Lost Illusions: From Trompe l’Oeil to Cubism

The inventors of Cubism, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, replaced perspective with a new kind of pictorial space: instead of receding into the distance, their paintings seemed to advance toward the viewer in a series of overlapping planes. In 1911 they supplemented representation with simulation, adding stenciled letters and patches of wood-graining to their paintings. In 1912 they glued actual strips of newspaper, wallpaper, and other materials to the surfaces. Their colleague Juan Gris went a step further and inserted old engravings, creating pictures within pictures. The heroic story of how Braque, Picasso, and Gris invented a new pictorial space and a new medium—collage—is a staple of textbooks and introductory courses on art history.

And yet … what art historian, walking through a gallery of American art, has not paused in front of an earlier trompe l’oeil painting by John Frederick Peto or William Michael Harnett and thought, "Isn't this awfully like a Cubist painting?" Overlapping planes? Check. Wood-graining? Check. Printed lettering? Check. Even the subject matter—violins or other musical instruments suspended from walls and panels—directly anticipates that of Cubist still life. Taking a deep breath, the art historian reflects that there is no way that Picasso, Braque, and Gris could have been aware of these obscure American paintings. It's a remarkable coincidence, that's all.

"Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition," now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, demolishes the assumption of Cubism's total originality. The curators, Emily Braun (professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center) and Elizabeth Cowling (professor emerita at the University of Edinburgh) have reconstructed a European tradition of trompe l’oeil painting beginning in 17th-century Holland and Flanders. The familiar American examples from the 19th century fall into place as late examples of a style then two centuries old. Building a bridge to Cubism, Braun and Cowling include specimens of late 19th- and early 20th-century wallpapers borrowing motifs and devices from the trompe l’oeil tradition. The exhibition also includes an amazing trove of Cubist still lifes: 15 by Braque, 20 by Gris, and 30 by Picasso. Often the Cubist pictures are paired with close antecedents from the old master tradition. Sometimes, in stunning feats of detective work, they are paired with samples of the original wallpapers the artists used.

One section of the exhibition, "Things on a Wall," brings together Harnett's Still Life—Violin and Music (1888) with Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts's Trompe l’Oeil with Violin, Music Book, and Recorder (1672) and Braque's Violin and Sheet Music: "Petit Oiseau" (1913). All three paintings show a suspended violin accompanied by sheet music. In the Gijsbrechts, the violin hangs from a wood-paneled wall; in the Harnett, from a hinged door comprising three wooden planks. The background of the Braque is also divided into bands. Retrospectively, it makes the parallel planks in the Gijsbrechts and the Harnett seem like ancestors of the Cubist grid.

Conversely, of the three meticulously painted patches of trompe l’oeil wood-graining in the Braque, two seem to belong to the wall, so one could reasonably conclude that, here too, the background consists of wood paneling. The charcoal hatching of the Braque brings it closer in mood to the soft shading of the Gijsbrechts than to the dramatic light and dark of the Harnett. But the strong shadow cast by the nail at the top of the Harnett uncannily anticipates the famous nail-plus-shadow in Braque's epochal Violin and Palette of late 1909, also included in this exhibition. If Braque's nail was inspired by something other than the Harnett, it must have been something very similar.

Another section of the exhibition, "Papyrophilia," is devoted to the love of paper. One of the standouts here is Wilhelm Robart's drawing Trompe l’Oeil (ca. 1770–80), showing an assortment of printed pages strewn on a granite tabletop. There's a calendar, two title pages, a sheet of sample fonts, an announcement from the Dutch East India Company, the music and lyrics of a song, a map of Europe, and three engravings of Dutch landscapes with travelers. It's a quodlibet: from the Latin for "whatever pleases." The black and white of the printed documents contrasts with the lively color of the granite, represented by dots of black and white sprinkled across a teal ground. Where many trompe l’oeil pictures show objects suspended from walls, here the emphasis is on horizontality. In the exhibition, the framed drawing is placed flat on a wooden sideboard, reinforcing its horizontal character.

