Fénéon, meanwhile is portrayed as a magician, who, top hat and cane in hand, brandishes a white flower from which the pinwheel backdrop seems to emerge. Signac pays homage to Henry, while the painting’s long, grandiose title seems to spoof his empirical claims for art. His ideas underpinned Pointillism’s technique of applying paint as dabs of pure color that would mix in the eye of the viewer.
An art dealer and critic, Fénéon is seen posed in profile against an abstract, spiral background that symbolically sets in motion the theories of Charles Henry-a mathematician, inventor and aesthete who took a scientific view of colors, proposing that rather than being blended, different hues should be treated as pure independent elements and kept separate from one another. His best-known work is this exuberant-almost psychedelic-portrait of his friend, Felix Fénéon. It was in this context that Pointillism emerged, and while usually associated with Georges Seurat, Paul Signac was another major figure of the movement. Near the end of the 19 th century, Impressionism’s spontaneous mode of painting gave way to Postimpressionism and its more methodical forms of expression. He believed in a philosophy of art he called Art-as-Art and used his writing and satirical cartoons. Most famous for his 'black' or 'ultimate' paintings, he claimed to be painting the 'last paintings' that anyone can paint. The same goes for the masked subjects crowding around grim reaper, who wears an elaborate lady’s hat, giving the scene an unnerving erotic undertone. He wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art and monochrome painting. Such a tableau is featured in this painting where the central figure, representing death, is actually a skull plopped on an arrangement of empty clothes. Furthermore, his themes were rooted in direct observation, as the ghouls and goblins that populate his imagery didn’t spring from his imagination, but were based instead on props and costumes set up in his studio (a legacy of the family business, a small emporium that sold festive get-ups and souvenirs to tourists who came to Ensor’s seaside hometown of Ostend for its annual Mardi Gras–style carnival).
Though seemingly Surreal in the broad sense of the term, his work wasn’t concerned with dreams or the unconscious (which would later become Surrealist obsessions), but rather with the futility and irony of existence. Key artists: Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, Robert Morris, Mary Corse, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Robert Irwin. This list of minimalist artists are primarily artists whose works were done in the 1960s, and are considered minimal, although some artists subsequently radically changed their work in the 1970s and in subsequent decades. Known for paintings featuring masks and skulls, the Belgian artist James Ensor is often seen as a precursor of Surrealism, which is true up to a point. Minimalism was an art movement that began during the 1960s.
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