Trompe l’oeil and the images that fool the mind

These two works capture the essence of the exhibition, which makes a connection almost entirely overlooked until now, linking the iconoclastic Cubist trio of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Gris to the playful, trompe l’oeil (literally translated as “deceives the eye”) paintings of the past, many by artists ready for rediscovery. The show does not posit the direct influence of specific earlier works on Cubism, but examines their echoes in the early 20th-Century movement, from its embracing of still life to including unreliable texts. And all these artists use their optical tricks purposefully, to engage viewers in questions of truth and falsehood, issues that make the exhibition perfectly suited to our own age, when facts themselves are in dispute.

Trompe l’oeil reached its height in 17th-Century Europe, in paintings so realistic that the objects in them seem to be projecting forward from the canvas into the viewer’s space, close enough to touch. In a common motif, straps seem to be physically holding up various objects – such as sheet music or letters – on a display board, when the entire image, wooden frame included, is actually a painted illusion. The Cubists, of course, did the opposite, fracturing images to grasp an object’s essence. In her memoir Life With Picasso, Francoise Gilot quotes the artist as saying, “We tried to get rid of trompe l’oeil to find a trompe l’esprit. We didn’t any longer want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind.” But a major point of the exhibition is that mind games questioning the nature of reality and of art itself were already there in the most ambitious 17th-Century trompe l’oeil paintings. “Any mimesis is not real, despite how real it might look,” Braun tells BBC Culture. Trompe l’oeil, she says, offered  a “sophisticated and philosophical discourse in the Baroque period, and then again when the Americans took it up in the 1890s,” a pattern the Cubists were heir to.