The inclusion of the landscape engravings in the Robart anticipates Cubist works such as Gris's The Guitar (1913), where the musical instrument, although abstracted into vertical strips, is accompanied by a fragment of a 19th-century engraving showing a woman with a child on her shoulders, running through a forest. In a broader sense, Robart's drawing prefigures the accumulation of documents and images in Robert Rauschenberg's work of the 1950s. Leo Steinberg famously described Rauschenberg's pictorial space as a "flatbed picture plane," comparable to a tabletop or a bulletin board "on which objects are scattered" so that the surface stands "for the mind itself," processing a stream of unrelated data. Perhaps postmodern art starts with Robart.

The last section of the exhibition borrows its title, "The Artist Is Present," from Marina Abramović's 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Here, it refers to works in which artists assert their authorship by means other than a conventional signature. In John Haberle's Imitation (1887), the artist's name appears on what looks like a scrap of paper, cut out from a printed catalogue and affixed to the fictive picture frame. Authorship is reduced to a simulacrum, like the trompe l’oeil banknotes and stamps "glued" to the black ground and the frame. Braun and Cowling pair this with a 1914 papier collé by Picasso, depicting a Cubist drawing of a pipe and sheet music affixed to a speckled sheet, and mounted within a "frame" assembled from strips of wallpaper imitating a carved wood border. A label attached to the frame bears the artist's name, written in block letters. The frame's trompe l’oeil carving and the label's hand-printing seem to mock the idea that Cubism might ever become a "museum" art.

Scholars have long been at a loss to explain the emergence of colored dots in Cubism, but Braun and Cowling have solved this mystery: the black and white dots on the mauve background of Pipe and Sheet Music are obviously modeled on the kind of trompe l’oeil granite found in Robart's 18th-century drawing—and in a late 19th-century wallpaper included in the exhibition. However, Picasso goes beyond the boundaries of conventional trompe l’oeil by continuing the field of dots in two slanting bands that extend over the pipe and sheet music. Furthermore, the dots change color as they traverse the drawing: in one band, they are yellow and red; in the other, red and purple. The sober imitation of granite gives way to a delirious play of color.

Other sections of the exhibition address a range of related themes. The show opens with "Origin Story," containing pictures related to the birth of trompe l’oeil painting: the legendary competition between two ancient Greek painters to see who could produce a more realistic picture. "Trompe l’Oeil and the Artisanal Tradition" focuses on Braque and Picasso's use of wood-graining and marbling, bringing their Cubist pictures together with the housepainters’ manuals and samples that helped inspire them. Similarly, "The World of Wallpaper" juxtaposes Cubist pictures incorporating wallpaper with real-life samples from the period. Some of these are fascinating in their own right: in a 1910–11 wallpaper simulating a Venetian blind, the repeated stripes of the blinds exert a hypnotic power like Frank Stella's "Black" paintings of 1959 or Bridget Riley's undular stripes of the mid-1960s. (Gris used this wallpaper in a 1914 painting that is reproduced in the catalogue but was not, alas, available for the exhibition.) "Trompe l’Oeil and Typography" brings together 17th- and 19th-century paintings including hyperrealistic newspapers with Cubist works incorporating strips of newsprint.

"Shadow Play" explores the mind games that Picasso played with cast shadows—somereal, some fake—and also the mysterious black silhouettes of objects in the Gris paintings. "Paragone," titled after the traditional rivalry between painting and sculpture, features Picasso's Cubist reliefs made from painted wood and sheet metal, dissolving the distinction between mediums. "Things on a Table" goes beyond the borders of trompe l’oeil proper, pairing tabletop still lifes from the 17th and 18th centuries with works by Gris and Picasso.

In the catalogue, two additional articles accompany the eye-opening introductory essays by Braun and Cowling. Drawing on the research from her 2016 book on Cubism's artisanal origins, Racines populaires du cubisme: Pratiques ordinaires de création et art savant, Claire Le Thomas provides the first detailed account in English of Braque's early training as a housepainter and decorative interior painter, an education that prepared him to revolutionize the facture of avant-garde art. Rachel Mustalish, a conservator at the Metropolitan, explains the originality of Gris's collage technique: where Braque and Picasso tended to overlap large patches of paper, Gris cut his found materials into small, exact shapes that he fitted together with the precision of marquetry.

"Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition" will keep art historians busy for years. There is much more to be said about trompe l’oeil's relationship to Cubism, and also about its oblique relationship to mainstream old master painting. Cowling vividly evokes the disdain directed at the style by traditional artists and critics, who dismissed it as a "low, flat, vulgar skill." But the technique has a particular formal character that is not described adequately as mere "skill." Trompe l’oeil depends, rather, on the avoidance of key aspects of conventional "realism."

In traditional perspective, bodies and objects are foreshortened along diagonals leading to one or more vanishing points. In theory, the illusion of mass and space should be credible only if the viewer is standing in the right place. In practice, perspective works perfectly well from a range of viewing positions. Spectators ignore the discrepancy between how things are represented and how they would actually appear if seen from one side or the other. The need to make this unconscious correction does not diminish the realism of the image—but it does make it less illusionistic.

Successful trompe l’oeil maximizes illusion by getting rid of perspective. Everything is flattened, facing the viewer. Recession is indicated solely by the overlapping of forms, accentuated by the use of shadows to separate one plane from another. Harnett's Violin and Music creates a more powerful illusion than Gijsbrechts's Violin, Music Book, and Recorder by using stronger shadows. The trompe l’oeil painter succeeds by drastically simplifying the rules of the game. But this simplification may vitiate the artistic quality of the result. Although more striking, the Harnett is not as good as the Gijsbrechts.

Cubism makes things more complicated. In 1908 and 1909, Picasso and Braque divided the surfaces of bodies and objects into facets, transforming them into something like the wireframe figures used in digital animation. In 1910 Picasso shattered the unity of the object, breaking it into independent planes supported by a scaffolding of vertical and horizontal lines. This revolutionary Cubist "grid" replaced traditional perspective with something radically different, not something simpler. In 1911 Braque realized that the independent planes of his quasi-abstract compositions could be filled in with realistic details like stenciled lettering or wood-graining. In 1912 Picasso and Braque begin filling these "receptor" planes with actual objects like strips of wallpaper or newsprint. They borrowed from the vocabulary of trompe l’oeil painting because its realistic details made such a powerful contrast with the complex, abstract framework of their overall compositions. A Cubist picture like Braque's Violin and Sheet Music: "Petit Oiseau" includes illusionistic details but is not illusionistic as a whole. The contrast between the spare charcoal lines of the scaffolding and the dense, tactile patches of wood-graining might serve as an analogue for memory, which recovers some details with clarity while others remain shrouded in vagueness. It is a picture of thought, like Steinberg's flatbed picture plane.

Finally, it would also be useful to think about the absence of trompe l’oeil from the work of Fernand Léger. He was the fourth member of the group of "essential Cubists" who were represented by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler before World War I, and collected by G.F. Reber in the 1920s and Douglas Cooper after World War II. They are also the only four Cubists included in the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, promised to the Metropolitan in 2013. (Braun has served for many years as its curator.) Léger was never interested in trompe l’oeil, but after World War I he began to incorporate advertising imagery into his Cubist work, and wrote about the billboard and the shop window as models for contemporary art. Advertising provided another way to get the real into compositions on the verge of abstraction. Like trompe l’oeil, it created a productive tension within Cubism. The combination of different visual languages into complex wholes makes the Cubist pictures on view at the Metropolitan as exciting today as they were when they were made.

"Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition" is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through Jan. 22, 2023.

This article appears in the December 2022 print issue of Art in America, pp. 22-24.