For a while, before the Museum of Modern Art’s most recent expansion fractured the story it told of the evolution of adventurous art over the past century and a half, one of the first things we saw on entering the permanent collection galleries was a bold, puzzling image of a strong-featured, bearded man against a wild, proto-psychedelic background of swirls, stars, spots, and dots of brilliant hues. Shown half length, in profile, wearing a yellow coat, the protagonist held a sinister looking flower in one extended hand, a top hat and a cane in the other, everything conjured up with a flurry of tiny dots. Who was he? An aesthete? Flâneur? Performer? Showman? Painted by Paul Signac, this strange work rejoiced in the equally strange title Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon, 1890. Why was the painting where it was? Because Fénéon (1861–1944) was one of the first critics to champion many of the artists in moma’s collection of early modernism. He was a fan and supporter not only of Signac, but also of Georges Seurat, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, and the Italian Futurists, among others; he was, as well, a connoisseur and collector of African, Oceanic, and Native American sculpture. It turns out, however, that there was a great deal more to Fénéon than even that impressive list suggests. Now, “Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the