Jason Farago-rhymes-with-Chicago writes a deep, reflective appreciation of Cézanne’s work, calling Cézanne the first painter he ever loved.
BC*: For six centuries, ever since some scientifically minded Florentines had developed rules of perspective that made art look more like life, painters had put a premium on convincing illusions. At Cézanne’s breakfast table, starting in the mid-1870s, that all came to an end.
AC: More important than copying or simulating reality was being true to your experience of reality. Your marks, your style, your hand, your eye: These now had primacy and the world outside was secondary… What Cézanne understood is that the eye is not impassive — not a camera with its shutter open… No: The eye flits and darts, looks inwards as well as out… A “convincing” depiction was now just a facile replica. Painting, after Cézanne, becomes a series of strategies to render visible — to viewers, to yourself — whatever truly matters to the artist.
Farago situates painting within the larger context of the things that are worthy of our attention:
… Cézanne taught me how to read Virginia Woolf, with her own idiosyncratic perspectives and spatial ambiguity. / I was learning, year by year, a modern poetics: a theory of art, music, literature predicated on a perpetual break with tradition.
Regarding breaks with tradition, Farago does modulate:
This century — do you mind if I say this? — has shown that exalting your own voice over established principles doesn’t always end well.
But I tell myself, “Listen to this much, for now, and make truer pictures. Then see what’s next.”
*BC — “Before Cézanne,” etc.
(Jason Farago, “Cézanne and the Hard Facts of Time,” New York Times, 6-30-25)
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
‘I Came Into the World Very Young’
“Study for a bust of Mr. Erik Satie painted by himself, with a thought: I came into the world very young during a very old time.” [New York Times caption and illustration, my translation]
I discovered Satie long ago through Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, and liked the music immediately. I thought of him as a “minor” composer, and I was drawn to perceived niche tastes. I crave even now the unmoored feeling that his music gave me then.
Satie’s “Vexations,” came with instructions to repeat them 840 times, entailing a running time of about 19 hours. Here’s the thing: “Strangely, it resists memorization. Pianists have played it for long stretches, stood up from their instruments and realized they already forgot it.”
“Bohéme” (“The Bohemian”), a portrait of Satie in his studio in Montmartre by his friend Santiago Rusiñol. Credit… Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Vexations! A lovely moniker. It reminds me of my experience with certain poetry: I interact with it as intensely as I can; maybe it marks me somehow, yet it scampers out of range of the retentive faculty.
He would write for performers to play “from the top of yourself” and “full of subtlety, if you believe me.” He seemed fixated on body parts, with instructions like “with tears in your fingers,” “on the tips of your back teeth” or “out of the corner of your hand.”
A performance of Satie’s “Parade,” a collaboration with Cocteau, Picasso and the choreographer Léonide Massine for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Credit… Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images. [New York Times caption and illustration]
(Joshua Barone, “Satie’s Music Will Always Be Popular. But Will We Ever Understand It?” New York Times, 7-2-25)
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved