchist who had caused a minor scandal in the press just the year before when quoted as saying, “What matter the victims, if the gesture is beautiful!” in response to another bomb set by the anarchist Vaillat.92 He remained a committed

Foyot. Il importe de préciser que cet homme de lettres fort connu, et même pas oublié aujourd-hui, bien qu’il ait peu ecrit…”

Translation: Tailhade “would be the only victim of an unknown bomber.

Unknown? No one was ever named… Sixty-five years later, that is to say now, just prior to writing all of this, a very old witness, someone who would have been the dean of anarchy if Proudhon had not leaned towards Maurras, confided in me that a subtle man of letters had bragged of having planted the bomb that exploded on the threshold of Foyot’s. It is important to point out that this man of letters was well-known, and not even forgotten today, though he wrote little…”

Halperin explains that Fénéon is presumed to be the man of letters, while the old witness is Alexandre Cohen. She received this information in 1964 from François Sullerot.

See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 394 (Notes).

Salmon knew both Fénéon and Cohen well. See See Salmon, La Terreur noire, p. 239 (Fénéon) and 245 (Cohen).

Alexander Cohen was a fellow anarchist writer who had fled to London in 1894 rather than face arrest for seditious acts. Fénéon helped him pass letters and supported him financially during this exile. See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-deSiècle Paris, p. 271 – 272.

Furthermore, Fénéon and Cohen continued to be acquainted until the end of Fénéon’s life. In a letter to the art dealer Jacques Rodrigues-Henriques in 1939, Fénéon, with his typical wry humor, describes an incident regarding Cohen: “It eût fallu recommender à M. Gauffin [who had wriiten to Fénéon asking for information about another anarchist who had been involved in the Proces de trente] de ne rappeler mon existence à Cohen sous aucun prétexte. Par maladresse, il n'eût point manqué de me trahir. Or ce Cohen, que Luce connaît bien, est un impitoyable raseur, et, comme malheureusement il me veut du bien, il m'aurait assiégé, surtout s'il avait appris que je vis à une heure seulement de sa demeure.”

Translation: “It would be necessary to tell M. Gauffin to not remind M. Cohen of my existence under any circumstance. Mistaking himself, he couldn’t fail to betray me. This Cohen, who Luce knows well, is a pitiless bore, and, since unfortunately, he only wishes me well, he would besiege me, above all if he were to learn that I live just an hour from his home.” See Fénéon and Rodrigues-Henriques, Correspondance 1906 - 1942: Félix Fénéon and Jacques Rodrigues-Henriques, p. 97.

As Luc Sante says of Fénéon’s guilt, in his “Introduction” to Fénéon’s translated Novels in Three Lines, “The evidence is a chain of hearsay, but suggestive.” See Sante, “Introduction,” p. xvi.

90 See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 276.

91 Salmon, La Terreur noire, p. 215: “Humour noir? La bombe anonyme fit beaucoup rire en crevant un oeil à Laurent Tailhaide...” Translation: “Black humor? The anonymous bombe made many laugh in puncturing Laurent Tailhade’s eye.”

92 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 276 – 277: In the police’s search of Fénéon’s apartment they had found Tailhade’s calling card. After the attentat Foyot, Tailhade “used to sometimes remove his glass eye before dinner and put it in

21

anarchist and – given the evident cliquishness of Parisian anarchist circles – a friend of Fénéon’s, even after his injury. Fénéon continued under police surveillance/reports, and presumably, therefore, agitating for anarchist causes until 1908.93

Fig. 18. André Salmon, Portrait de Laurent Tailhade, no date.

Reproduced in André Salmon’s La Terreur noire.

Fig. 17. Alphonse Bertillon, Le restaurant Foyot, 4 April 1894. Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris.

a goblet of water on the mantelpiece: ‘The gesture is neither beautiful nor elegant, but allow me to present myself before you as a Cyclops, since destiny willed that I pay with an eye for the publicity Foyot received.’” [FIG. 20] 93 See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 295. Even after 1908, Fénéon continued to be slyly subversive. See Fénéon, “Qu’en pensez vous?,” p.

100: In 1939, Fénéon sends a response with an anarcho-surrealist flavor to a survey asking what readers think about a government plan to raise funds for prizes to encourage population growth by issuing new sets of stamps. Fénéon cynically responds “La propaganda du minister des P[ostes] T[élégraphes et] T[éléphones] ‘pour la natalité’ est molle et sterile. Que n’exaltet-il les populations, en leur offrant en exemple sur ses timbres-poste, une famille de lapins, ou deux harengs! Voila des reproducteurs sérieux.”

Translation: “The propaganda from the minister of the P. T. T. to promote births is flaccid and sterile. Wouldn’t it arouse the population to offer them on their postage stamps, a family of rabbits or a couple of herrings! Those are serious reproducers.”

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Surrealism’s Poetics of Violence and an Individualist Revolution According to André Breton, there is a germ of anarchy at the root of surrealism.94 By that crucial year of 1913, Breton had also begun reading the anarchist press, in addition to his immersion in poetry.95 Breton was fascinated by anarchists from the era of attentats – in particular Émile Henry.

According to the biographer Marguerite Bonnet, who charted his early influences in 1975’s André Breton: Naissance de l'aventure surréaliste, Breton “had regarded Henry as ‘the most prominent figure of anarchism’ and his [trial] statement as the ‘most beautiful expression of individual revolt.”96 Breton and his young friends – Soupault, Aragon and others – were also fascinated by accounts of other notorious anarchists, including Ravachol and the Bonnot gang.97 Breton was also aware of Fénéon’s prosecution as an accomplice of Henry in the Procès des trente (if not of his guilt in the Foyot bombing).98 Fundamentally, the incipient surrealist group of the 1910s was more interested in fin-de-siècle anarchism than in anarchism of its own day.99 As surrealism evolved, in the first half of the 1920s, from being a poetic movement to a simultaneously artistic and political one, its members’ interests

94

Breton, “Tower of Light,” p. 265; and Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 55 95 Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 51.

96 Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 64: “il a tenu Emile Henry pour ‘la plus haute figure de l’anarchie’, et ses declaration pour ‘la plus belle expression de la révolte individuelle.” Breton felt an additional affinity for Henry because he saw a surreal connection in the fact that in order to evade arrest, Henry had pretended his name was Breton: “une sort de lent transfert, de nature presque onirique…” Translation: “a sort of slow transfer, almost dreamlike in nature.” See Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 65.

97 Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l’aventure surréaliste, p. 62 – 63.

98 Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes: 1919 – 1969, p. 12: “Breton était égalment plain d’admiration pour Mallarmé lorsqu’il vint temoigner en faveur de son ami Félix Fénéon inculpé… dans le procès des Trente [sic].” Translation: “Breton was equally full of admiration for Mallarmé, since he came to testify in favor of his friend Félix Fénéon indicted in the procès des Trente [sic].”

99 Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes: 1919 – 1969, p. 38.

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also turned towards contemporaneous events.100 This is particularly evident in the first issue of La Révolution surréaliste, which contains a photomontage with portraits of the men of surrealism surrounding a larger, central image of Germaine Berton, an anarchist assassin in whom they must have recognized the allure of their fin-de-siècle anarchist heroes.101 [Fig. 19] In 1923, Berton shot the militant nationalist leader Marius Plateau in the offices of L’Action francaise, although her more likely target was his superior in the movement, Leon Daudet. Shortly after Berton’s imprisonment, Daudet’s son committed suicide, and the death was attributed to his defiant anarchist views and secret love for Berton. The scandal created by the assassination and it’s fall-out engrossed French society. It particularly transfixed the surrealists, who sent a congratulatory letter to the anarchist journal that had covered the news of the Daudet suicide.102

Fig. 19. Group portrait, surrealists and Germaine Berton, La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 1, 1 December, 1924.

100

Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 100; and Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes: 1919 – 1969, p. 27.

101 Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes: 1919 – 1969, p. 34.

102 Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 88. Detailed information regarding the Berton case and the surrealist reaction begins in Eburne’s book on page 55.

