Fénéon: "I aspire only to silence."

 "The most sensational of the myriad exhibitions that Fénéon organized was 'The Italian Futurist Painters' in February 1912. Launched three years earlier, Futurist paintings combined the color principles of the New-Impressionists and the fractured forms of the rivaling Cubists with their own distinctive subject matter:  revolutionary politics and the speed and dynamism of the modern experience.  While the exhibition received mostly negative reviews, partly in response to the artists' bombastic rhetoric, it drew huge crowds and catapulted the Futurists into the European avant-garde."

Luigi Russell, Italian, The Revolt.  c. 1911.

Giacomo Balla, Italian,  Street Light, c. 1910-11.

Fénéon also was one of the first Europeans to champion art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas.  

Fénéon worked in a prestigious gallery and collected art himself, promoting artists that were not well known and struggling at the time, but who became famous and successful later (Matisse).  

''I aspire only to silence, ' Fénéon once said.  He realized this aim toward the end of his life in the ultimate act of self-erasure; rather than bequeathing his art collection to a French museum, he decided to disperse it through a series of auctions.  The first took place in December 1941, when he needed funds for cancer-related bills.  Following his death in 1944, and that of his wife Fanny in 1946, more  than eight hundred remaining works were sold in four record-setting sales:  three for his collection of art from Europe, and one for his collection of objects and sculptures from Africa, Oceania and the Americas."