[MANUSCRIPT] [FINE ARTS] Félix FENEON - Les hommes d’aujourd’hui -...

[MANUSCRIPT] [FINE ARTS] Félix FENEON - Les hommes d’aujourd’hui - Paul Signac An exceptional, complete manuscript of a draft version of the famous text on Signac’s work by the visionary art critic Félix Fénéon. A document of great importance, in a period binding of cardboard and marbled paper, with a smooth spine and gilt title; some damage to the spine. 18 pages, front side only, all mounted on tabs at the time; signed by Félix Fénéon on the last page. Hinges slightly weakened; some cardboard missing from the spine. Water stains; pages slightly soiled. Each page is carefully numbered in red; the text is written in the right-hand column, leaving the left-hand column blank (a few annotations and remarks are added there on pages 3, 5, 8, 13, 15, 16, and 17). The first page contains a valuable 10-line paragraph in red, placed as a preface, providing instructions to the publisher and/or printer for proper layout. Most notably, there are significant variations between this manuscript and the known published version: at least 10 turns of phrase have been changed; indeed, some of these corrections appear directly in the author’s handwriting in this manuscript; and, even more importantly, two passages were ultimately deleted: for example, on page 3, “If they have unequal saturation and luminosity: the more saturated one gains in intensity, the less saturated one fades; the brighter one becomes even brighter, the dimmer one darkens; —which can be summarized, loosely, by saying that the lighter one becomes lighter, the darker one, darker: contrast of tones.” From this paragraph, only the last sentence will be retained: “The lighter one becomes [...] contrast of tones.” And on pages 4–5: “We have distinguished the agents of coloration: local color, solar orange, normal irradiation of complementary colors, and accidental reflections. - We know, moreover, that when colored light (or light-color) falls on a pigment, the role of absorption in producing the final hue is virtually nil: this hue results from a true mixture of light-colors, or optical mixing. (For example, in yellow light, ultramarine paper will appear white [corrected to “whitish” directly on the page] and not green.)” This passage was completely omitted from the published version.Published in 1890 in *Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui*, this portrait of Signac by Fénéon appeared at a time when Neo-Impressionism was still seeking recognition of its legitimacy. Fénéon had already played a decisive role in defining the movement, notably with *Les Impressionnistes* in 1886. Here, however, he develops a portrait-manifesto of Neo-Impressionism. This portrait of Paul Signac goes beyond a simple biographical sketch to contribute to the defense and legitimization of an avant-garde aesthetic. Fénéon helped to situate Signac’s art within a new conception of painting, based on a renewal of the relationships between color, light, and perception.A staunch anarchist, Félix Fénéon was one of the first defenders of Georges Seurat and played an important role in the reception of his work, and later that of Paul Signac, who, for his part, shared many of Fénéon’s anarchist ideas.