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Several surrealists – like Aragon – wrote essays about Berton as a means of exploring the subject of murder and political violence. In the same issue of La Révolution surréaliste, Aragon echoed Breton’s esteem for Émile Henry, praising Berton’s act as “the most beautiful protestation raised on the face of the earth against the hideous lie of happiness.”103 Four years earlier, in an essay titled “Asassiner,” which appeared in response to the violent murder of a young girl, Benjamin Péret wrote (with a sangfroid reminiscent of Fénéon), “A crime interests us only insofar as it is an experiment (a dissociation of chemical compounds).”104 According to Jonathan Eburne, the example of anarchist violence fueled the aesthetics and ethics of surrealism,105 rooting its political activity in a libertarian philosophy of individualism.106 These threads of anarchist violence, connecting the turn of the century to contemporaneous events, when woven together with the early “rhetorical excess” of surrealist writing on violence, lead inexorably to Breton’s most famous and caustic statement, from his 1929 Second Manifesto of Surrealism: “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.”107 Once again, Fénéon’s significance became ineluctable, as surrealism’s political pendulum swung away from communism and back to anarchism during the Stalinist period. Fénéon’s turn towards communism in the early part

103

Aragon, “Germaine Berton,” np: “la plus belle protestation élevée à la face du monde contre le mensonge hideux du bonheur” 104 Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 58.

105 Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 51 and 59.

106 See also Paligot, Parcours politique des surréalistes: 1919 – 1969, p. 37: “L’individualisme est au coeur de cet attrait pour l’anarchisme.” Translation: “Individualism is at the heart of [their] attraction to anarchy.”

107 Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” p. 125.

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of the 20th century was a choice based on the Soviet organization’s revolutionary efficacy, and was an “evolution due in part to [French] anarchist involvement in the labor movement [anarcho-syndicalism].”108 By 1926, most members of the surrealist group had converted to communism for similar expeditious reasons.109 Breton adopted this very term when describing the surrealists’ political development from less-than-committed anarchists to what others derisively termed as communists “in short pants.”110 Ultimately, however, surrealism’s alignment with communism would not last. Breton’s own political instinct was more libertaire in spirit than adherence to communist beliefs would allow. According to Michael Löwy, surrealism was “above all a particular state of mind – a state of insubordination, negativity, and revolt.”111 By 1938, in the essay “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art,” Breton had come to “believe the supreme task for art in this age is consciously to take an active part in preparing the revolution” even if that meant a withdrawal from communism.112 Ultimately, after the Moscow Trials of 1937, Breton would no longer be able to abide by communism’s requirements of conformism in the cause of revolution, and his inner circle would follow suit. Félix Fénéon, on the other hand, continued as a committed member of the French Communist Party for the remainder of his life.113 In fact, in organizing his estate, Fénéon wanted to bequeath the proceeds from the

108

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 295. See also, M. Saint-Clair (Maria van Rysselberghe), Galerie privée, p. 73: “Il fut anarchiste par tempérament, puis communiste par raison.” Translation: “He was an anarchist due to temperament, then a communist due to reason.”

109 Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 111.

110 Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 141. See also, Breton and Parinaud, “Radio Interviews with André Parinaud (1913 – 1952),” p. 76: “I admit it looked very much like a mass conversion...”

111 Löwy, Morning Star: surrealism, marxism, anarchism, situationism and utopia, p. 2.

112 Breton, “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art,” p. 33.

113 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 308.

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auction of his famous collection to the Soviet Union. He was dissuaded by this course of action by John Rewald, who pointed out the cultural and political unfeasibility of executing this plan during the height of World War II.114 Breton on the other hand, spent surrealism’s post-communist period in rapprochement with anarchism. In a 1952 essay for Le Libertaire titled “La claire tour,” Breton traced surrealism’s divergence from its anarchist infancy and a longing to correct the errors of the past through a return to origins.115 As proven in the following two sections, one of the few areas in which Fénéon’s opinions diverged from Breton’s was in their political inclinations in the 1930s and 1940s. Still, in spite of their political differences, both Fénéon and Breton had arrived at their respective positions through a fundamental belief in a libertaire concept of individual revolution.116

114

Rewald, Félix Fénéon: L’Homme qui désirait être oublié, p. 82 – 83.

Juillard, “Preface,” p. xiv.

116 Breton, “The Cantos of Maldoror,” p. 49: “Revolution – political, poetic, and epistemological – became the banner under which the surrealists strove to unify these fields of knowledge.”

See also, Fénéon, “Patrie,” p. 86 – 87.

115

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Â

Part 4: Humor / Those Joyful Terrorists

Fénéon and the Ego’s Invulnerability Throughout his life, Félix Fénéon had a reputation for great wit. According to Halperin this “deadpan humor” was part of his personal style.117 It was also a mode of response to a modern world gone mad. While on trial in the Procès des trente, which started on 6 August 1894, Fénéon put on a sublime performance of this type of comedy. On the first day of the trial, Fénéon had stopped the slow march of prisoners and guards out of the courtroom to momentarily confer with his lawyer. As a result, he was “brutalized in front of twenty lawyers and a few journalists” who had loudly protested this treatment.118 The next day was his turn to testify. Observers remarked on his “glacial” temperament, which brooked no heatedness, but seemed as if he had resolved himself to indifference.119 Rather than succumbing to the weight of the forces arranged against him, he kept his dandyish cool,120 and ran circles around the prosecution. The following line of questioning was typical of his exchanges with the advocat général Bulot and his judge in the proceeding: J[udge Dayras:] When your mother was interrogated, she said your father found these detonators in the street.

F[énéon:] That is possible.

J. That is not possible. One does not find detonators in the street!

117

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 7.

De Saint-Auban, et al, Le Procès des trente, p. 27: “Pendant une minute, Félix Fénéon s’attarde un peu... Alors les guardes, violemment, s’emparent de lui et – disons le mot – le brutalisent devant vingt avocats et quelques journalistes qui s’exclament et protestent et s’indignent.”

119 De Saint-Auban, et al, Le Procès des trente, p. 28 – 29: “une correction glaciale... pas d’eclats de voix, de chaleur de langage, comme si la resolution avait été prise d’une attitude indolente ou indifferent.” Translation: “a glacial mien, no shouting, no warmth of language, as if having taken a resolution to adopt an indolent or indifferent attitude.”

120 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 284: “When a solicitous visitor could not accept his answer, ‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ in response to urgings to tell his needs [in prison], Fénéon said: “Perhaps a bit of shoe polish; they are rather stingy with it here.”

118

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F. And yet, Monsieur Meyer, the examining magistrate, said to me one day: “You should have thrown those detonators out the window!” So you see one can find such objects on the public way. (Laughter)121

Having succeeded in making fools of his accusers, and subverting judicial authority on its own field of play, Fénéon won in the court of public opinion. The jury deliberated for two hours before acquitting all of the political prisoners, convicting only those three who had been accused of theft.122 In his 1994 analysis of The Popular Culture of Modern Art, Jeffrey Weiss provided a synopsis of the bohemian penchant for blaguerie.123 This type of comedy reflects a “transgressive ... provocational” attitude on the part of the writers of the fin-de-siècle, an upending of traditional values that signaled the rise of the new modern spirit. André Breton found the Great War exemplar of this spirit in Jacques Vaché – another young man with not much left to lose who chose a path of indifferent insubordination, a politically motivated “whatever.”124 For Breton, Vaché was the first embodiment of the principle of black humor, in

121

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 290.

Although this subject will be addressed briefly, later in the text, more can be written about Fénéon and his relationship to surrealism through crime. Ortiz, who was one of those condemned for theft at the trial, was an acquaintance of Fénéon’s (although Fénéon tried to minimize this relationship in his testimony). Ortiz, a suave thief, can be linked to surrealism through the long line of gentlemen criminals of fiction (like Octave Mirbeau’s Arthur Lebeau) favored by the surrealists (Fantômas). Fénéon was not above associating with thieves, and considered that type of crime in service of revolution honorable. See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 248: Fénéon “encouraged individuals to act according to their own conscience – to steal if need be – rather than give up the struggle for life.” Another character who fascinated the surrealists was the narrator/memoirist Randal/Darien, in Georges Darien’s Le Voleur. Little is known about the author, though both Breton and Benjamin Péret conjectured that the novel is actually an autobiographical account. One of the confirmed facts about this anarchist writer is that he went to exile in England in 1894. See Greau, Georges Darien et l’anarchisme littéraire, p. X. Many other anarchists, afraid of being implicated by the lois sclératés, fled France at this time, and Fénéon acted as agent and benefactor to several of them. See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 272 – 273. Perhaps linkages can be found through Darien as well.

