THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 73
of her work, determined not to stand be-
tween her subjects and their effects on
the broadest possible public.
One day in 1936, at a blighted pea
field in Nipomo, California, she came
upon the subject of what is perhaps his-
tory’s most famous photograph, “Mi-
grant Mother”—a thirty-two-year-old
Cherokee woman, Florence Owens (later
Thompson). With three children hud-
dled against her in an open tent, the
woman’s mingled anxiety and resilience
transfix a viewer’s mind and heart. No
sentimental response is possible in the
evocation of vast, rock-hard realities that
have come down, for an instant, to one
synoptic point. Publication of the pic-
ture in the San Francisco News spurred
a rush of food aid to Nipomo, where
today a public school is named for Lange.
It emerged later that Lange had got de-
tails about her subject wrong. Not a pea
picker, Owens had stopped at the field
briefly, awaiting a car repair. She was not
identified as the image’s subject until
forty-two years later, when she had risen
to tolerably comfortable circumstances.
This instance of Lange’s faulty report-
ing suggests to me that her declared def-
erence to verbal supplementation was a
feint, hiding the transcendent artistry of
her eye in plain sight.
On a side note, I felt a twinge as I
was looking on my laptop at pictures by
Lange, which include a series taken of
Japanese-Americans about to be sent to
internment camps during the Second
World War—work that was commis-
sioned and then suppressed by the fed-
eral government. One of the best known
is a shot of children, Japanese-Ameri-
cans and others, with hands on hearts,
apparently reciting the Pledge of Alle-
giance. Lange’s images show the detained
as regular people who had to cope with
an outrageously unjust confinement—
and who, in doing so, were buoyed by
being together, at least. Among other
strengths, Lange was a poet of the ordi-
nary but imperious human need, under
any conditions, for mutual contact.T
he first intriguing fact that’s new to
me about the unpredictable Félix
Fénéon is that he never liked the carni-
valesque Pointillist portrait, painted by
Paul Signac, in 1890, that makes him look
like a dandyish magician pulling a lily
from a hat against a blazing vortex of ab-
stract patterns. Given the picture by Sig-
nac, Fénéon kept it hanging in his home
until his death, fifty-four years later, but
airily pronounced it one of Signac’s weaker
pieces. The Moma show displays it with
works by other of Fénéon’s favorite art-
ists—twenty-one by Seurat, several each
by Matisse and Bonnard—as well as ob-
jects that reflect his pioneering interest
in African, Native American, and Oce-
anic tribal art. Less than enthusiastic
about Picasso, he greeted “Les Demoi-
selles d’Avignon,” in 1907, by advising the
artist to stick to caricature. But he hailed
Cubism for its extreme radicalism.
Any dramatic change in art might
foreshadow a social revolution, by
Fénéon’s anarchist lights—never mind
if the art was arcane and destined for
museums. Fénéon generally despised mu-
seums. His life abounded in apparent
contradictions. He was the chief clerk of
France’s Ministry of War when, in 1894,
he was arrested on suspicion of conspir-
ing with a cohort of terrorists and stood
trial with twenty-nine others. Bomb-
making materials had been discoveredat his office. His defense turned less on
evidence than on a stream of witticisms
that enchanted the Parisian public. Ac-
cused of having “surrounded” himself with
two notorious characters, he objected
mildly that it takes at least three people
to surround anyone. In effect, he won an
acquittal on grounds of being exasper-
ating. For a time, he edited the avant-
garde journal La Revue Blanche. Though
not rich, he shrewdly bought and sold art,
impervious to imputations of commer-
cialism even as he joined the Commu-
nist Party. Little that might pose a prob-
lem to others troubled Fénéon. He died
in 1944, possessed of an immense collec-
tion, much of which was sold off three
years later, after the death of his widow.
Fénéon’s most startling departure was
to write, as a daily feature in a Parisian
newspaper, in 1906, more than a thou-
sand unsigned, usually salacious items.
Titled “Nouvelles en Trois Lignes,” these
were diamond-cut in style, featherweight
in tone, and exquisitely cruel. In one, he
wrote, “Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three
times at his wife. Since he missed every
shot, he decided to aim at his mother-
in-law and connected.” In another: “Pau-
line Rivera, 20, repeatedly stabbed, with a
hatpin, the face of the inconstant Luthier,
a dishwasher of Chatou, who had un-
derestimated her.”
I’ve found the online Fénéon show a
waterslide into the lore of a staggeringly
clever man who epitomizes a heyday of
audacities in pell-mell, modernizing
Paris. He never wrote a book. He cut a
practically invisible figure in public. But,
once you’ve made his acquaintance, he
may pester any thoughts you have of the
era, like something that is glimpsed and
then, when you look, isn’t there. THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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