Double Take: An Exhibition in Paris Explores Trompe-l’œil Tropes

In a world of fake news and ‘truthiness,’ of A.I.’s terrifyingly indistinguishable verisimilitude with reality, the Musée Marmottan Monet’s exhibition “Trompe-l’oeil, from 1520 to the present day” feels thematically very a propos with its focus on highly realistic yet ultimately deceptive optical illusion—although wildly more cheeky and jubilant in nature. The illusions may be short-lived upon closer inspection, but they are nonetheless striking, effective, and sometimes astonishingly disruptive. Several older works are unframed to perpetuate the sense of naturalism or are faux-framed by the artist himself (it’s almost always “himself” here). As the wall text states, these “painters competed with reality.”

The show is threaded with works from the Musée Marmottan Monet’s own collection, and Sylvie Carlier, director of the museum’s collections, who co-curated the exhibition with Aurélie Gavoille, described it as “raconté” (a form of storytelling) rather than “exhaustive.” On view in Paris in the museum’s repurposed townhouse through March 2, 2025, the show—hung against sober brown-violet walls—examines the trickle-down from Flemish heritage to artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries, each deploying this irreverent and illusory style. The earliest examples highlight, per the wall text, “an artfully composed jumble” by way of vanitas paintings, letter racks, and cabinets of curiosity, with recurrent visual tropes such as engravings, ribbons, playing cards, flies, glass shards, feathers and faux wood backdrops.

“Trompe-l’oeil” skews heavily male, but one exception is the work of Anna Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818), a court painter to Marie-Antoinette and the first woman to be admitted to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Here, two small-scale trompe l’oeil bas reliefs show chubby children frolicking and gamboling within hand-painted frames. There’s also an incredible trompe l’oeil portrait made by Jean Etienne Liotard that features, circa 1762, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. The work is all one piece yet painted to look like a woodgrain sliding cover partially masking her painted profile, adorned with a faux medallion in bas-relief.

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The trompe l’oeil transcends the canvas in Louis Leopold Boilly’s early 19th-century work, oil on vellum mounted and set on a mahogany tabletop upon which is sprawled an array of coins, feathers, and playing cards as well as a magnifying glass (the perfect apparatus with which to do a double-take by examining something a little more closely). He coined the term “trompe l’oeil” in 1800; the Musée Marmottan is located on a street named after him (rue Louis Boilly).

An offshoot room detours from paintings into showcasing ceramics, presented collectively behind a vitrine: there is an oversized soup tureen shaped like a leafy green cabbage (made by a Strasbourg manufacturer in 1750) and a lively-looking glazed terra-cotta serving plate brimming with ferns, fish, flowers and lizards by Charles-Jean Avisseau, circa 1853. Fast-forward to the 20th Century, to a white faux-engraved plate by the renowned Italian designer and frequent user of trompe l’oeil, Piero Fornasetti.

In the late 18th Century, trompe l’oeil had a moment in the United States, specifically with some Philadelphia painters. Two examples on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington are by John Frederick Peto, spotlighting horse racing (red jockey cap, horseshoe, ripped Oakly race trace poster, 1895) and music (a violin, bow, tattered piece of sheet music, circa 1890). Placed between is a painting by John Haberle from 1887 in which there is a smattering of dollar bills (hello, George Washington), an etched jolly stick figure in the top right corner, two coins, and a “photograph” of the heavily mustachioed/bearded painter himself.

Shifting into the 20th and 21st Centuries, virtuosic trompe l’oeil examples are brought to the fore, notably one by Henri Cadiou, whose 1981 work La Déchirure sees Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa coming unsheathed from behind blue wrapping paper, vigorously torn right down the middle while leaving the gleaming tape unmolested. The neighboring painting is just as referential—a trompe l’oeil of Lucio Fontana’s signature slashed canvas. Adjacently, an oil painting by Jacques Poirier from the 1980s toys with Picasso’s legacy in Le Reliquaire, an oil painting in which a ripped packet of Gitane cigarettes, used matches, and stubbed out butts are given pride of place while encircled by gold finery including a mini-bust of Picasso and horn-blowing angels.

In one of the last rooms are two examples of Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Mirror Paintings (Quadri specchianti): stainless steel polished to a mirror finish onto which he applied images taken in the studio of the photographer Paolo Bressano. They implicate the viewer in the work by virtue of reflection against the jarringly human scale figures. Across from these, New Realist Daniel Spoerri’s “tableaux-pièges” series is exemplified by Tisch no. 5, an ensemble installation that showcases the remains of a meal glued, frontally facing, onto a wood panel—wine glasses, an ashtray, used silverware, a bread basket, a salt shaker, amongst other items—so we see the table from a bird’s eye perspective, categorized by the wall text as a “theater of real objects.”

French artist Daniel Firman’s 2015 “Jade”—a faceless adolescent figure leaning sulkily into the wall, part of Firman’s larger series, Attitude—is an unnerving silhouette seen only from behind in her striped sweater, skinny jeans and backward cap. The figure is cast from resin and sports real clothes and a wig, startling the viewer with her hyperrealism.

The last sector is a surprising choice to end on—namely, the way camouflage was created in 1915 after the beginning of World War I to melt soldiers into surrounding vegetation. In other words, a means of deploying trompe l’oeil in a wartime context for better protection and defense. Highlighting this is a 1954 black-and-white photograph by Daniel Camus, a freelancer for the magazine Paris Match, who was commissioned to cover the Indochina War and snapped French soldiers dissolving into the jungle during the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Nearby, an image by Lisa Sartorio draws from her ongoing series L’écrit de l’Histoire. Seemingly, it depicts an innocent view of a wheat field but is, in fact, a dense cluster of images of assault rifles culled from the Internet.

It’s a loaded note on which to leave the exhibition but a potent way to conceptualize how fragile and murky the line is between reality and perceptions of authenticity.

“Trompe-l’oeil, from 1520 to the present day” at the Musée Marmottan Monet is on view through March 2.