123 Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 111.

124 Polizzotti, “Introduction: Laughter in the Dark,” p.10; and Breton, “Jacques Vaché,” p. 348: “A stance of utter indifference, along with a will not to serve any purpose whatsoever, or more precisely to conscientiously disserve.” Italics Breton’s.

122

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part because of his nihilistic, simultaneously manic, utter indifference. Vaché and Breton coined the word umor to describe this attitude, “a sensation… of the theatrical (and joyless) pointlessness of everything.”125 The stance expressed as umor, which would later be called ‘objective humor” and then “black humor,” became a profound surrealist philosophy. Based on a Freudian interpretation of what John Erickson termed the individual’s “recovery of that which has been repressed by the dominant discourse,”126 this kind of humor is one of the few healthy responses to suffering. According to Freud, humor is among the only available options for the psyche, along a spectrum that includes deflection through substance dependence or descent into madness.127 [FIG. 20]

Fig. 20. Maximilien Luce, Fénéon en prison, 1894. Current location unknown. Reproduced in Jean Paulhan’s F. F. ou le critique.

Erickson, in his essay “Surrealist Black Humor as Oppositional Discourse,” argued that this psychological reaction to oppression, morphed into concept

125

Jacques Vaché, “Letter 4/29/17,” p. 351.

Erickson, “Surrealist Black Humor as Oppositional Discourse,” p. 198. Erickson deals mainly with the Anthologie de l’humour noir, but does address the transition from ‘objective humor’ to ‘black humor.’ To a degree this text aims to readdress the terms by drawing a distinction based on the discourse of power and authority to which Erickson refers.

127 Erickson, “Surrealist Black Humor as Oppositional Discourse,” p. 201.

126

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Breton eventually termed black humor. According to Erickson, some time between the 1920s and 1930s, black humor developed from (but is different than) Breton’s Hegelian theory of objective humor.128 From a longer perspective, however, it is clear that black humor and objective humor are one and the same, and that the same ideas also reside in umor.129 All of these types of humor – including Fénéon’s icy avoidance of the death penalty through blaguerie represent the same impulse against authority. Breton described the “secret of the humorous attitude [as] the ability that certain individuals have, in cases of serious alarm, to displace the psychic accent away from the ego and onto the superego.”130 A distinction can also be drawn here, with Erickson’s argument that black humor’s “opposition is that of the ‘weak’ or powerless individual who profits against the system.”131 The capacity for humor to up-end the status quo – as exemplified in Fénéon’s performance at his trial, or Vaché’s performance during WWI – was at this early stage congruent with the tropes of classical comedy: “The slave beats the master and it’s funny.”132 The second development in surrealism’s theory of humor, truly black comedy, involves a much darker comic

128

Erickson, “Surrealist Black Humor as Oppositional Discourse,” p. 199.

Erickson, “Surrealist Black Humor as Oppositional Discourse,” p. 212. Erickson quotes Breton from “The Poverty of Poetry” in What is Surrealism about these precursors: “symbolism with Lautréamont, Rimbaud, corresponding to the Franco-Prussian War... dadaism (Vaché, Tzara) corresponding to that of 1914...”

130 Breton, “Lightning Rod,” p. 25. Italics Breton’s.

131 Erickson, “Surrealist Black Humor as Oppositional Discourse,” p. 201.

132 Rosello, L’Humour noir selon André Breton, p. 34: “Dans la comédie, l’esclave bat le maître et c’est drôle.” See also, for contrast, Erickson, “Surrealist Black Humor as Oppositional Discourse,” p. 203 – 205: Erickson attempts to read all of the entries Breton’s anthology, like Swift’s “Directions to Servants,” as examples of the carnivalesque idea of (Ian Frazer’s) Killing of the Diving King. However, other entries – like Sade’s “Juliette” – don’t fit so neatly. Neither, for that matter, does Erickson’s own example of Baudelaire’s “Le mauvais vitrier,” which he contorts to fit the case. As Erickson unhelpfully suggests, “Obviously we need to read differently.”

129

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disposition: “In Breton’s anthology, the strong strikes the powerless, and it’s still supposed to be funny.”133 The Anthologie de l’humour noir contains examples of both types of comedy. Swift’s “Directions to Servants” fits with the first paradigm, developed in the aftermath of The Great War: the bearing of the broken, but unbowed. Other entries, such as Sade’s “Juliette,” come from a more complete sense of disillusionment. What changed, over the course of the decade, are the victims and the consequences of power. The surreal absurdity of late black humor lies in the unceasing punishment of the weak.

Fénéon, Faits Divers, and the Anthologie de l’humour noir Fénéon’s humor similarly became darker over the course of a difficult decade.

After the financial failure of the Revue blanche, Fénéon took a job in 1906 writing faits divers for Le Matin. According to Eugen Weber, in his 1986 survey of the time and place, France: Fin de Siècle, The fin-de-siècle is the age of material novelties, of news, of faits divers, nouvelles à sensation – of scoops and beats and bulletins, newsbriefs and sensational tidings; the time when fashions – in dress, politics, or the arts – became clearly defined as being made to pass away: change for the sake of change.134

Fait divers – short capsules of daily events, often concerning oddities or the macabre – were a common journalistic format at the turn of the century. Readers often collected the funniest or strangest, but Fénéon’s – the only ones “ever considered literary texts, attributable to an author” – stand out as the most

133

Rosello, L’Humour noir selon André Breton, p. 34: “Dans le recueil de Breton, le fort frappe le faible, et c’est quand même censé être drôle.”

134 Weber, France: Fin de Siècle, p. 6.

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emblematic of their period.135 During the year they were published, Fénéon wrote up to 20 per day, over 1200 in all.136 Based on wire service stories or even submissions from readers, Fénéon’s Nouvelles, are sometimes meticulously phrased suspense stories, in other cases tragically universal ironies.137 They are always highly specific distillations of a vast and merciless world writ small.

In 1950, a selection of these Nouvelles was published in a special issue of La Nef, edited by André Breton and Benjamin Péret, which they called the Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle.138 They were grouped under the section titled, “Potlatch of the great inviters to the great invitees,” as a reciprocal evocation of influence and respect.139 Each one was illustrated with a potato print made by Breton, Péret, Jindrich Heisler, or Toyen. Below is a sampling: Caught by a tram that had just thrown him ten meters, the apothecary Jean Désille, from Vanves, was cut in half. [FIG. 21] In Menzeldjemil (Tunisia), Madame Chassoux, wife of a commandant, would have been killed but her corset stopped the blade. [FIG. 22]

135

Sante, “Introduction,” p. viii.

Sante, “Introduction,” p. vii, and p. xxii. Jean Paulhan published the first official collection in 1948, in the volume of Fénéon’s Oeuvres. It is based on an album found after Fénéon’s death that had been compiled by Camille Plateel, Fénéon’s mistress of 5 decades. The Nouvelles must have circulated in an underground format that kept Fénéon’s name associated with them long after the daily papers had been thrown out: Many of the most famous voices of the period – from Apollinaire (see Apollinaire, "Revue de la quinzaine," p. 432 and Apollinaire, “The Salon d’Automne,” p. 18.) to Gertrude Stein – mentioned Fénéon’s Nouvelles years, and even decades, after their publication in Le Matin (but prior to Paulhan’s edition). See also, Patricia Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Guerre Paris, p. 137 for an explanation of the parallels between Fénéon’s Nouvelles and Picasso’s cubist collages, as linked through Apollinaire.

137 Sante, “Introduction,” p. xxii.

138 Fénéon,“Hommage à Félix Fénéon: Nouvelles en trois lignes,” p. 166 – 169.

139 Fénéon,“Hommage à Félix Fénéon: Nouvelles en trois lignes,” p. 166: “’Potlatch des grands invitants à leurs grand invites.” In another section of the Almanach titled “Panorama du demisiècle,” Breton/Péret noted under the Faits divers section in 1944, the death of Félix Fénéon. See Breton and Péret, “Panorama du demi-siècle,” np.

