False Light Case

Braque’s and Picasso’s brief outburst of Analytic Cubism (1912–14) was one of the most important developments in modern art, from which architecture heavily borrowed. Trompe l’oeil is the reduction of European perspectival painting to a crass parlor trick. Put the two together and you get the Met’s unseemly Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, which closed late last month. It’s true that Cubist collages and papiers collés do flirt with trompe l’oeil elements (seen up close, some of Juan Gris’s more obvious collages were more than a little gauche), but the great deconstruction of Western painting was not at all illuminated by being in the company of some gaudy Dutch still lives. Still, a poor curatorial conceit didn’t negate the work itself, especially when there were three Cubists for each of the others.