COUNTERFEIT ILLUSION
David Joselit on “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition”
"NO TENDENCY in painting has inspired as much experimentation among succeeding generations of modernist artists as Cubism. In the face of this legacy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” seeks to divert that future-oriented momentum by bending its trajectory backward—toward trompe l’oeil painting, a minor Western tradition that was practiced between the mid-seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and later devolved into a form of decoration. This curatorial thesis, launched with slim historical evidence but delivered in a seductive spectacle of gorgeous old-master paintings alongside striking Cubist works by Georges Braque, Juan Gris, and Pablo Picasso, cancels itself out from the start. "