136

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A gas explosion, which made a somber slush of the riches of his stall, burned the haunches of the butcher from Argenteuil, Cartier.140 [FIG. 23]

Like the darker examples in the Anthologie, these faits divers took perverse pleasure in the repeated blows that pummel the multitude. Morbid, winking morsels of mishaps and misdeeds, Fénéon’s fait divers exemplify black humor avant la lettre.

Figs. 21 – 23. Three of a series of potato prints executed by Breton, Péret, Heisler, and Toyen for the 1950 Almanach surréaliste du demisiècle. Images of originals courtesy of ADAGP, Paris, 2005 and Breton’s internet archives.

140

Fénéon,“Hommage a Félix Fénéon: Nouvelles en trois lignes,” p. 166, p. 168, p. 169.

“Rattrapé par un tramway qui venait de le lancer a dix metrès, l’herboriste Jean Désille, de Vanves, a été coupé en deux;” “A Menzeldjemil (Tunisie), Mme Chassoux, femme d’un commandant, eût été assassinée, mais son corset arrêta la lame;” “Une explosion de gaz, qui fit un sombre purée des richesses de l’étal, a brûle aux cuisses le charcutier Cartier, d’Argenteuil.”

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The DNA of the surrealist penchant for this darkest black humor exists in the very beginnings of the movement. This was far from the only example of a surrealist predilection for faits divers.141 The first issue of La Révolution surréraliste was, in many ways, dedicated to the concept. Suicide was a recurring motif in the issue, partially demonstrated through faits divers that mirrored that theme. Several of these ‘artifacts’142 were interspersed among the essays, images and poetry by the journal’s editors Pierre Naville and Péret.143 In addition, Soupault wrote an essay for that first issue, “L’Ombre de l’ombre,” regarding ““faits-divers and back page announcements in popular newspapers [which] provide both a lens into and an impossible distortion of modern social and imaginative conditions.”144 Black humor has been, since Vaché, an ironically modern attitude to the conditions at hand.

Breton’s Anthologie de l’humour noir, reflected the tyranny of “bloody utopias” which were on the rise in that period.145 He first mentioned the term at the Conférence de l’humour noir in 1937, in the era of Stalin’s Great Purge and the Moscow Trials, Hitler’s increasing belligerence, and the Spanish Civil War.146 The first edition of the Anthologie was published four days before the occupation,

141

See Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 42 – 46, for an overview of several surrealists and presque-surrealists who were inspired by the Nouvelles.

142 Sante, “Introduction,” p. xxvii.

143 Naville and Péret, La Révolution Surréaliste, no. 1, December 1924. The connection with faits divers, the focus on Germain Berton mentioned previously, and Man Ray’s photograph the Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, make this issue a (probably) unintentional Valentine to Fénéon. It also spells out, in a very concrete manner, how the manifold preoccupations of early surrealism were shaped – consciously or no, directly or indirectly – by Fénéon.

144 Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 9.

145 Graulle, André Breton et l’humour noir, p. 8: “La réflexion de Breton sur l’humour noir rest en effet indissociable des utopies sanglantes qui ont marqué, de maniere dramatique, le XXème siècle.” Translation: “Breton’s reflections on black humor effectively rest hand in hand on the bloody utopias which have marked, in a dramatic fashion, the twentieth century.”

146 Graulle, André Breton et l’humour noir, p. 9.

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and banned by the Vichy government for is politically problematic content.147 Breton included in it a selection from Maldoror, a work that is perhaps the blackest example of black humor. In the introduction to Ducasse’s work, Breton encapsulated, among its central characteristics, “topsy-turvy reconstructions of famous maxims.”148 Black humor negates the proverb regarding the inheritance of the meek. In the same essay, Breton claims that evil is a necessary “motor force of historical development,” and that the roots of progress lie in sadism and the breaking of taboos.149 From its inception, surrealism has worn a bitter smile, as the “crystal armor” of Jacques Vaché was battered against the tyrannies of history.150

Duchamp, a Coda If Vaché was the ur-humorist of surrealism, Marcel Duchamp was the master of its “comic geste.”151 Jeffrey Weiss and Gavin Parkinson have written extensively on this subject, so that the particulars of Duchamp’s “humor and play” are by now well known.152 Breton memorably described his demeanor as “elegance at its most fatal, and beyond elegance a truly supreme ease…”153 For Duchamp, as for Vaché and Fénéon, this ease came from a posture of complete “disdain of messages.”154 Fénéon and Duchamp shared other, more particular similarities as well. Both men considered themselves great paresseuses: Fénéon declared,

147

Polizzotti, “Introduction: Laughter in the Dark,” p.14.

Breton, “Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautréamont): 1846 – 1870,” p. 171.

149 Ibid.

150 See Breton and Parinaud, “Radio Interviews with André Parinaud (1913 – 1952),” p. 17.

151 Weiss, The Popular Culture of Modern Art, p. 109.

152 Parkinson, The Duchamp Book, p. 133.

153 Breton, “Marcel Duchamp,” p. 85.

154 Breton, “Marcel Duchamp,” p. 87. Italics Breton’s.

148

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upon leaving his post at Bernheim-Jeune in 1924, “I am ready for idleness.”155 Duchamp, in a similar fashion, “liked to tell interviewers that he was simply a respirateur.”156 In spite of their protestations, they continued to be consumed by certain preoccupations – for Fénéon it was Seurat’s legacy, for Duchamp, chess and the Étant donnés. In The Duchamp Book, Parkinson stated, “Duchamp’s wish to escape his own authorship was part of a larger programme to pass beyond any formal designation.”157 This desire for authorial obliteration, which also existed in Fénéon, was at the root of Duchamp’s provocative alter ego, Rrose Sélavy. The stratagem perhaps explains Fénéon’s aliases as well – from “hombre” to the “series of female names: Félicie, Luce, Thérèse, Denise, Agathe,” which Fénéon used to sign his correspondence.158 Perhaps their greatest semblance lies in the reserved confidence of an unspoken acknowledgement. Remy de Gourmont’s explanation of Fénéon’s withdrawal can apply equally to Duchamp: Never to write, to disdain that; but to have written, to have proven an evident talent in the exposition of new ideas, and abruptly to have fallen silent? I believe there are spirits who are satisfied once they know their worth; a single attempt sets their mind at rest.159

Marcel Duchamp, was in many ways the unacknowledged inheritor of Fénéon’s most trenchant characteristics – egoless, witty, gender-bending, up-ender of the status-quo, constantly working though ‘retired,’ who moved under the surface but caused ripples in every direction and into the future.

155

Perruchot, “Le très étrange Félix Fénéon,” p. 12: “Je suis mûr pour l’oisiveté.”

Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography, p. 15.

157 Parkinson, The Duchamp Book, p. 133.

158 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 13.

159 Brotchie, Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life, p. 127.

156

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Part 5: Non-Western Objects / Fénéon, That’s It

Fénéon and the Tribal Artifact Market On 18 June 2014, Sotheby’s will auction a 19th century Fang Mabea statue from Cameroon as part of their sale of Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie.160 [FIG. 24] The statue’s sale price is expected to break the record for the most expensive tribal object ever sold. Given the high stakes, an extensive marketing campaign has been built around the statue, which is the only one of twelve currently known Fang Mabea figures that is still in private hands.161 To establish the legitimacy of its value and impeccable credentials, the statue’s provenance has been prominently attributed to Fénéon in press materials.162 According to Jean Fritts, International Chairman of African and Oceanic Art at Sotheby’s, “This same sculpture, repeatedly, over a period of nearly 90 years, being chosen to represent African carving, underlies the true importance of this sculpture in all art history [sic].”163 Fénéon’s collection of non-western objects, like his collection of paintings, was significant for its exceptional quality.

th

Fig. 24. Fang Mabea statue, early 20 Century, Cameroon.

Robert T. Wall Family Collection, San Francisco.

160

“Statue Fang Mabea, début XIXeme siècle, cameroun,” np; See Sotheby’s promotional video, The ‘Fénéon’ Fang Mabea Figure, with Jean Fritts.

162 “Statue Feng Mabea: Félix Fénéon and ‘Art from Remote Places,’” np.

163 See Sotheby’s promotional video, The ‘Fénéon’ Fang Mabea Figure, with Jean Fritts.

161

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This statue is far from the only prominent object, a fact that was recognized during Fénéon’s lifetime. He lent his many artifacts for display in scholarly publications and exhibitions throughout the 1920s and 1930s.164 For example, one equestrian Yoruba sculpture from Fénéon’s collection was used as an illustration for an article by the eminent ethnographers Clouzot and Level in L’amour de l’art in 1924,”165 and by Georges-Henri Rivière for his article “Archéologismes” in Cahiers d’art in 1926.166 Walker Evans also photographed it for the African Negro Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935.167 [FIG. 25] Given Fénéon’s long friendship with Apollinaire (an early proponent of indigenous objects), and the avant-garde milieu of galleries and publishing in which he was eminent, Fénéon likely started collecting these non-western artifacts during the early 1910s. He would have entered the market alongside other prominent collectors and advocates of these objects, men like Apollinaire and the dealer Paul Guillaume.168

164

“Statue Feng Mabea: Félix Fénéon and ‘Art from Remote Places,’” np.

Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p.43.

166 Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p.40 – 41: Rivière was a “jazz musician and art consultant,” who was also a curator at the Trocadéro during this period, and who contributed articles on ethnography to Georges Bataille’s Documents. According to Kelly, “Rivière was a significant mediator between the world of the wealthy private collectors and the scholarly, ‘scientific’ realms of Documents and the Trocadéro, and the person who more than any other would represent this tension. Rivière orchestrated the commission by the brother of his former employer, Pierre David-Weill, of works by Giacometti and André Masson.” See Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p. 52.

167 “Statue Feng Mabea: Félix Fénéon and ‘Art from Remote Places,’” np.

168 To return to the anecdote about Fénéon and Apollinaire visiting Picasso’s studio: Given Fénéon’s familiarity with African artifacts and – it goes without saying – avant-garde art, it seems highly unlikely that he would have been caught so (untypically) flat-footed in seeing Demoiselles for the first time.

165

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Fig. 25. Walker Evans, Equestrian Figure, Dahomey, Yoruba, 1935. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Fig. 26. Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, Maîtres du cubisme, 1921.

Will They End Up in the Louvre?

In fact, Paul Guillaume was one of the respondents to a survey in the Bernheim-Jeune organ, Bulletin de la vie artistique, which Fénéon published over the course of three issues in November and December 1920, titled “Irontils au Louvre?” Other distinguished contributors to the debate included René Verneau, director of the Trocadéro museum, the aforementioned Clouzot and Level, and Leonçe Rosenberg.169 That same winter, Rosenberg was exhibiting the sweeping Maîtres du Cubisme at his Galerie de L'Effort Moderne. [FIG. 26] In framing the debate for his publication, Fénéon was once again at the forefront of aesthetic thought, this time about non-western material culture. According to Julia Kelly, in 2007’s Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, the tribal goods market in the early part of the twentieth century was “concerned predominantly with three-dimensional forms, around

169

Fénéon, “Suite de l’enquête sur les arts lointains: iront-ils au Louvre?,” p. 695 – 696 [Guillaume]; p. 732 – 736 [Rosenberg]; p. 736 – 738 [Clouzot and Level].

37

which debates about their status as ‘art’ or ‘artifacts’ coalesced.”170 This dichotomy, though not always clear-cut, fell across a spectrum marked on the one hand by those who primarily viewed the objects as aesthetic forms – like Guillaume – and others who preferred an anthropological focus on the objects’ function as tribal or religious implements. The two sides likewise tended to differ in their preference for African or Oceanic works. The formalists preferred objects made of “dark carved wood with a high polish,” which highlighted the prominent curves and severe planes of African sculptures.171 The aesthetic ethnographers opted to place greater value on “the material properties of ‘fetish’ objects, whose ephemeral, replaceable elements” like shells and fibers were neither museologically stable nor likely to provide fodder for Cubist canvases.172 André Breton began collecting tribal artifacts by 1916 at the suggestion of Apollinaire.173 By 1922, when he moved into rue Fontaine, Breton already had a significant collection of artifacts.174 Predictably, he fell on the same side as his mentor, who “was concerned not with distinct ‘art works,’ but with religious and magical practices.”175 Breton derisively referred to collectors who valued “certain nobility of skin rather than blood, attested by the ‘patina.’176 In a catalogue essay for a 1948 exhibition at the Andrée Olive gallery, he declared himself definitively on the side of “Oceanie.” In demarking the difference between the two factions, Breton opined, “the latter [African preference], in broad outline at least, could be said to correspond to the realist

170

Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p.3.

Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p.20.

172 Ibid.

173 Bonnet, André Breton: Naissance de l'aventure surréaliste, p. 35.

174 Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, p. 152.

175 Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p. 20.

176 Breton, “Oceania,” p. 170.

171

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vision and the other one [Oceanic] to the poetic (surrealist) vision of things.”177 Although these artifacts were not, strictly speaking, surrealist objects at this early date, Breton believed the schism marked nothing less than divergent paths in route to defining a modern sensibility.178 Although Fénéon wrote little to nothing regarding his own opinion about the Oceanic/ethnographic versus African/formalist divide, several actions point to preferences aligned with surrealist values and Breton’s vision of modernity.179 In “Iront-ils au Louvre?,” Fénéon offers multiple illustrations of Oceanic artifacts, including a couple that would have been significant to Breton: Breton’s “Oceanie” exhibition essay contains a description of a Hawaiian war god with “fearsome mother-of-pearl eyes blazing among the feathers” of its head, which resembles the Honolulu war god depicted in Fénéon’s essay.180 [FIGS. 27 and 28] Fénéon’s survey also contains a photograph of a New Guinean Tatanua mask remarkably similar to one used in the March 1926 issue of La Révolution surréaliste.181 [FIGS. 29 and 30] The

177

Breton, “Oceania,” p. 172. Breton also referred to African art, in the same essay, as “style through a gradual refinement,” whereas Oceanic art was “greatest effort ever to account for the interpenetration of mind and matter, to overcome the dualism of perception and representation.” See Breton, “Oceania,” p. 173 and 172, respectively.

178 Breton, “Oceania,” p. 171.

179 The one text he did write regarding indigenous objects was the catalogue to the posthumous sale in 1947 of part of his collection, which placed the Oceanic artifacts prominently in the beginning. See Fénéon, “Objets d’art negre: collection Fénéon,” p. 500.

180 Breton, “Oceania,” p. 173; and Fénéon, “Suite de l’enquête sur les arts lointains: iront-ils au Louvre?,” p. 728.

181 Fénéon, “Suite de l’enquête sur les arts lointains: iront-ils au Louvre?,” p. 735; and Breton, “Textes surréalistes”, p. 4. (Although uncredited in the image, this mask surely belonged to Fénéon’s collection – except for the first image of the text, Fénéon left the remaining illustrations of objects from his collection un-credited.) The mask shown in the Révolution Surréaliste issue was lot no. 104 at Breton and Éluard’s 1931 sale of tribal objects put on by Charles Ratton. See Collection André Breton et Paul Éluard: sculptures d’Afrique d’Amérique d’Océanie, plate vi. In the same “Oceanie” essay, Breton refers to “first-rate Oceanic objects, [including a] “great mask from New Britain, its magnificence unequaled, which one can discover in the Chicago Museum – a conical mask like so many others but crowned with a large parasol on top of which a six-foot-long prey mantis, made of pink elder pith like the rest of the mask, sits like a ghost. Whoever has not stood in front of that object does not know the limits of the poetic sublime.” See Breton, “Oceania,” p. 173.

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two men clearly shared a similar aesthetic outlook regarding these works, which was likely shaped by their similar political views.

Fig. 30. Feathered head of a war god, th 18 Century, Hawaii. British Museum, London. Image reproduced in “Iront-ils au Louvre?”

th

Fig. 29. Figure of a god, 18 Century, Hawaii. Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

Fig. 31. (Tatanua) Mask, New Ireland.

Formerly the Collection of Félix Fénéon.

Current location unknown.

Fig. 32. (Tatanua) Mask. New Mecklenburg. Formerly the Collection of André Breton. Sold in 1931 at the Collection André Breton et Paul Éluard: sculptures d’Afrique d’Amérique d’Océanie auction.

Current location unknown.

