Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition

In Pliny the Elder’s story, Parrhasius triumphed over Zeuxis because he strategically painted a curtain on the foreground plane, inventing a classic threshold device—an object that seemingly crosses over into the viewer’s space. In this collaborative still life, where a taffeta curtain on a rod painted by Van Mieris partially obscures a bouquet by Van der Spelt, whose level of simulated reality most astonishes? Seventeenth-century Dutch collectors sometimes placed protective curtains across their paintings, a fact that increases this work’s potential for pictorial duplicity, however fleeting. Other deceits lie hidden in plain sight: flowers that bloom in different seasons and camouflaged insects, such as the Red Admiral butterfly poised at the curtain’s edge.

Pliny the Elder’s origin story of eye-deceiving illusionism and creative competition, recounted on the wall at right, influenced artists in the Renaissance and for centuries after. Still-life painting emerged in the 1600s as a fully independent subject in European art, and grapes and curtains became popular motifs for artists aiming to vaunt their skills. El Labrador, the Zeuxis of his time, specialized in bunches of grapes hanging in a dark chamber for winter storage. The setting served as a pretext for closing off the background plane and allowing raking light to conjure the moist, plump fruit, temptingly near at hand. Tiny dots of highlight on the spherical surfaces round out the illusion of palpable three dimensions.

This is among the earliest surviving independent still lifes in European painting. It playfully refers to a celebrated but long-lost work by the fifth-century-BCE Greek painter Zeuxis, who “produced a picture of grapes so successfully represented that birds flew up to it.” This sort of classically-inspired picture appealed to erudite patrons such as Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), marchesa of Mantua, for whom we know Crevalcore painted a still life in 1506; he was, in fact, compared to Zeuxis by a scholar writing in 1513.

Picasso made the first Cubist collage by pasting a piece of oilcloth (a waterproof fabric used for tablecloths) onto an oval canvas depicting café fare and a newspaper. For this radical act—inserting a fragment of reality into the fictive realm of painting—he ingeniously selected a mass-produced, ready-made visual deception. Machine-printed to look like the textured rattan weave used in chairs, this piece of trumpery is materially real but patently fake. Picasso then surrounded his still life with rope, a handy substitute for the traditional hand-carved frames that mimic braiding. In so doing, he wittily imitated an imitation.

The Met acknowledges the exceptional generosity of the Musée National Picasso-Paris in lending this work; this is the first time in thirty years that it has been exhibited in the United States.

Bold color reentered Braque’s and Picasso’s work in spring 1912, partly in response to the Italian Futurists’ brilliantly hued canvases, which debuted in Paris earlier that year. Picasso used industrial paint to reproduce the cover of a pamphlet, “Our Future Is in the Air,” issued by the Michelin tire company to raise support for the government’s aviation program. The blue, white, and red stripes refer to the French flag. Cubists enjoyed aviation references because they viewed their art as similarly groundbreaking. As an inside joke, Braque and Picasso compared their creative partnership to that of the Wright brothers.

Bold color reentered Braque’s and Picasso’s work in spring 1912, partly in response to the Italian Futurists’ brilliantly hued canvases, which debuted in Paris earlier that year. Picasso used industrial paint to reproduce the cover of a pamphlet, “Our Future Is in the Air,” issued by the Michelin tire company to raise support for the government’s aviation program. The blue, white, and red stripes refer to the French flag. Cubists enjoyed aviation references because they viewed their art as similarly groundbreaking. As an inside joke, Braque and Picasso compared their creative partnership to that of the Wright brothers.

Van Hoogstraten specialized in the quodlibet (Latin for “whatever you please”), a seemingly random assortment of objects that typically contains verbal and visual witticisms about art, artists, patrons, and politics. This conceit required marvelous fidelity to the textures and scale of the items depicted; even so, the frame proclaims the entirety to be a painting. Therein lies the ruse, for the frame itself is illusory. Having outwitted the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III with one of his visual deceptions, Van Hoogstraten received the imperial gold medallion and chain, proudly displayed here to symbolize his elevation from artisan to fine artist. The adjacent note from an admirer boasts of this feat and compares him to Zeuxis, the ancient Greek painter skilled at painted illusion.

A studio wall displaying the tools of the artist’s trade was the ultimate self-reflexive subject of trompe l’oeil, a means of representing representation. Here, the painter’s palette, brushes, maulstick (used to support the hand holding the paintbrush), and bottle of oil cast lively shadows that also indicate the proximity of the background plane. Above, a toppled hourglass and spent candle symbolize the transience of life, but Gijsbrechts undercuts the moralizing by revealing the scene to be mere illusion: the canvas peels off its stretcher, while a disingenuously rough sketch for that composition, nailed to the wall, ironically mimes the curling corner. Such virtuoso illusionism required an artist to hide the mark of his own hand, including signatures; Gijsbrechts coyly embedded his autograph in the note folded over the palette knife.

Vaillant pioneered the letter rack, a type of word-and-image counterfeit that prompts reflection on authenticity. The partially revealed letters, all originally secured by red sealing wax, invite the viewer to interpret messages ostensibly written by the hands of others. The inky script is painted not penned, despite the misleading quill, which raises further doubts: are the letters fake or faithful facsimiles? In a novel form of self-promotion, the correspondence bears the names and autographs of Vaillant’s princely patrons or those he aimed to impress. The crumpled letter at lower left is a version of the cartellino, a trompe l’oeil device invented in the Renaissance that presents the artist’s signature on a slip of paper seemingly appended to the painting’s surface.

Braque’s Violin and Palette contains the Cubists’ first explicit allusions to the trompe l’oeil tradition: the artist’s palette and the green curtain, pulled back at upper right. Like Gijsbrechts in the painting on the adjacent wall, Braque daubed the palette faithfully with the same colors used on the rest of his canvas. Instead of painting a picture-within-a-picture, however, he took a picture apart. By refusing to employ modeling and perspective consistently, he exposed, through inversion, these two fundamental tricks of the painter’s trade. Most tangibly real is the nail that casts a shadow (at the apex of the composition), an emblem of pictorial artifice since the seventeenth century.

The fluctuating planes in a shallow space are characteristic of Analytic Cubism and the modernist emphasis on the picture surface. Nevertheless, Picasso’s violin on a wall also harkens back to trompe l’oeil board paintings, which reversed the conventions of Renaissance perspective and refused to lead the eye into a fictive middle ground or distance. The artist mixed ham-handed and virtuosic renditions of the violin, having learned from Braque artisanal techniques for faking wood with a brush and a decorator’s comb. Not by chance, Picasso included a bunch of grapes (they spill out of a wicker basket)—the symbol of deceptive illusionism since antiquity and the fruit that the Cubists drew and painted more often than any other from 1912 onward.

A picture-within-a-picture attached to a board or wall was a favorite motif of trompe l’oeil artists. They astonished their patrons by using oil paint to depict work in other mediums and make “honest” forgeries of other artists’ styles. Gris outdid them—and his fellow Cubists—by pasting an actual nineteenth-century engraving into his still life (Robert Wallis’s reproduction, published in 1832, of J. M. W. Turner’s watercolor View of the Chateau at St. Germain-en-Laye). Tongue in cheek, the artist told his dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, that the buyer of the painting could remove the print and replace it with another of his choice, which perhaps explains why the bespoke frame swings open at the side.

