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But first…

Photo: Sylvie Chan-Liat/Courtesy Musée d’Orsay

In the postimpressionist pantheon, the French painter Paul Cézanne is first among equals. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin certainly have more compelling biographies, and Georges Seurat—of Sunday in the Park with George fame—has been played on Broadway by the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal. But Cézanne’s newfangled fracturing of old-fashioned still lifes and landscapes became the very motor of modernism. Indispensable to figures as diverse as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, not to mention Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, Cézanne (1839–1906) can still reliably mesmerize. And with a substantial portion of his works in private hands, he can still surprise.

Switzerland’s Beyeler Foundation, blessed with a Renzo Piano–designed premises near Basel, made the case for Cézanne’s supreme position in the visual arts when it mounted Cézanne and the Modern back in 1999, giving a native son of Aix-en-Provence pride of place alongside Picasso, Matisse, and Alberto Giacometti. Last month, the museum went one step further by bumping him from top billing to solo performer. Of the 58 oil paintings and 21 works on paper featured in the exhibition Cézanne, around half are from private collections, while the rest are on loan from museums on both sides of the Atlantic.

Paul Cézanne came into his own in the 1880s, when, after passing through a Paris-based impressionist period, he returned to Provence. Here he managed to call the impressionists’ bluff by going beyond their light-dappled distortions and using planes of color to all but break with linear perspective.

Emphasizing his final period, the Swiss show begins around 1890, with celebrated oil-on-canvas paintings such as The Card Players (1892–96), from London’s Courtauld Gallery, and unfinished landscape drawings, ghostly half-rendered in graphite and watercolor, from Switzerland’s Esther Grether Family Collection.

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Some of the privately owned works haven’t been seen in public for decades. Indeed, one oil version of a sunny bathing scene—a favorite subject that Cézanne revisited dozens of times—has never before been shown in public. Painted between 1900 and 1906, but left unfinished, it has flesh-colored trees, a pale-blue sky, and eerie outlines of naked bodies. It’s as if the artist were looking through squinted eyes.

Writing in the catalogue, the distinguished Cézanne scholar Gottfried Boehm, a Swiss-based German art historian now in his 80s, argues that many of these apparently unfinished artworks, though fragmentary, can still be regarded as “complete.” And for Ulf Küster, the exhibition’s curator, it’s tempting to consider even the supposedly finished works, which almost invariably feature one of a handful of Cézanne’s recurring motifs—in this show, Provence’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, tables with fruit, and the bathing scenes—as part of a single, ongoing, never-quite-repeating series whose larger, open-ended endeavor is to reinvent painting.

By revising through repetition, and dispensing with perspective, Cézanne came to free himself from mere perception. He painted what he felt rather than what he saw. And in not depicting or reflecting reality but, rather, creating his own, Cézanne in this final phase helped install subjectivity as the core tenet of modern art.

The show will also do its bit to reintroduce the artist as “Paul Cezanne,” sans acute accent—the spelling preferred by the artist himself, who signed his paintings that way. Though now in limited use, the accentless version is on the march, says Küster, forecasting that, in a decade or so, “Paul Cézanne” may be gone for good.

And now…

It’s always fun to navigate an exhibition with your ears. At the Musical Instruments Museum in Brussels, you can do this using proximity-based headphones. Approach a case full of 19th century saxophones—which, it turns out, are named for the Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax—and hear them honk. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s epic touring exhibition David Bowie Is used similar technology, delivering an immersive soundtrack as if transmitted directly from ground control.

Then there’s Art of Noise at Cooper Hewitt, which opened this past Friday and lasts through mid-August. It’s another captivating aural experience, although here the sound is pervasive, subtly overlapping, and leads you from one gallery to the next. The show is about the intersection of music and design, but there are no saxes, synthesizers, or any other musical instruments. Instead, the curator Joseph Becker—who created the exhibition for SFMOMA, where it originated in 2024—chose to focus on graphic design and products made for “playback,” such as radios, record players, stereos, speakers, and wearable devices. The ghosts in these machines haunt the space. You never see music being physically generated (unless you count a needle in a groove), but it spills through the air nonetheless, and into your ears.

If there’s one disheartening aspect to this topic, it appears early on, in a section on portable devices. A series of beautiful, pop-inflected artifacts dwindles down, finally and inevitably, to a single iPhone. With its screen blank, it feels somewhere between a punctuation mark and a miniature gravestone. In his recent book, A Sound Mind, the journalist Paul Morley—who was also the in-house intellectual for Art of Noise, the conceptually inclined New Wave group—wrote about the experience of digitized listening, noting that, “It’s progress, and you can never deny that … but it’s also a regression, possibly even a betrayal of all that imagination and ambition that led to the music existing in the first place, something that makes you think about what happens if music goes missing.”

Indeed, one way to understand Art of Noise (the exhibition, not the band) is as a counternarrative to this recent trend toward dematerialization, a gathering of objects that are as expressive as the music they play. Product design shows are inherently challenging—somehow, they have to be more interesting than the local Apple Store—but this one manages to succeed brilliantly, partly because of the abundance of objects, variously nostalgic and unfamiliar, but also its razor-sharp scenography. Most objects in the show congregate in tightly spaced miniature skylines, set on planes of cobalt blue raised on metal armatures. The exhibition design, as well as other features in the show, including a “choir” of sculptures that sing in unison, come courtesy of Teenage Engineering, a Swedish electronics firm with a background in video game development.

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