Art Throb #21: 'Portrait of Felix Feneon' (1890) by Paul Signac (1863-1935)

Paul Signac (1863–1935), Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints. Portrait of Felix Feneon in 1890

Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/2" (73.5 x 92.5 cm)

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York

This painting is easy to date, right? If I didn't know better, and despite the man's Victorian garb, I'd swear it was created in the late 1960s or '70s. Its background of exploding circus colours, a pinwheel of swirls, candy stripes and geometric shapes, conjure up the words 'psychedelic', 'groovy' and 'trippy' – 'druggy', perhaps. It says The Beatles' Yellow Submarine, or Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze. Cosmic, man!

It certainly blew my mind when I first saw it – not in the flesh, unfortunately, but on a TV programme, The Riviera, a History in Pictures, featuring Richard E Grant travelling around the south of France exploring the origins of modern art. Which gives a clue as to when this painting was produced: 1890. 1890! The artist, Paul Signac, was a French neo-impressionist painter who helped develop pointillism, a branch of impressionism in which tiny dots of colour are applied to surfaces to create a coherent whole. The technique is often compared with 20th Century printing techniques, newsprint and television.

It's not just the technique that is revolutionary here, however, but the subject matter. While Signac and his colleague Georges Seurat pioneered pointillism, their images depicted mostly conventional subject matter – portraits, landscapes, scenes of people in parks, or bathers by lakes. This portrait of Felix Feneon is unusual in that it conveys a sense of the subject's psychological make-up, personality and work. Combining different painting styles – figuration and abstract – its juxtapositions of colours recede into a vanishing point as a representation of optical theorist Charles Henry's colour wheel, recalling too the pin wheels we'd colour in as children. This suggests an innocent playfulness. In the foreground and to the right of the vanishing point stands Feneon. In profile, his top hat doffed in a gesture of deference, he proffers a flower, a lily, possibly offering it to someone. Who could he be offering it to? A friend? A lover? His mother? As the viewer stands in front of this painting, we become aware of someone else who may be standing to the left, skewing our gaze.

The painting is filled with opposites and contradictions, and tricks that make our eyeballs bounce. In addition to the different painting styles, Feneon's upright posture contrasts with the surreal background. It could threaten to suck him in, but his posture is resolute, emphasised by the cane. The lily, an artistic motif heavy in symbolism, and the fact that the artist, Signac, chose to paint him in profile, hark back to pre-renaissance art when wealthy subjects were indeed painted sideways on. This contrasts obviously with the surreal swirling taking place behind him.

What was it about Feneon that made Signac portray him in this way? Wikipedia describes Feneon as a 'Parisian anarchist and art critic' who coined the term neo-impressionism. Perhaps his fixation here on the lily is a distillation of a single-mindedness and determination to hold true to his ideals and principles. Holding his top hat in front of that background, he looks a bit like a magician or wizard who's just pulled the flower out of it. At the heart of this painting would seem to be an innocence, a purity of vision. Its pretentious, mischievous title would seem to be ridiculing something. MoMA suggests scientific terminology. It could also be academia.

From the title onwards, and the fact that it was created in 1890 (1890!), this magical painting makes your head spin. It would be patronising to suggest that contemporary audiences would be shocked and bemused by it; they could probably take a lot more than we imagine, and were probably just as progressive as modern audiences, if not more so. This work remains amazing, and must have been an influence on artworks produced more than half a century later.