Chalfant pasted a U.S. stamp onto canvas and placed next to it a hand-painted double, with identical sawtooth edges and paper-thin relief. The hastily cut-and-pasted newspaper account of the artist’s sleight of hand challenges the viewer to discern the real four-cent proxy from the impostor. Though one stamp appears abraded—evidence, perhaps, of attempts to verify “which is which” by touch—the real rub lies with the press clipping, a fictitious piece of paper and reporting. The insertion of actual printed matter, the stamp, was a one-off until the advent of Cubism, but the American proffered two other conceits as well: faux collage and fake news. Though well publicized in the United States, the works of the American trompe l’oeil artists were likely unknown to the Cubists.

Like Chalfant in Which Is Which?, Gris used a newspaper clipping (in this case, an actual one) to engage the viewer in discerning “[L]E VR[AI] ET LE FAUX” (The true and the false), as the headline reads. Multiple layers of fiction ensue, as Gris draws phantasmal representations of a pipe, a glass, and bottles over solid wood-grain wallpaper that masquerades as a tabletop. A book lies open to a verifiable page, but the hefty volume is pure illusion. The artist pilfered the text from L’agent secret (The Secret Agent, 1911), one of a series of best-selling whodunits by French authors Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre that feature the criminal Fantômas, a master of disguises. The beguiling key cannot unlock the drawer because the “keyhole” is merely its own cast shadow.

Correa was a pioneer of trompe l’oeil easel painting in Spain. This panel, which is one of a pair, is typically self-reflexive in depicting the artist’s paint-daubed palette, bottle of oil, and maulstick (used to support the hand holding the paintbrush). The battered prints Correa copied have been identified: a 1611 engraving of a farmyard with peacocks, based on a drawing by the Dutch painter Abraham Bloemaert, is nailed above an etching depicting a beggar, made about 1622 by the French artist Jacques Callot. The skull of a dog is both a studio prop and a reminder of mortality.

Twice Gris added a twist to the classic trompe l’oeil theme of a print nailed to a wall (exemplified by Correa’s adjacent painting) by incorporating a real reproductive print. In this way, a multiple—the print was from a large edition—acquired uniqueness. Gris may have picked this British engraving (by Charles Heath, based on Henry Howard’s The Swiss Peasant and published in 1831) because it reeked of passé popular taste and suggested the kind of folksy music played by the absent guitarist. The artist’s imitations of wood and marble look willfully crude, in keeping with the painting’s general air of feigned naivete.

The abstracted trellis pattern of this wallpaper, which Picasso also pasted into his first papier collés, recalls the network of straps in letter-rack compositions, one of its joints acting as the hook for the guitar. Like the letter-rack painters, Picasso teases the viewer to make sense of the combination of disparate elements, including a piece of his hand-painted wood-grain, his drawing of a wineglass, and snippets from a song sheet and Le Journal. The viewer must become “LE JOU[EUR]” (the player). Many collages by Picasso include news clippings about the Balkan Wars, but here he omitted reference to that specific war from the headline. “LA BATAILLE S’EST ENGAGE[É]” (The battle has begun) has been interpreted as a private allusion to his creative rivalry with Braque.

Braque produced the first-ever Cubist papiers collés in autumn 1912 when he pasted strips of imitation wood-grain wallpaper into his drawings. The resemblance to the flat wood boards beloved of trompe l’oeil painters is striking. Here, the faux pine stands for the wood of both the violin and the paneling on which it hangs, effectively fusing foreground and background. Braque’s charcoal drawing and shading unite and harmonize the commercial stock with the fine-art paper of the support. The pleated planes forming the violin’s body seem to push out and back, as if vibrating like sound, while the parallel lines of its strings double as the lines of music paper. Braque was a keen amateur musician: his theme here is music itself.

In this two-dimensional variant of one of Picasso’s paperboard-and-string constructions, the illegible newsprint laid on its side evokes the fine grain of a violin’s wood case. The map of lines surrounding the instrument, perhaps indicating where other cutouts might go, recalls the gridlike structure of many trompe l’oeil board paintings (including the nearby Harnett). To judge by the violin’s long, narrow form and pointed lower section, Picasso had a “kit” in mind. Small enough to be kept in a pocket, kit violins were used by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dance teachers and street musicians and occasionally appear tucked behind straps in letter-rack paintings.

Braque depicted violins more than any other instrument. The violin was associated with both classical and folk music, the refined and the sentimental, a bridging of tastes that appealed to the Cubists’ own spirited dialogue with high art and popular culture. Here, a single violin is shown from multiple viewpoints, with selected details of the black tailpiece, tuning pegs, and scroll. Braque’s skill at using metal combs to create distinct wood grains was developed in his youth while training as a painter-decorator, his father’s profession. This still life is unique in Braque’s oeuvre because of its trompe l’oeil representation of sheet music.

Harnett was the most imitated and skillful still-life painter in late nineteenth-century America, celebrated for his many arrangements that pushed the art of trompe l’oeil (French for “fool the eye”) to its limits. While this complex composition may at first appear flat, it is full of depth and plasticity, emphasizing the tension between illusion and reality. The depicted hinged door is slightly ajar, and the humble objects hang on prominent nails, casting strong shadows. The instruments and torn sheet music for a popular Irish reel underline Harnett’s humorous sense of play as well as his Irish-American identity.

With its bow pointing to a recorder, a violin presides over a deceptively casual array of sheet music, a newspaper, a booklet, and implements for writing (uncut feathers, a pen case, an ink bottle, a penknife, and quill pens). Composing and making music—a creative art form akin to painting—was Gijsbrechts’s theme in this trompe l’oeil tour de force. A letter draped over the leather strap anchors the rhythmic composition on the right; it not only advertises the artist’s position as court painter to Christian V, king of Denmark, but also serves as the artist’s signature. The violin turns respectfully toward this precious document.

Picasso based this composition on classic trompe l’oeil board paintings. In painting the pine wainscot, however, he simulated the stereotypical style of painter-decorators, artisans who created the convincing imitations of wood paneling that were ubiquitous in French interiors. Some planes forming the violin have the flatness of paper cutouts, but the overlaps, passages of tonal modeling, and addition of sand to the paint lend the instrument a physical presence similar to the cardboard-and-string constructions Picasso was making at this time. By depicting only one of its sides and varying the size of the f-holes, he indicated that it is pivoting on its hook, like the violin in Gijsbrechts’s nearby painting.

The unknown author of this picture-within-a-picture hid his own identity, but not that of the signed and dated print he meticulously copied. The print reveals Dutch artist Ferdinand Bol’s debt to his teacher Rembrandt in the characterization of the old man and the etching technique, reproduced perfectly in paint. Fixed to the board by a blob of sealing wax, the print appears to curl toward the viewer, its illusionistic creases implying previous handling. The actual oak support that the painter used is concealed by his convincing imitation of pine.