40

Fénéon, Surrealism and the Politics of Indigenous Objects In a later, 1924 issue of the Bulletin de la vie artistique, Fénéon published an essay by Breton regarding the imprisonment of André Malraux for the theft of statues from Angkor Wat.182 With typical logic of the period, Breton editorialized that Malraux had enacted a greater good by taking the objects, which would be under greater care in France.183 A paternalistic attitude towards the producers of non-western objects was common at the time of the Malraux incident, according to Lindsay French, in her 1999 article “Hierarchies of value at Angkor Wat”: There was little question... that some Frenchman should have the right to determine their disposition, however. The temples were the foundation of a growing European scholarship...In the context of the colonial regime in Indochina, it was the French who would decide how the temples should be classified and managed.184

In later years Breton would regret this position, as the politics surrounding these objects changed.185 Prior to the formulation of a surrealist theory of objects, surrealists were nonetheless turning away from a mode of

182

Fénéon, “L’Attrait de l’art khmer”, p. 470. In his introduction to Breton’s essay, Fénéon describes the young Breton as “le directeur de la revue Littérature, le poète de Clair de terre, l’essayiste des Pas perdus [sic].” Translation: “The director of the journal Littérature, the poet of Clair de terre, and the essayist of Pas perdus [sic].” As Halperin notes that even in his ‘retirement’ “jeunes écrivains” would send Fénéon their writings, he had probably read these early Breton works. See Fénéon and Halperin, Oeuvres plus que complètes, p. xxviii (Chronologie).

183 Fénéon, “L’Attrait de l’art khmer”, p. 470: “Qui se souci reellement de la conservation, dans leur pays d'origine, de ces oeuvres d'art? Je ne veux pas le savoir, mais je ne puis penser... [que Malraux va] servir l'art de notre temps en France, de realiser, qui sait, une oeuvre plus haute que celle qu'il a menacé.” Translation: “Who actually worries about the conservation, in their country of origin, of these works of art? I don’t care to know, but I can’t help think [that Malraux will] serve the art of our time in France, will realize, who knows, a deed more exalted that which he has threatened.”

184 French, “Hierarchies of Value at Angkor Wat,” p. 177. Italics French’s.

185 Breton, “Oceania,” p. 172: Breton wrote nostalgically, “There was a time, for some people who used to be my friends and for myself, when our trips, out of France for instance, were entirely guided by the hope to discover some rare Oceanic object for which we would hunt all day long without respite. It brought out in us a compelling need to possess that we otherwise hardly ever experienced, and, like none other, it fanned the flame of our greed... I talk about this in the past tense to avoid offending anyone... I am still as captivated by these objects as I was in my youth, when a few of us were instantly enthralled at the sight of them. The surrealist adventure, at the outset, is inseparable from that seduction, the fascination they exerted over us.”

41

appreciation for these artifacts that came to be associated with “ethnography’s colonialist agenda.”186 Fénéon’s political and aesthetic instincts once again appeared aligned with surrealist ones, when, “as a result of current political scandals and the resulting outcry of the anticolonial opposition of anarchists and socialists to French colonial policy in west and central Africa,” appreciation for these objects bifurcated once again, along political lines.187 In this period of flux, Fénéon and the surrealists had multiple linkages related to the purchase and display of tribal objects. Fénéon purchased a pair of Baoule figures that belonged to Breton at the Flagel-Portier auction, Art Primitif, in 1927.188 [FIG. 31] He also exhibited seven objects from his collection at the Éxposition d’art africain et océanien at the Galerie du Théâtre Pigalle.”189 Tristan Tzara and Charles Ratton had organized this exhibition in 1930. Mentioned in a prior footnote, Ratton was a dealer in tribal artifacts who had close ties with Fénéon as well as with the surrealist circle. He not only backed the sale of Breton and Éluard’s indigenous collections in 1931, but also the later, 1936 L’Éxposition surréaliste d’objets.190

186

Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p.30.

Leighten, The Liberation of Painting: Modernism and Anarchism in Avant-Garde Paris, p.

60.

188 “Importante paire de statues Baoule, Côte d’ivoire,” np.

189 “Statue Feng Mabea: Félix Fénéon and ‘Art from Remote Places,’” np. To visitors, this exhibition’s close ties to the surrealist movement was undeniable, and in some cases unpalatable. According the skeptical contemporaneous critic Henri-A. Lavachery, “African art is very much greater than that of the Oceanians because it has a human tone that the works of the Pacific Isles hardly have at all. The latter frequent a realm of the imagination where the fear of the unknown has given rise to a kind of madness and we understand why the surrealists, who believe themselves to be liberated from so many contingencies of earthly logic, have chosen this art as inspiration and friend.” Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p.31.

190 See Dagen and Murphy, Charles Ratton. L’Invention des arts ‘primitifs’, p. 8 and p. 11.

See also Maurer, In Quest of the Myth, p. 14. Issues of La Révolution Surréaliste “frequently carried illustrated advertisements for Charles Ratton’s gallery of primitive art.” (In reference to: La Révolution surréaliste, no. 6, 1926, p. 4; no. 7, 1926, p. 16; nos 9-10, 1927, p. 34.)

Breton and Fénéon both attended the important 16 December 1931 sale of Georges de 187

42

Fig. 32. Photograph of September 1931 exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies.

Reproduced in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 4, Décember 1931.

Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute and Breton internet archives.

Fig. 31. Pair of Baoulé statues, Côte d’Ivoire. Private Collection.

Among Fénéon’s multiple connections through non-western material culture to surrealist and quasi-surrealist groups, the most significant is his participation in the 1931 exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies. Held under the auspices of the French Communist Party, this exhibition was part of a larger Éxposition anti-coloniale which took place at what had been the former Soviet pavilion for the 1925 Éxposition des art décoratifs et industries modernes.191 It was intended as a response to the pseudo-scientific and exploitative practices being lauded at the much more widely attended, state-sanctioned Éxposition coloniale. According to Julia Kelly, within this context “surrealists and ethnographers were apparently in direct opposition.”192 In his 2004 book Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent,

Miré’s collection. See See Dagen and Murphy, Charles Ratton. L’Invention des arts ‘primitifs’, p. 7; and the Breton internet archives have a copy of the de Miré catalogue containing “annotations et quelques noms d'acheteurs.” (Translation: “annotations and several names of buyers.”)

191 Bate, Photography and Surrealism, p. 216.

192 Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p. 31.

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David Bate provided detailed examples of the types of displays intended to shock visitors, which included displaying Judeo-Christian icons with tribal objects and referring to both as ‘fetishes.’193 [FIG. 32] Although it’s unclear exactly how Fénéon became a donor to an exhibition which historically has been aligned tightly with surrealism, it is not surprising given his existing contacts, his fiercely libertaire moral attitude, and his communist politics.

Fellow communist Louis Aragon casually mentioned Fénéon’s participation in the exhibition in a September 1931 letter to André Breton, writing that he had “gone to the Soviet Pavilion, for the anti-colon[ial] exposition, to whom I gave some advice and some ‘fetishes,’ (other than myself, Fénéon, that’s it).”194 Fénéon’s importance to this exhibition, which has not been remarked on before, demonstrates his close alignment with surrealist values during this critical period.

By the early 1930s, Breton’s opinions on the debates of the prior decade coalesced into a theory of these works as surrealist objects, that incorporated objective chance and Lautréamont’s fortuitous encounter.195 For Breton, the tribal artifact was a conduit, ineffably evoking its magic through “waves of suggestion.”196 It was also – like a readymade, or flea-market

193

Bate, Photography and Surrealism, p. 219.

Aragon, Lettres à André Breton, p. 418: “aller au Pavillon des Soviets, pour l’exposition anti-colon[iale], et je leur ai donné quelques conseils et des fétiches (à part moi, Fénéon, c’est tout).”

195 Breton and Péret, ““Panorama du demi-siècle,” np. In the “Panorama du demi-siècle,” Breton lists under the year 1931 in the Arts section, “Création des “objets surréalistes à fonctionnement symbolique.” Translation: “Creation of surrealist objects with symbolic function.”

196 Breton, L’Art Magique, p. 126: “Magiques, certes, de telles oeuvres le sont en nous rien que par les ondes de suggestions qu’elles éveillent.” Translation: “The magic of these works exist in us only through the waves of suggestion that they evoke.” Italics Breton’s.

