Portrait of Félix Fénéon

In Paul Signac's 1890 portrait, the art critic Félix Fénéon is holding out a small white cyclamen in his gloved hand. The flower is chosen deliberately. Cyclamen comes from the Greek kyklos, cycle. The whole background behind Fénéon is a rhythmic pinwheel of complementary colours, painted according to Charles Henry's colour theory. The flower is the theory made visible. Fénéon was an anarchist art critic and editor. He was the man who coined the term Neo-Impressionism to describe what Signac and Seurat were doing. The background of this portrait is abstract painting twenty years before Kandinsky did the same thing louder. Now at Museum of Modern Art, New York @themuseumofmodernart