The trompe l’oeil motif of a print attached to wood planking by nails or sealing wax became so popular that during the second half of the eighteenth century many factories imitated it on tableware. Typically, the miniature faux prints depict landscapes with buildings and tiny figures; delicately executed cast shadows make the paper appear to lift. Sometimes the painter signed the print or, as with the plate here, inscribed it with the date and factory name. Whether a different painter would have been employed to execute the pine background remains an open question.

The trompe l’oeil motif of a print attached to wood planking by nails or sealing wax became so popular that during the second half of the eighteenth century many factories imitated it on tableware. Typically, the miniature faux prints depict landscapes with buildings and tiny figures; delicately executed cast shadows make the paper appear to lift. Sometimes the painter signed the print or, as with the plate here, inscribed it with the date and factory name. Whether a different painter would have been employed to execute the pine background remains an open question.

The trompe l’oeil motif of a print attached to wood planking by nails or sealing wax became so popular that during the second half of the eighteenth century many factories imitated it on tableware. Typically, the miniature faux prints depict landscapes with buildings and tiny figures; delicately executed cast shadows make the paper appear to lift. Sometimes the painter signed the print or, as with the plate here, inscribed it with the date and factory name. Whether a different painter would have been employed to execute the pine background remains an open question.

According to Braque, this was his first papier collé, created in September 1912 with mass-produced faux bois wallpaper purchased in Avignon. To gain a surreptitious advantage over his partner and rival, Braque waited until Picasso had left Avignon for Paris before beginning to incorporate strips from the roll into his charcoal drawings. The machine-printed wallpaper was designed to be a cheap alternative to artisan-painted imitation wood, which was itself a cheaper alternative to real tongue-and-groove oak paneling. By using the three offcuts to frame his hand-drawn still life, Braque merged bargain-basement trompe l’oeil and avant-garde Cubist abstraction.

This painting riffs on the novel process of Cubist collage while exploiting traditional artisanal methods. Rather than imitate wood-grain directly, Braque used a decorator’s comb to imitate the faux bois wallpaper he had pasted into his first papiers collés, here pretending to patch scraps of it together. The simulated strips of gray wallpaper with an incised trellis pattern recall the rose-and-trellis wallpaper Picasso employed in his first papiers collés. The black faux cutouts forming the pitched-up tabletop mimic a commercial paper used in other collages. Further allusions to artisanal practice include evidence of the use of a ruler and compass to draft the composition, and the bunch of grapes rendered in the stereotyped manner of a motif on a decorative frieze.

Tradesmen would have hung the faux bois wallpaper vertically to simulate tongue-and-groove oak paneling, but here Braque pasted the cutouts horizontally. So mysterious is the space conjured in this still life that, in its “incorrect” orientation, the wallpaper could designate a wainscot, a tabletop, floorboards, or all three. The wallpaper is an alien presence, but Braque used the linear grooves and the drifts of wood-grain to reinforce, respectively, his hand-drawn geometric grid and hatched shading. Here and there Braque also extended the pattern by hand or drew over the offcuts: thus, the top edge of the ghostly newspaper (“JOUR[NAL]”) traverses the uppermost cutout.

This is likely the first Cubist painting to include a passage of hand-painted faux bois. Here, it represents the oak paneling behind the projecting table. Fine grooves in the oil paint indicate that Braque used a decorator’s graining comb. The flat, jet-black lettering of the music paper looks as if it were stamped on the surface of the completed painting, and Braque did use ready-made stencils to execute “BACH” (which also functions as a near homophone of his name). The use of commercial stencils was condemned in decorator’s manuals on the grounds that it required no skill; as if to prove his competence, Braque executed the letters “J S” by hand. T he artist signed the work at a later date.

The training of a French painter-decorator of Braque’s generation involved an apprenticeship with an established master, who introduced the novice to the specialized branches of the trade. Plates published in manuals and portfolios, such as these chromolithographs, supplemented practical experience. Accompanied by instructions, they demonstrate how to imitate varieties of wood, the veining of marble, and the convex and concave profiles of architectural moldings, while simultaneously providing models of finished work.
“Attributes of the Painter-Decorator” summarizes the entire trade by depicting its essential tools and materials. Emulating seventeenth- and eighteenth-century trompe l’oeil paintings that symbolize the visual arts, the print also claims high status for decorators trained in the art of deception.

The training of a French painter-decorator of Braque’s generation involved an apprenticeship with an established master, who introduced the novice to the specialized branches of the trade. Plates published in manuals and portfolios, such as these chromolithographs, supplemented practical experience. Accompanied by instructions, they demonstrate how to imitate varieties of wood, the veining of marble, and the convex and concave profiles of architectural moldings, while simultaneously providing models of finished work.

The training of a French painter-decorator of Braque’s generation involved an apprenticeship with an established master, who introduced the novice to the specialized branches of the trade. Plates published in manuals and portfolios, such as these chromolithographs, supplemented practical experience. Accompanied by instructions, they demonstrate how to imitate varieties of wood, the veining of marble, and the convex and concave profiles of architectural moldings, while simultaneously providing models of finished work.

The training of a French painter-decorator of Braque’s generation involved an apprenticeship with an established master, who introduced the novice to the specialized branches of the trade. Plates published in manuals and portfolios, such as these chromolithographs, supplemented practical experience. Accompanied by instructions, they demonstrate how to imitate varieties of wood, the veining of marble, and the convex and concave profiles of architectural moldings, while simultaneously providing models of finished work.

The training of a French painter-decorator of Braque’s generation involved an apprenticeship with an established master, who introduced the novice to the specialized branches of the trade. Plates published in manuals and portfolios, such as these chromolithographs, supplemented practical experience. Accompanied by instructions, they demonstrate how to imitate varieties of wood, the veining of marble, and the convex and concave profiles of architectural moldings, while simultaneously providing models of finished work.

The training of a French painter-decorator of Braque’s generation involved an apprenticeship with an established master, who introduced the novice to the specialized branches of the trade. Plates published in manuals and portfolios, such as these chromolithographs, supplemented practical experience. Accompanied by instructions, they demonstrate how to imitate varieties of wood, the veining of marble, and the convex and concave profiles of architectural moldings, while simultaneously providing models of finished work.

The training of a French painter-decorator of Braque’s generation involved an apprenticeship with an established master, who introduced the novice to the specialized branches of the trade. Plates published in manuals and portfolios, such as these chromolithographs, supplemented practical experience. Accompanied by instructions, they demonstrate how to imitate varieties of wood, the veining of marble, and the convex and concave profiles of architectural moldings, while simultaneously providing models of finished work.

The training of a French painter-decorator of Braque’s generation involved an apprenticeship with an established master, who introduced the novice to the specialized branches of the trade. Plates published in manuals and portfolios, such as these chromolithographs, supplemented practical experience. Accompanied by instructions, they demonstrate how to imitate varieties of wood, the veining of marble, and the convex and concave profiles of architectural moldings, while simultaneously providing models of finished work.

Silence reigns in this somber painting, in which all the instruments strewn over the massive table have broken strings and are unplayable. Decaying apples reinforce the vanitas message of the transience of life. Yet Baschenis incites the urge to touch by rendering everything with palpable veracity; the open drawer, crumpled scores, and silky ribbons appear to project outward, as if within one’s grasp. Baschenis had been all but forgotten outside his native Bergamo when his signature was deciphered on the table leg of this painting. Published in 1908, the discovery prompted great interest in his work, just as the Cubists embarked on their dialogue with trompe l’oeil painting.

Picasso completed this painting during the first winter of World War I. He counteracted the signs of festive eating and drinking—a compote piled with fruit and cakes, with a black, raffia-encased bottle of rum to its left; a peeled apple; a wineglass—by turning Le Journal black and the adjoining crumpled napkin an ominous leaden gray. The wallpapers he had used in his papiers collés influenced the work’s conception: the faux cutouts with multicolored dots mimic faux-granite wallpapers, and, on the right, the truncated marble panel and wood chair rail can only represent paper imitations of the real thing. The apparent grandeur of the composition is manifestly sham.

With its profusion of costly objects, beautiful flowers, and mouth-watering fruit, Bernard’s canvas is typical of the ostentatious tendency in seventeenth-century illusionistic still-life painting that appealed especially to aristocratic collectors. Known in Holland as pronkstillevens, these lavishly decorative pictures held much less appeal for the Cubists than mundane tavern and kitchen still lifes by the likes of Van de Velde and Meléndez. But Picasso had this tradition in mind when he began work on the complex, cascading composition of Still Life with Fruit Dish on a Table (shown alongside) in Avignon during the summer of 1914.

The wood table, crockery, and glassware imply an ordinary kitchen, while the varnished tile-patterned wallpaper stands in for an oilcloth table cover. Two sensational murders are reported on the front page of the newspaper, generating an ominous atmosphere that is reinforced by the stark tonal contrasts. The meticulous hand-drawn reproduction of parallelepiped, a brainteasing pattern that goes back to antiquity, contributes to the visual drama. Gris also highlighted the newspaper’s contrasting photos of a Parisian monument, showing it first disguised by the handbills pasted over it, then in a cleaned-up and (as the caption states) “less picturesque” state. A covert allusion to collage was likely intended.

Gris seamlessly combined cuttings from a tobacco package and his favorite faux wood-grain wallpapers with his handmade imitations of printed materials: the checked tablecloth that doubles as floor tiles, sheet of music, and label for “BOR[DEAUX] V[IN].” The tabletop tips up vertically, all but negating spatial recession, and the glinting bottle and wineglasses seem to push through the picture plane in classic trompe l’oeil style. The haunting fusion of guitar and table in a shadowy room and the remnants of a past gathering with music recall the theme of Baschenis’s rediscovered masterpiece (shown nearby), which Gris may have known in reproduction.

Gris evoked a masculine world like that of Van de Velde’s nearby still life. The snippet from Le Journal offers minimal reading matter, but the eye-catching word “FEMMES” may suggest that the unseen beer drinker had sex on his mind. Ironically, it came from an impassioned “Appel aux Femmes” (Call to Women) to join the embattled French suffrage movement. Gris left the attitude of the beer drinker to the divisive “woman question” provocatively open, just as trompe l’oeil painters left it to their viewers to make what sense they liked of the documents littering their compositions.

The traditional still-life imagery of this collage is akin to that of Meléndez’s nearby tableau. Gris’s table, however, is tipped up vertically like the backboard of a classic trompe l’oeil letter-rack painting. The grid pattern inscribed on the cloth and echoed in the product labels recalls the straps that secure objects to such backboards. By carefully rendering the molding on the rim of the fruit dish and the crisp folds of the table linen, Gris flaunted his command of conventional illusionism—albeit the illusionism typical of “commercial” rather than “high” art.

This painting is from a renowned set of almost forty still lifes by Meléndez on display at the Prado ever since the museum opened in 1819. In these masterpieces of descriptive realism, which Picasso and Gris certainly saw, the space is shallow, the background featureless, and the crowded table or shelf brought so close to the frontal picture plane that the objects projecting over its edge appear to penetrate the viewer’s space. The acute appeal to the senses is offset by the refined geometry of Meléndez’s carefully plotted compositions.

The pyramidal structure of this still life is the product of rigorous artistic planning and control, but the imagery implies disorderly behavior. The tall, ringed pasglas filled halfway with beer would have passed from hand to hand in a drinking competition; chalk marks on the table beside the deck of cards indicate gambling; and embers spill from the carelessly abandoned clay pipe, while the burning lighter draped over it threatens fiery destruction. Cubist still lifes summoning up the convivial masculine world of the local bar drew on this prevalent type of seventeenth-century Dutch still-life painting but rarely expressed the same vanitas warning that death comes to all.

In place of the virtuoso imitations of materials and textures created by seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish painters, Gris relied on wood-grain wallpaper, a cutting from Le Matin, Scaferlati tobacco packaging, and the top of a box of matches. The fancy lettering of the “Vin Rosé” label was his own handiwork, however. Complementing the impression of a dimly lit table at night, the leading report in the newspaper concerns the strikes and power cuts that had formerly plunged Paris into darkness. Scaferlati tobacco was nicknamed “le cube gris” because of the cubic form of its grayish package; incorporated into his collages, it served as a punning substitute for Gris’s missing signature.

In this painting, Picasso engaged with a traditional Spanish type of realist still life in which the objects are arranged in a zigzagging line along a narrow, projecting ledge. But subversion as well as homage was involved, for although he revived a time-honored form, he chose lowly tavern imagery and adapted artisanal techniques and materials. He used a decorator’s comb to grain the wood, gave the bottle literal tangibility by mixing sand into the dark gray paint, and imitated the vulgar trompe l’oeil of a printed wallpaper border when painting the carved molding of the table’s edge.

Picasso often pinned his cutouts to the support before pasting them flat. He sometimes left the pins in situ (a crafty echo of the trompe l’oeil nail), allowing part of the paper to rise proud of the surface and cast live shadows from within the picture. Here, a subtle shadow emerges from beneath the lower edge of the indented ocher cutout, an inversion of the guitar’s B-shaped, white profile. Picasso both concealed and revealed it by adding light strokes of charcoal. The cylindrical bottle projects a contradictory, squared-off double. The outline of a glass adds to the reversals of light and dark, highlight and shadow, and the transparent and opaque.

Picasso did not fully adhere the brilliant blue paper (the silhouette of the rectangular instrument), allowing it to rise along the deckled left side. He then blanketed the resulting shadow with hand-drawn sfumatura (blending), literally blurring the real and the fake. The differences are almost indiscernible, prompting the urge “to see” by lifting the paper. Picasso’s pronounced shading under the white coffee cup also momentarily casts doubt, stimulating the false perception of high relief. The Cubists often applied such eye-tricking chiaroscuro around the edges of their cutouts. Having introduced a radical material realism into a picture, they undercut it with old-fashioned illusionism. The fragment of wallpaper imitating Islamic tiles signifies the background wall and creates its own optical game of projecting and receding planes.

Though sinister cast shadows were no novelty, Gris’s ingeniously detached silhouettes stand for the things themselves, as with the wineglass, pipe, and bottle in this garishly colored scene. Unlike full-bodied objects, these apparitions are flat and insubstantial, eluding our grasp. Meanwhile, the shadow dutifully attached to the guitar does not obey the laws of nature but changes in shape and direction, like a rogue twin. Gris’s mock deviousness was inspired by the murky criminal underworld of the pulp-fiction series Fantômas and its film versions (1913–14), which enthralled the Parisian avant-garde; the titular character often perpetrated his dastardly deeds like a stealth silhouette, clothed all in black.

The flattened planes and diverse materials of Cubist pictures are anything but illusionistic. Yet look again. For his fragmented checkerboard, Gris fashioned a delicate marquetry with inlaid pieces of faux bois wallpaper. As two-dimensional as the depicted scene may be, delicate shading conjures the thickness of the checkerboard along its top edge and the thinness of the stippled white paper plane below, which lifts ever so slightly off the tabletop. A Cubist glass, with its cup, stem, and base schematically rendered, sits at the edge of the table—or do we see two? The excessively large shadow to its right takes on a life of its own, to sinister or comic effect.

The sense of movement and intrigue in this diagonally oriented painting is palpable: someone has quickly left the scene, leaving a shawl or cloak behind on the chair and a crumpled napkin and folded newspaper on the table. The blade of the black knife at far left, dangerously angled at the table’s edge, infuses the painting with menace, while the goblet at right seems to levitate upward at an angle. A fluted design on its base almost appears as the fingers of an invisible intruder. In contrast to Braque and Picasso, Gris reveled in garish colors that add narrative drama to his still lifes.

Typically, the Cubists inserted different styles of representation within a single picture. Gris shaded the tablecloth at the left with naturalistic creases and folds, whereas the pedestal of the fruit dish appears two ways, with a convincingly modeled, reddish-brown base and as a flat-footed white silhouette. The shared border between the two renditions possibly triggers an illusion known as Rubin’s Vase: if the brown shape dominates, the profile of a down-turned head emerges. Together, what one sees of the wine label “BEAU[NE/JOLAIS]” and the newspaper “LE JOUR[NAL]” spells “the beautiful day,” an ironic counter to the ominous blacks that fill the backdrop and a wistful sentiment, given Gris’s pronounced gloom during World War I.

Still Life may appear to be casually concocted from scrap materials but is rife with playful allusions to favorite motifs of trompe l’oeil painters: a table that thrusts forward, a precariously balanced knife, a cut-crystal glass half full of wine, and the leftovers of a meal. The pattern Picasso painted on the beading, which represents a chair rail, is an abbreviated replica of the faux moldings of wallpaper borders, while the real upholstery fringe stands in for the costly textiles featured in illusionistic still lifes. A type of trompe l’oeil known as a chantourné, a painting cut to the shape of the thing depicted, may have inspired this eccentric silhouette.

Picasso constructed this relief inside a shallow wooden box, which approximates the frames that enclose Renaissance reliefs by the likes of Lorenzo Ghiberti. The fluted wineglass, carved from a rough scrap of wood, is seen both straight on and from above, as in a Cubist painting. The top of the die is sliced off in a spoof of steep linear perspective. For the newspaper, Picasso repurposed a powdered-milk tin, cutting and crumpling it as if it were paper. He used its embossed lettering to represent printed text but painted the letters of the masthead, [LE] JO[UR]NAL, by hand. Straying beyond the box’s threshold, it parodies the curling documents of trompe l’oeil paintings, whereas everything else undermines the very notion of illusionism.

Picasso toyed with standard trompe l’oeil themes in this relief sculpture, which he framed as if it were a painting. The glass and newspaper, fashioned entirely from bent and cut tin, project so far beyond the ready-made frame that a viewer drawing too close might suffer a nasty cut—an absurdist parody of seventeenth-century paintings of tables strewn with objects that appear to protrude outward and invite the urge to touch. The grisaille (gray monochrome) palette echoes that adopted by painters who specialized in simulating relief sculpture, but Picasso’s super-sketchy technique is flamboyantly anti-illusionistic.

While Picasso never sculpted in the esteemed material of marble, he copied its veining in paintings, papiers collés, and this deliberately rough-hewn construction. The carved and marbleized piece of wood fixed to the backboard may represent a curtain or a screen. In any case, it complements the flat, marbleized shadow apparently cast by the white fluted wineglass. Decorative pattern thus supersedes realism in this exercise in trompe l’esprit (fool the mind). A jutting nail—a motif represented in countless trompe l’oeil paintings—is the sole surviving sign of a fringe cut from newspaper that originally adorned the edge of the circular table and concealed the construction’s unpainted base.

In an age when sculpture usually meant allegorical figures and portrait busts, Picasso’s life-size rendering of a glass of alcohol was shocking for its banality. Cast in bronze in an edition of six, and then hand-painted, none of the finished works is colored green, so it was clearly not absinthe’s distinctive color that inspired Picasso. Nor does he seem to have been moved by the national debate about whether to ban the potent liquor. Instead, absinthe presented Picasso with the opportunity to incorporate an actual piece of cutlery, a trowel-shaped, slotted spoon designed to hold a sugar cube over the rim of a glass when preparing the drink. When asked about the sculpture years later, Picasso remembered that he had been particularly intrigued by “the relationship between the real spoon and the modeled glass. In the way they clashed with each other.”

In a treatise published in 1781, Liotard firmly stated his belief in the supreme mimetic power of painting. His deceptive imitation of two chipped plaster reliefs “proves” that a painter can convincingly reproduce the appearance of sculpture (whereas a sculptor cannot reproduce the appearance of painting). Significantly, the imagery of the reliefs is derived from paintings, both by François Boucher. Liotard’s simulations of screws made of two different metals, the colored chalks of his two costume sketches, torn and crumpled paper, sealing wax, and pine are equally persuasive. The artist’s professional pride is captured in the seemingly casual signature and date “written” at the top of the faux panel.

Glass and Ace of Clubs is the papier collé sibling of the reliefs Picasso made during the same period, the almost featureless background standing for the wall on which they were designed to hang. He mitigated the flatness of the cutouts by allowing their edges to lift slightly and gave the wineglass heft by using a textured paper. In a parody of trompe l’oeil painting, the playing card tips over the edge of the oval table—itself made from a sheet of Picasso’s hand-painted faux bois, complete with a crude faux carved edge. The dark gray-blue cutout may represent a jug and the vertical molding its handle.

These papiers collés exemplify Picasso’s genius for converting offcuts of paper into surprisingly convincing objects. In each case, the artist created a wineglass by cutting out half its silhouette, drawing certain contours and details, and shading part of its body. Alternating between the ready-made and the handmade, Picasso used a scrap of a trompe l’oeil border to represent a carved chair rail in Glass and Card but drew the wood beading of Pipe and Wineglass by hand in the standardized style of illusionistic printed borders. Like the quarter apple in Still Life with a Glass and Ace of Clubs (hanging nearby), the pipe came from Picasso’s existing stock of cutouts. Although adhered to the surface, it has a sculptural presence thanks to the careful modeling and the hand-drawn shadow cast by its stem.