194

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discovery – a poetic encounter with luck.197 According to James Clifford, in his influential 1981 essay “On Ethnographical Surrealism,” The surrealist moment in ethnography is that moment in which the possibility of comparison exists in unmediated tension with sheer incongruity. This moment is repeatedly produced, and smoothed over, in the process of ethnographic comprehension. But to see this activity in terms of collage is to hold the surrealist moment in view – the startling co-presence on Lautréamont's dissecting table.198

Félix Fénéon, through the 1920s and 1930s, travelled with surrealism along this road. He contributed to the auction and exhibition market in non-western materials that – in its early years – helped fund surrealist activities. He also committed resources from his exceptional collection to surrealist-oriented exhibitions. Fundamentally, Fénéon shared a political and aesthetical point of view with the movement, which led to primitive artifacts becoming surrealist objects. Ultimately, this interpretation of non-western objects helped to define the contemporary discourse on indigenous culture.

197

Kelly, Art, Ethnography, and the Life of Objects, p.73: “Breton’s evocation of this ‘lucky find’ [in Nadja] also points to some of the complexities of the ethnographic find. While his example suggested that the found object’s meaning should remain willfully mysterious, its maker’s or original user’s intentions erased, Breton’s text did note... that this object must have been ‘precious’ to someone else... To see out and acquire second-hand things may be less of a ‘critical’ practice than initially imagined, serving to validate refinements of taste and judicious ‘selection.’”

198 Clifford, “On Ethnographical Surrealism,” p. 563.

45

Conclusion / Portrait de M. Félix Fénéon

The Signac Portrait

Fig. 33. Paul Signac, Sur l’émail d’un fond rythmique de mesures et d’angles, de tons et de teintes, Portrait de M. Félix Fénéon en 1890, Opus 217, 1890. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

No text on Fénéon would be complete without mentioning the famous 1890 portrait by Paul Signac titled Sur l’émail d’un fond rythmique de mesures et d’angles, de tons et de teintes, Portrait de M. Félix Fénéon en 1890, Opus 217.

[FIG. 33] Fénéon was never happy with this likeness. He thought, perhaps with affected humility, that it was Signac’s weakest work.199 In retrospect, however, it is possible to interpret this image as an encapsulation of many facets of a complicated man. On the surface, it is a definitive statement on Fénéon’s relationship to Neo-Impressionism. If Seurat was the central figure of this school, Signac was its most dedicated adherent.200 The portrait of Fénéon is at once signified and signifier, representing a distillation of the optical theories in which it is rooted.201 On a deeper level, the arabesques of the ‘rhythmic enamel’

199

Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 147.

Argüelles, “Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Colors, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890, Opus 217,” p. 50.

201 Ibid.

200

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background allude to the more ‘literary’ concerns of symbolism.202 The rotating spiral’s implied kinetic force also intimates, in a forward-looking coincidence, anarchist violence and the explosion at the restaurant Foyot. Humor tempers the retroactive violence of the painting. Halperin called it a “joyous spoof,” which was treated as a lark from its conceptualization: Fénéon agreed to be Signac’s ‘”accomplice,” only if it would be “immortalized” with the title Portrait of a Young Man.203 Meanwhile, the single flower which Fénéon offers with such a dandyish affect can be viewed as a proxy for the flowerpot vessel which contained the bomb.204 [FIG. 34] This iconic flowerpot was recreated and later stored in the police archives, and the echoes of the two – painted flower and simulated bomb – create a synthesized surrealist object. Jonathan Eburne described this type of chimera when he wrote, “At the moment [criminal violence] becomes subject to representation, the historical event of crime begins to obey the characteristics of art as a proliferation of objects and artifacts that bear the paradoxical relation of art to the empirical world.”205 The spiral, too, corresponds more broadly to Fénéon’s ever-expanding significance – his influence rippling outward in many directions.

202

Benjamin, “The Decorative Language, Fauvism, and the Arabesque of Observation,” p. 301.

Haperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 45 and p. 43.

204 According to Halperin’s imagined recounting of the bombing in the opening section of her biography, “In the crook of his arm he carried, somewhat incongruously, a flowerpot with a tender young shoot of hyacinth in it...” See Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-deSiècle Paris, p. 3.

205 Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime, p. 10.

203

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Fig. 34. La bombe du restaurant Foyot, 1894. Police facsimile. Musée de la préfecture de police, Paris.

No Disappearing Act When Félix Fénéon died in 1944 at the age of 83, Jean Paulhan was named the executor of his literary estate. Although they had known each other since the 1920s, they became close decades later, as Fénéon’s death from cancer approached. They had initially corresponded when Fénéon refused to publish a text Paulhan had submitted to La Sirène. Twelve years later, when Paulhan was editing La Nouvelle revue français, he asked Fénéon for a publishable text, and Fénéon again refused.206 Ever diffident, ever withdrawing, Fénéon, according to Paulhan, “shows himself to us, for a moment, in plain view and then disappears.”207 He would have never succeeded in making himself disappear entirely, however, in spite of his refusal to remain visible. Paulhan, who admired him greatly and modeled his own critical posture on Fénéon, did not allow it.208

206

Paulhan, F. F. ou le critique, p. 64.

Paulhan, F. F. ou le critique, p. 63: “Il se montre a nous, à tel moment, en pleine evidence et puis disparaît.”

208 Ouvry-Vial et al, “The Double Necessity of Criticism and Self-Effacement,” p. 27.

207

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Neither did Halperin, Paulhan’s protégé.209 In spite of writing anonymously, and his diligence behind the scenes, Fénéon’s published works now exist in several volumes. In spite of destroying letters, the evidence remained in the correspondence of others – like Breton, like Aragon – and in the influence he had on art, literature, and culture for the better part of six decades.

Fénéon could have remained a man of the fin-de-siècle, but that was as unlikely as a complete retreat into the shadows. His legacy does not merely depend on his exquisite taste or tireless labors, although those are partial factors.210 It also does not rely on just ‘Neo-Impressionism,’ or the Demoiselles, Foyot or the Nouvelles. His legacy is the result of an unfailing instinct for the modern, a robust disrespect for the status quo, and a desire to be useful. For decades, Fénéon worked nights, after his day job, writing and editing in order to promote the political and aesthetic values he esteemed. He was never formally accused of the crime he may or may not have committed; but Fénéon also took no credit for Lautréamont, for Seurat’s catalogue raisonné, or for the countless favors – big and small – that he did over the years: from giving Alfred Jarry a regular column in the Revue blanche so that he could support himself to loaning his own collection for a surrealist cause.211 Fénéon continued to offer of himself until the end of his life, not solely in the interest of shoring up a Post-Impressionist or Symbolist tradition, which alone

209

Halperin, “Au Lecteur,” p. vii – viii.

It is not a coincidence that so many portraits of Fénéon, including several reprinted in this text, depict him in lamplight, working at his desk.

211 Brotchie, Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life, p. 265 – 266. Breton was aware of Jarry’s contributions for the Revue blanche. See Breton, “Alfred Jarry,” p. 38 – 39.

210

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would have ensured his immortality.212 He gave his time and advice, continued to develop his tastes and follow his political convictions, for the sake of future movements and future generations. Whether Breton, and others associated with surrealism who also knew Fénéon, were aware of this discrete man’s involvement in so many of the disparate areas that impacted the surrealist point of view, is beside the point. Breton wrote regretfully of his ignorance of many of these aspects of Fénéon’s life in the same 1949 letter to Jean Paulhan mentioned previously: “Although I got to know him, was amazed by him, admired and loved him, I never understood him as you have. With no little chagrin and sadness I mull over the fact that I did not know how to see him and that it is too late.”213 In spite of that regret, Fénéon’s legacy, particularly as refracted through the lens of surrealism, did not merely survive into the 20th century, it is an integral part of surrealism’s foundations. If Fénéon had done only half the things he managed to accomplish - in so many fields, over decades – it is possible that surrealism would look very different.

