The Met – Join the exhibition’s curators Emily Braun and Elizabeth Cowling for a virtual tour of Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, which offers a radically new view of Cubism by demonstrating its engagement with the age-old tradition of trompe l’oeil painting.

A self-referential art concerned with the nature of representation, trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”) beguiles the viewer with perceptual and psychological games that complicate definitions of truth and fiction. Along with Cubist paintings, sculptures, and collages, the exhibition presents canonical examples of European and American trompe l’oeil painting from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.