These papiers collés exemplify Picasso’s genius for converting offcuts of paper into surprisingly convincing objects. In each case, the artist created a wineglass by cutting out half its silhouette, drawing certain contours and details, and shading part of its body. Alternating between the ready-made and the handmade, Picasso used a scrap of a trompe l’oeil border to represent a carved chair rail in Glass and Card but drew the wood beading of Pipe and Wineglass by hand in the standardized style of illusionistic printed borders. Like the quarter apple in Still Life with a Glass and Ace of Clubs (hanging nearby), the pipe came from Picasso’s existing stock of cutouts. Although adhered to the surface, it has a sculptural presence thanks to the careful modeling and the hand-drawn shadow cast by its stem.

In iconography and structure this papier collé is closely related to Still Life (in the nearby case), its bare background representing the wall against which Picasso’s constructed reliefs were supposed to hang. The overlapping handmade components (the loosely brushed faux wood paneling with molding; the glass and pipe fashioned from cut-and-torn paper; the cutout imitating an ace of clubs) vie with real printed cigarette packaging, which Picasso cut and shaded to simulate creasing. In contrast, the schematic tabletop, drawn in reverse perspective directly on the paperboard, undermines the pretense of three-dimensionality governing the rest of the composition.

The construction technique Picasso used when making both three-dimensional reliefs and papiers collés perfectly suited his quickfire imagination, gift for improvisation, and dexterity. To speed up the creative process, he standardized his representation of key tabletop motifs, such as the fluted wineglass, and prepared a corps of cutout fruit, pipes, and playing cards that he could draw from when assembling his papiers collés. The brightly colored quarter apple in this example came from his existing stock. A few meandering black lines and deft snips transformed a scrap of paint-daubed paper into a surprisingly convincing marble shelf, the hand-drawn line beneath it enhancing the impression of physical projection.

Braque used a wallpaper simulating limewashed oak to represent the table and another pattern to imitate the paneling typical of dining rooms. The latter is laid on top of the other pasted fragments but, paradoxically, represents the wall behind the table. To integrate it into his composition, Braque extended its molding on the left with a hand-drawn replica. The clay pipe appears to be a pasted-on cutout but was in fact cut from the newspaper on which it seems to lie. Violette de Parme (Parma violet), advertised in bold type at the bottom of the other news clipping, was a prized perfume for women. Facing the pipe, it promises a floral antidote to the pungent smell of tobacco.

A streamlined version of the neoclassical, early nineteenth-century French Empire style became fashionable for interior decoration shortly before the outbreak of World War I. Picasso echoed this trend by depicting a console table with a beaded edge and an imperial porphyry top (made with faux granite wallpaper); paneling in an off-white tone (the natural color of the paper plus ruled graphite lines and shading); and a towering fruit dish resembling a classical column (a cutout painted white to distinguish it from the paneling). Beside the cutout of a bunch of grapes are staring, eye-like forms that may represent cross-sections of the fruits. The duo of wineglass and ace of clubs—the lucky card—appears in many of Picasso’s collages, likely signifying conviviality.

Picasso alluded to Pliny’s famous account of the luscious grapes painted by Zeuxis by pairing his cutout of a simplified bunch of the fruit with a snippet of the Leroy factory’s trompe l’oeil wallpaper border of scrolling leaves and berries. Cascades of colored dots representing rays of light echo the design of the faux granite wallpapers Picasso used in other collages made in this period. The eccentrically shaped cutout representing the fruit dish is visibly flat, but he gave it volume through his virtuoso modeling and by reinforcing with pencil the real shadows cast by the lifting edges of the paper.

Gris’s meticulous collage technique resembles marquetry, the practice of inlaying wood to create complex patterns. To cut, match, and place the many paper fragments that compose his still lifes required great finesse. In Guitar and Glass, the boudoir pattern of the wallpaper, which imitates Rococo silk, complements the soft, hand-drawn curves of the reclining guitar and contrasts with the geometry of the cutouts and grid lines that anchor the composition. Slender strips of paper representing the instrument’s strings, like the wineglass tipping over the table edge, invite exploratory touch and enhance the sensual implications.

Gris’s collages often hint at narrative scenarios, the wallpapers and other elements acting as clues for the viewer. In Flowers, the combination of the “masculine” pipe and the “feminine” bouquet (formed from different flowery papers, including Leroy’s daffodil pattern, displayed below), along with the wine and coffee, imply a lovers’ meeting. The hand-painted midnight blue surround and the faux marble wallpaper underline the erotic atmosphere. (The Leroy sample shown below is printed in a different colorway.) American author Gertrude Stein, who befriended Gris in Paris, acquired Flowers soon after it was created in spring 1914.

Here, Picasso used an old Leroy paper (displayed below) torn from a wall, possibly by the artist himself. The border was stuck to it, but Picasso split the two apart for his composition. Inspired by Islamic tiles, the wallpaper contrasts with the border, which simulates a classic European molding and stands for the table’s carved edge. The pinned papers lift slightly, creating real shadows that vie with those both drawn by hand and printed on the border. Books on interior decoration published around the turn of the century recommended “Mauresque” (French for Moorish) patterns for the male domains of smoking room and club, where Vieux Marc brandy and newspapers would be found.

When France entered World War I in August 1914, Picasso, a Spanish national, was not required to serve. He expressed his patriotic sentiments for his adopted country by indirect allusion, as seen at left in the white souvenir cup with its crossed flags. Seemingly nothing is somber in this riotously colorful array, from the bottle of the raffia-encased La Negrita rum to the flocked wallpaper to the pear or pears at far right. Even the dotted vessel at center seems full of energy. Only the uncanny shadow of a bottle on the back wall casts a disquieting note.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

The wallpapers and borders displayed here are similar or identical to those the Cubists used in their collages and pastiched in their paintings. Eight of the albums contain samples from the Isidore Leroy factory, which opened in the 1840s and was the first in France to print wallpaper by machine. Patterns were issued in various colorways; some came in several weights and finishes, including varnished and washable versions. Shops displayed lengths of wallpaper in their windows and kept albums with samples inside. Brochures sometimes included pasted-in snippets. Borders imitating moldings, edgings, and trimmings served to frame architectural features and mark divisions in a decorative scheme. Printed in rows, they were cut out by the paperhanger before application.

Collier painted his letter racks during a boom in serial publications and in the aftermath of the event known as the Glorious Revolution (1688), when the Catholic king of England was overthrown and replaced by his Protestant offspring. Collier included actual documents related to religious conflict and the status of rulers, subtly tampering with dates and spelling. The masthead of the London Gazette, one of England’s first newspapers, seems clear enough, but the copy blurs upon close inspection. A parliamentary pamphlet titled “The Humble Address” disingenuously puns on the picture itself and its important messages to the viewer. The artist chose to juxtapose printed matter with handwritten keepsakes, raising questions about how the two differ in feel and truth value. The script of “Memorye” on the notebook cover is overly embellished, as memories often are.