The purpose of re-evaluating Feneon’s legacy was to bring into the light of the 20th century the life of a man who worked well into the middle of it, preventing his retreat into the shadows of the past. Two initial clues led to this reevaluation through his relationship to surrealism – the note, mentioned in the introduction, from the Cahier de la centrale surréaliste and a brief excerpt of Breton’s letter to Paulhan in Luc Sante’s introduction to the English translation of

212

In lieu of donating his collection to the Soviet Union, as had been his earlier wish, the proceeds from the sales of the estates of Félix (and Fanny) Fénéon were used to set up two annual prizes in perpetuity at the Sorbonne – one for a young poet, and the other for a young artist. See Rewald, Félix Fénéon: L’Homme qui désirait être oublié, p. 82 – 84.

213 Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris, p. 11.

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Fénéon’s Nouvelles.214 There are very likely more clues yet to be explored – in the context of surrealism and through other movements, both artistic and literary – which will inevitably affirm the ever-expanding spirals of his influence. Once Fénéon’s biography allows for a holistic view of his singularly modern sensibility, vast swaths of the 20th century will be seen in the light of Félix Fénéon.

214

Sante, “Introduction,” p. xi.

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Breton, André. “Nonnational Boundaries of Surrealism.” Free Rein (La Clé des champs). Trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D'Amboise.

Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 1996. 7 – 18. Print.

Breton, André. “Oceania.” Free Rein (La Clé des champs). Trans. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D'Amboise. Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 1996.

265 – 267. Print.

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Breton, André. “Surrealism and Painting.” Surrealism and Painting. Ed. André Breton. Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: MFA Publications, 2002. 1 – 47. Print.

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Breton, André. "The Disdainful Confession." The Lost Steps (Les Pas perdus).

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Breton, André, Louis Aragon, et al. Cahier de la permanence surréaliste: 11 Oct 1924 to 20 Apr 1925. TS 257000. Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet. André Breton Archives. 1 – 48. Web. 6 May 2014.

Breton, André and Jean Duche. "Answers to Other Questions (1941 - 1952): Radio Interview with Jean Duche." Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Paragon House, 1993.

196 – 208. Print.

Breton, André and André Parinaud. “Radio Interviews with André Parinaud (1913 – 1952).” Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism.

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Print.

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Dagen, Philippe, and Maureen Murphy. Charles Ratton. L’invention des arts ‘primitifs.’ Paris: Musée du quai Branly et Skira Flammarion, 2013.

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Symposium vol. 42, no. 3 (Fall 1988): 198 – 215. JISC Journal Archives.

Félix Fénéon. “Arthur Rimbaud: les Illuminations.” Oeuvres plus que complètes. Vol. 2. Ed. Joan U. Halperin. Genève: Droz, 1970. 572 575. Print.

Félix Fénéon. “Hommage a Félix Fénéon: Nouvelles en trois lignes.”

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Félix Fénéon. “L’Agitation.” Oeuvres plus que complètes. Vol. 2. Ed. Joan U. Halperin. Genève: Droz, 1970. 929 - 930. Print.

Fénéon, Félix. “Le Neo-Impressionisme.” Oeuvres plus que complètes. Vol. 1. Ed. Joan U. Halperin. Genève: Droz, 1970. 71 - 76. Print.

Fénéon, Félix. “Les Impressionists en 1886.” Oeuvres plus que complètes.

Vol 1. Ed. Joan U. Halperin. Genève: Droz, 1970. 27- 52. Print.

Fénéon, Félix. “Objets d’art negre: collection Fénéon.” Oeuvres plus que complètes. Vol. 1. Ed. Joan U. Halperin. Genève: Droz, 1970. 501 – 504. Print.

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Fénéon, Félix. “Qu’en pensez-vous?” Félix Fénéon: Petit supplément aux oeuvres plus-que-complètes. Ed. Maurice Imbert. Tusson: Du Lérot, 2003. 100. Print.

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Fénéon, Félix, and André Breton. “L’Attrait de l’art khmer.” Oeuvres plus que complètes. Vol. 2. Ed. Joan U. Halperin. Genève: Droz, 1970. 470.

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Salmon, André. La Terreur noire. Montreuil: L'Échappée, 2008. Print.

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List of Illustrations Fig. 1. Édouard Vuillard, À la Revue blanche [Portrait de Félix Fénéon], 1901.

Guggenheim, New York.

Fig. 2. Alphonse Bertillon, Félix Fénéon, 1894. Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris.

Fig. 3. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Panneaux pour la baraque de La Goulue, à la Foire du Trône à Paris, 1895. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Fig. 4. André Masson, L’Homme attablé, 1924. Private Collection.

Fig. 5. Max Ernst, La Colombe, 1925. Private Collection.

Fig. 6. Georges Seurat, Une baignade, Asnières, 1884. National Gallery, London.

Fig. 7. Bernheim-Jeune in 1910, Boulevard de la Madeleine and rue Richpanse. Bernheim-Jeune Collection, Paris.

Fig. 8. Paintings and Sculptures of Morocco at Bernheim-Jeune, 1913. BJMatisse, Paris.

Fig. 9. Georges Seurat, Clowns et trois personnages, study for La parade, 1887. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Fig. 10. Georges Seurat, Le cirque [esquisse], 1891. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Fig. 11. Georges Seurat, Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte – 1884. Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 12. Félix Vallotton, Félix Fénéon à la Revue blanche, 1896. Private Collection.

Fig. 13. Arthur Rimbaud, manuscript of Honte from Illuminations, ed. 1886.

Private Collection.

Fig. 14. Les Chants de Maldoror, frontispiece and title page, 1890.

Fig. 15. Kees van Dongen, Portrait de Félix Fénéon, no date. Formerly the collection of Félix Fénéon, current location unknown. Reproduced in Jean Paulhan’s F. F. ou le critique.

Fig. 16. La Dynamite à Paris: L’Explosion de la rue des Bons-Enfants, Le Progrès illustré, 1892. Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon.

Fig. 17. Alphonse Bertillon, Le restaurant Foyot, 4 April 1894. Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris.

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Fig. 18. André Salmon, Portrait de Laurent Tailhade, no date. Reproduced in André Salmon’s La Terreur noire.

Fig. 19. Group portrait, surrealists and Germaine Berton, La Révolution surréaliste, no. 1, 1 December, 1924.

Fig. 20. Maximilien Luce, Fénéon en prison, 1894. Current location unknown.

Reproduced in Jean Paulhan’s F. F. ou le critique.

Fig. 21. One of a series of potato prints executed by Breton, Péret, Heisler, or Toyen for the 1950 Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle. Images of originals courtesy of ADAGP, Paris, 2005 and Breton’s internet archives.

Fig. 22. One of a series of potato prints executed by Breton, Péret, Heisler, or Toyen for the 1950 Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle. Images of originals courtesy of ADAGP, Paris, 2005 and Breton’s internet archives.

Fig. 23. One of a series of potato prints executed by Breton, Péret, Heisler, or Toyen for the 1950 Almanach surréaliste du demi-siècle. Images of originals courtesy of ADAGP, Paris, 2005 and Breton’s internet archives.

Fig. 24. Fang Mabea statue, early 20th Century, Cameroon. Robert T. Wall Family Collection, San Francisco.

Fig. 25. Walker Evans, Equestrian Figure, Dahomey, Yoruba, 1935. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Fig. 26. Galerie de l’Effort Moderne, Maîtres du cubisme, 1921.

Fig. 27. Figure of a god, 18th Century, Hawaii. Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

Fig. 28. Feathered head of a war god, 18th Century, Hawaii. British Museum, London. Image reproduced in “Iront-ils au Louvre?”

Fig. 29. (Tatanua) Mask, New Ireland. Formerly the Collection of Félix Fénéon. Current location unknown.

Fig. 30. (Tatanua) Mask. New Mecklenburg. Formerly the Collection of André Breton. Sold in 1931 at the Collection André Breton et Paul Éluard: sculptures d’Afrique d’Amérique d’Océanie auction. Current location unknown.

Fig. 31. Pair of Baoulé statues, Côte d’Ivoire. Private Collection.

Fig. 32. Photograph of September 1931 exhibition La Vérité sur les colonies.

Reproduced in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 4, Décember 1931. Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute and Breton internet archives.

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Fig. 33. Paul Signac, Sur l’émail d’un fond rythmique de mesures et d’angles, de tons et de teintes, Portrait de M. Félix Fénéon en 1890, Opus 217, 1890.

Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fig. 34. La bombe du restaurant Foyot, 1894. Police facsimile. Musée de la préfecture de police, Paris.

58