This is the earlier of Harnett’s two known “rack” pictures, a subject he and his contemporary John F. Peto had inherited from seventeenth-century Dutch painters. The wood boards of the background, the pink tape of the rack, the cards and envelopes that are tucked into it, and the surrounding paper scraps are all carefully delineated. Curling edges, subtle shadows, and distinctive textures tease the viewer into imagining that all the painted elements are real. A few clues suggest that the canvas was commissioned by someone associated with the Philadelphia firm C. C. Peirson and Sons, which dealt in woolens and hides.

This collage is one of three by Gris that showcases the word “explorers” and news of an international dispute over who “discovered” an unmapped river in the Amazon Basin. The headline “Explorateurs en désaccord” (Explorers in Discord) and claims of precedence likely allude to the rivalry, or even a rift, between Braque and Picasso. Gris doctored the newspaper to appear as a single page when it really consists of two. The headline from the previous day, “L’enquête atroce” (The Atrocious Affair), while providing a wry gloss on the other story here, reports on war crimes committed during the Second Balkan War. More often than the two “pioneering” Cubists, Gris interrupted the artifice of his still lifes with brutal realities from the real world.

Gris delighted in specious representations—forms that transubstantiate, multiply, or appear and disappear. In this dazzling still life, he focused on an impeccably foreshortened volume illuminated by white light. Amid the hide-and-seek outlines of spectral objects—a coffee pot and grinder, a sugar bowl, cups, and a pipe—the book appears real enough, yet it frustrates the reader with a text composed of strikethrough lines. Gris turned the facing page into a mirror, all glassy sheen, though further scrutiny reveals that it reflects a different page.

On an outdoor table dappled by colored sunlight, the mouth of a bottle of Banyuls fortified wine appears two ways, sealed by wax and open. Interrupting the pleasurable scene is a newspaper headline with the “terrifying” news of an air balloon whose basket detached and fell into the Tuileries Gardens, threatening death and causing injury. The basketweave pattern of the tabletop underscores that Gris’s choice of papers was never random, but an intricate piece of the narrative design.

It is often the case with trompe l’oeil typography that words inside an artwork make inside commentary about art. Here, sculpture, music, film, drawing, and collage are brought together in “concert” to play a recurring theme, or “rondo.” Braque undoubtedly saved the program from the Tivoli Cinema because of the suggestive titles of the three “représentations” (screenings). Éclair-Journal, or “illuminated newspaper,” was a weekly cinematic newsreel. “Timbre rare” (rare tone) suggests the sound of the guitar and perhaps also Braque’s silvery strokes. The plot of Statue d’Épouvante (Horrific Statue) revolved around a sculptor seeking to avenge his daughter’s death; yet the words can also be read as the artist’s expression of mock horror at traditional forms of sculpture.

Published in Florence, the journal Lacerba was a mouthpiece for the Italian Futurist movement and included articles on Cubism. The boldface title riffed on the adjective acerbo/a (acerbic), deliberately chosen because of the journal’s aim to be strident. Picasso’s handwritten label for Vieux Marc, a prized French brandy that requires aging for its rich flavor, takes aim at the Futurist obsession with youth and speed. As in earlier still lifes, the presence of long-distance dispatches and foreign publications attests to the widespread circulation of information across gaps of time and distance. Unlike the painted papers, however, the Cubist clippings, now yellowed and friable, have changed materially over time, underscoring the venerable vanitas theme of transience.

This belongs to a series of papiers collés in which Braque foregrounded the dual-directional reading of table and tableau (picture) by drawing the outline of his tabletops inside the picture with soft charcoal lines. The violin inscribed on faux bois wallpaper could be lying on the table or hanging on the wall, given that its tuning keys double as nails. The masthead “LE QUO[TIDIEN] DU M[IDI],” from a daily published in the South of France, may surreptitiously refer to the quotidian (everyday) subjects of still lifes; it also brings to mind “le quodlibet,” a term used to describe pictures of assorted objects and ephemera.

Whereas Picasso liked to shape his cutouts into silhouetted objects and Gris inlaid his like marquetry, Braque preferred cut rectangles that insist on their identity as flat sheets of paper. His papers are cast about pell-mell across faintly outlined tabletops, even as they take on other meanings. The presence of the masthead from Le Courrier Colonial: Organe de Madagascar et des Colonies de l’Océan Indien brings the outside reality of French colonialism into the picture. The newspaper is a “courier” to the reader, a function akin to the informational relay typical of trompe l’oeil medleys. Braque’s altered masthead reads “ORGAN[E] DE MAD[AME],” a bawdy reference deepened by the hole of the adjacent cutout heart.

In a witty version of a “mirror image,” Braque took the oval backing board off a looking glass, covered it with white gesso, and turned the vertical format to a horizontal one to emphasize the tabletop effect. The two pieces of differently grained faux bois stand for the respective wood planes of wall and table, reinforcing oscillating viewpoints, while the latter displays the daily news: two actual pages and hand-drawn letters that refer to the newspaper Le Journal. He placed an ad for Motobloc automobiles (suggesting the male “drive”) next to one publicizing L’amour obligatoire (Mandatory love), a handbook on women’s “proper” sexual comportment, and conjoined them with a wineglass amusingly split into positive and negative forms.

Artistic ambition underlies this “messy” table, as indicated by the porte-crayon, a drawing instrument, that points to the word “FAMOSA.” Occupying most of the background plane is a page of artists' biographies, which Pérez Ruano “took” from one of the most influential treatises on the visual arts, Joachim von Sandrart’s Academia Nobilissima Artis Pictoriae (1683). The three landscape engravings are layered just so, in order to reveal the names of the printmakers whose works have been replicated; originally produced in multiples, each is here rendered unique. Attributes of masculinity—a pocketknife, cards, and a cigarette—accompany the copy of Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s 1768 story of attempted seduction and fidelity, but a book of prayers (Gozos) tops them all, closest at hand.

Documents fan out upon a green granite tabletop, transfixing the eye with their material veracity and replicating a collector’s habit of viewing prints strewn across a table. Here, Robart’s medley of images is displayed flat to redouble the table/tableau (picture) conceit. A dated sheet from the Dutch East India Company bears a list of cargo on its merchant ships; it partially obscures a musical score for the Nunc Dimittis (Song of Simeon). Together with a map of Europe and a booklet with a view of Dordrecht, the imagery traverses time and place, the sacred and the profane. The two landscapes in ink wash are Robart’s “own” handiwork: note the footprints in the snow in the scene at lower left and track the tiny figure who travels across the picture, from winter to spring.

By copying the works and styles of other artists, image counterfeiters raised the question of “who is who?” as much as “which is which?” In this self-aggrandizing etching, however, all the prints proudly displayed “every which way” are Papillon de la Ferté’s own, and each extols his employer, the French king Louis XV, including an engraved portrait medallion and maps of the kingdom. The hand-colored floral-band pattern of the backdrop resembles wallpaper more than a tablecloth, accentuating the dual-directional reading. The lack of pins or tacks appending them to a vertical surface reinforces the appearance of papers lying on a table, even as we view them as a picture hanging on the wall.

This still life is one of two by Gris with mirror fragments, which would have offered a Cubist reflection of any person who stood before them. The artist facetiously defended his shortcut by noting how a painted mirror can never really be convincing because the surface of an actual one is always changing: “There is nothing else to do but stick on a real piece.” The book page is taken from the author’s preface to an obscure historical novel, Le bourreau du roi (The King’s Executioner) by Roland Bauchery. The heading, “DE L’AUTEUR” (of/by the author), now stands for Gris the artist, who has appropriated Bauchery’s authorship for his own creative ends.

The French term trompe l’oeil, “fool the eye,” was coined in 1800 by none other than Boilly, whose visual deceptions attracted and astonished crowds. This painting on marble functions as an actual tabletop and simulates the look of recently emptied pockets. The piece was likely commissioned by the addressee on the envelope, “Monsieur Pourtalès,” a member of the Neuchâtel banking family, which accounts for the array of Swiss coins. Boilly flattered his patron by including his portrait miniature, with the glass cover coyly removed and set aside for all to “see.” The inclusion also shows off the artist’s own talent—and thriving business—in portraiture. Boilly left behind a few of his business cards, bearing the address of and directions to his studio.

American trompe l’oeil painters replicated paper bills so exactly that they raised suspicions of actual forgery. Haberle’s title, Imitation, provokes on multiple levels, as do his painted representations of different forms of representation—stamps, currency, signatures, and a tintype photograph (of himself)—whose relative values depend on established conventions. Nothing is materially “real” here, though much may be “true,” such as the portrait likenesses. He signed the work twice: his name is “carved” into the wood support and appears to have been hastily cut from newsprint and affixed to the frame in a parody of the collection nameplate. The latter draws attention to his artistic “brand,” despite the association with a newspaper’s degradable paper and cheap price.

This collage contains a rare autobiographical reference by Braque, who was a keen cyclist: the fragment of an ad for the bimonthy magazine Le Cyclotouriste. The work likely dates from around June 28, 1914, when the artist embarked on a bicycle trip from Sens to Sorgues (a distance of some 370 miles). He framed his own oval picture with a bespoke mat crafted from trompe l’oeil linen wallpaper so that a piece of it crosses the threshold. The rapidly scripted letters that appear literally out and ahead of the rest of the papers likely express the “[vit]esse,” or speed, with which he aimed to complete his cycling journey.

Braque meticulously reproduced a type of engraved-metal nameplate, with tiny screws at the edges, that had devolved into a trite vehicle for product branding. A typical example is seen in the lower right of the image reproduced here, featuring a painter-decorator marbling a wall, one of a series of collectible cards advertising Trébucien coffee and chocolate. Braque likely chose this popular signature device over more rarified forms to chafe at the professional hierarchies that separated artisanal painters from “fine” artists. The frankly fake nameplate nonetheless functions as a sign of genuine authorship. That the raised areas of paint, sawdust, and wood particles appear to be cut outs collaged onto the surface is pure trompe l’oeil.

Image caption: “Le peintre décorateur” (The painter-decorator). Card advertising Trébucien, “Chocolat des Gourmets,” ca. 1900. Chromolithograph. Mucem, Marseilles

Picasso plays with expectations. What might normally be printed—the label on the bottle at center—is deliberately hand-drawn, while what is traditionally handwritten—the artist’s signature—is stenciled within the outline of a dog-eared calling card at lower right. A diagonal representing a shimmering ray of light separates the “B” from the “AS” and energizes the composition. Ostensibly, “BAS” stands for the popular British import Bass ale (to which Braque and Picasso clearly refer in other Cubist works), but here the “B” is depicted as if it were the liquid itself entering the glass. Meanwhile the remaining letters—“AS”—spell the French word for “ace,” which is precisely what Picasso depicts below.

These two papier collés poke fun at the same well-worn conventions of art display parodied by Haberle in the trompe l’oeil on the facing wall. Picasso mounted two of his Cubist still lifes on wallpaper supports and surrounded them with a printed leaf-and-berry border that simulates the carved versions used to frame venerated masterpieces. The rectangles of pasted paper, which bear a faux naive version of his autograph, mock the brass nameplates pretentiously affixed to solid frames by collectors and museums. Yet, by virtue of his collage technique, Picasso has appended to his picture a materially real version of the cartellino, the time-honored illusion of a slip of paper bearing the artist’s signature—likely a first in the history of art.

These two papier collés poke fun at the same well-worn conventions of art display parodied by Haberle in the trompe l’oeil on the facing wall. Picasso mounted two of his Cubist still lifes on wallpaper supports and surrounded them with a printed leaf-and-berry border that simulates the carved versions used to frame venerated masterpieces. The rectangles of pasted paper, which bear a faux naive version of his autograph, mock the brass nameplates pretentiously affixed to solid frames by collectors and museums. Yet, by virtue of his collage technique, Picasso has appended to his picture a materially real version of the cartellino, the time-honored illusion of a slip of paper bearing the artist’s signature—likely a first in the history of art.

Calling cards displaying the name of the artist or that of a notable peer are featured in many trompe l’oeil still lifes. Following suit, Picasso included the actual engraved cards of his patrons Gertrude Stein and André Level. A bent corner signified that the owner had delivered it personally; though here, the corners are simply not there: Picasso cut them off and drew in duplicitous doubles. The conjoined dice may allude to Stein’s intimate relationship with Alice B. Toklas, one stated openly on their shared card. As to Level, he headed the consortium of investors that sold Picasso’s painting Family of Saltimbanques (1905) at auction in 1914 for a staggering sum, creating a whole new market for Picasso and modern art.

Calling cards displaying the name of the artist or that of a notable peer are featured in many trompe l’oeil still lifes. Following suit, Picasso included the actual engraved cards of his patrons Gertrude Stein and André Level. A bent corner signified that the owner had delivered it personally; though here, the corners are simply not there: Picasso cut them off and drew in duplicitous doubles. The conjoined dice may allude to Stein’s intimate relationship with Alice B. Toklas, one stated openly on their shared card. As to Level, he headed the consortium of investors that sold Picasso’s painting Family of Saltimbanques (1905) at auction in 1914 for a staggering sum, creating a whole new market for Picasso and modern art.

The word-and-image play in this amusing collage asserts Gris’s position as part of an elite Cubist trio, the “DESTILLACION ESPECIAL” (special distillation) as per the claim on the label from a popular alcoholic drink. The enjoyment to be had is as much about amis (friends) as anis, the licorice-flavored spirit. The logo includes its place of manufacture, Badalona, a suburb of Barcelona, and two prize-winning medallions from Paris and Madrid; these were emblematic cities for Picasso, Braque, and Gris, respectively. The lattice pattern on the “tipsy” bottle mimics the original’s pressed glass design, itself a mass-produced imitation of real cut glass.

The table in this domestic breakfast scene is laid with printed wallpapers and brims with autobiographical references, mainly the coffee-drinking accessories and the actual Café Eugène Martin label. Gris’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler remarked that the artist was an excessive consumer of caffeine. A fortuitous newspaper fragment provides the ready-made signature “GRIS” while the letters “OURN,” excerpted from the masthead of Le Journal, form a homophonic pun on “Juan.” The name Juan Gris (or “John Gray”) proved to be the finest fiction of all, for it was but a pseudonym for the man born in 1887 as José Victoriano Carmelo Carlos González-Peréz.