Now, that bar has lowered. In 2023, the landscape changed once again, the prices of the most expensive works sold at auction having dropped significantly from last year.

Compare this year’s 10th most expensive work to that of 2022. Henri Rousseau’s Les Flamants (1910) sold this past May for $43.5 million, setting a new auction record for him. That’s a little more than half the price of the Magritte sold in 2022.

Signs of a downturn are evident in other ways too. This year, four of the works that generated the year’s top 10 prices overall went for under $50 million—many fewer than last year. Consider the most expensive work sold at auction too. This year’s most expensive work, a Picasso painting, sold for $139 million. Last year’s, a Warhol painting of Marilyn Monroe, sold for $195 million. That’s a 29 percent difference between the two.

The total figures for the top 10 lots exhibit a similar loss—$660 million in 2023 versus $1.1 billion in 2022.

Below, a look at the most valuable lots sold at auction in 2023.

That $406 million total figure represents one of the highest ever achieved for a single-owner collection at auction. Still, that sum is modest still in comparison to the $676 million brought in from the court-ordered sale of the Macklowe collection, sold at Sotheby’s last fall, and the $646 million total drawn during the sale of David Rockefeller’s collection at Christie’s in 2018.

The Landau auction was what’s called a “white glove sale”, meaning that each and every one of its 31 lots offered were placed with buyers, though it’s worth keeping in mind that each of those lots were backed by third-party guarantees—minimum bids secured by the auction house in deals with outside parties ahead of the sale that are meant to offset financial risk. There were some disappointments and some bright spots: nearly a third of the lots hammered at prices below their low estimates, but new records were set for Agnes Martin and Mark Tansey.

Anchoring the evening sale was a 1932 painting by Pablo Picasso. Bidding for the canvas, depicting Picasso’s early muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, started at $100 million. A few bids brought the hammer price for the work to $121 million. The work eventually went to a bidder on the phone with Brooke Lampley, head of Sotheby’s Global Fine Art division. Ahead of the sale, the painting was offered with an estimate upon request of $120 million. The end result, inclusive of fees, came to $139 million, the second highest price ever achieved for Picasso at auction, below the $179 million paid for Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’), 1955, when it was sold at Christie’s in 2015.

After the Picasso hammered, the sale seemed to lose a bit of momentum. Multiple lots sold for upward of $20 million, but didn’t far surpass the auction house’s expectations for them. Ed Ruscha’s Securing the Last Letter (Boss), a black-ground canvas featuring the word “BOSS” in bold red lettering, brought the second-highest auction price ever for the West Coast artist, going for a total of $39.4 million with fees. The painting hammered just below its $35 million estimate. Following a similar course was a 1958 canvas from Mark Rothko’s heralded series of works commissioned for New York City’s Seagram Building. That work hammered on a bid of $19 million, well below its $30 million estimate. It sold to a bidder on the phone with Sotheby’s Asia chairman Wendy Lim, the final price coming out to $22 million with fees.

Elsewhere in the sale, historically important women artists were a focus. Agnes Martin’s large-scale canvas Grey Stone II (1961), an off-white monochrome painting, was the among the works that saw the deepest bidding of the night. When Barker opened the lot to the room, bids quickly soared, and eventually, the work hammered at a staggering $16 million, more than double its low estimate of $6 million. It went to a determined bidder in the room for a final price of $18.7 million with fees, surpassing Martin’s previous record of $17.7 million, for her painting Untitled #44 at Sotheby’s Macklowe sale last November, and setting a new record for the artist.

Earlier in the night, four bidders battled for Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pink Tulip (Abstraction – #77 Tulip), a floral abstraction that she produced in 1925 and that was featured in exhibitions at New York’s Intimate Gallery the following year, when O’Keeffe was still rising as an artist. Landau bought the canvas directly from O’Keeffe in 1985, just a year before the artist’s death. The work went to a bidder in the room for a final price of $4.75 million, hammering over its low estimate of $3 million.

By contrast with Christie’s sale of 21st century art on Tuesday night, living artists were few and far between in the Sotheby’s sale. One standout was Glenn Ligon, whose black-and-white textual work, Untitled (I Lost My Voice, I Found My Voice), hammered at $2.7 million, above the $2.5 million estimate, going for $3.2 million. Landau bought the piece in 1991 and later loaned it to the the artist’s 2011 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum.

“Given the strength of the material I was expecting more,” said collector Max Dolciger, speaking to the sale as a whole. “But it was still a success. People were excited about how fresh the works were and of course about the provenance, but they were still cautious. It has nothing to do with the art. It has to do with where the world is right now and everything going on.”

Offered as the tenth lot in the anticipated sale, Sotheby’s auctioneer Olivier Barker opened the bidding at $100 million, with several bids bringing the hammer price for the work to $121 million. The work eventually went to a bidder on the phone with Brooke Lampley, Head of Sotheby’s Global Fine Art division. Ahead of the sale, the painting was offered with an estimate upon request of $120 million.

A depiction of Picasso’s young muse through much of the 1930s, Marie-Thérèse Walter, the piece has been referred to as “a “definitive” work in Western art history, according to Sotheby’s specialists.

Picasso’s paintings of Walter often fetch the highest prices for the artist’s at auction. Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which was painted the same year, sold for $106.5 million at Christies in May 2010, well above its $70 million estimate. Picasso’s previous record at auction was also made a Christie’s May 2015, when Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) from 1955 sold for $179.4 million, reportedly to the Qatari royal Al Thani family. 

The present painting has changed hands a precious few times since Picasso laid paint to canvas. Landau, who died earlier this year at the age of 102, bought the work from Pace Gallery in 1968. Pace acquired Femme à la montre from Galerie Beyeler in Basel, who bought the work from Picasso, just two years prior, according to the provenance published by Sotheby’s. 

Backed with a financial guarantee from the house, the collection is estimated to generate over $400 million.

Likely the biggest ticket item to be sold from Landau’s estate is Pablo Picasso’s 1932 painting Femme à la montre, a portrait of one of his famous subjects, the young Marie-Thérèse Walter. Works that depict Walter, known in the historical canon as Picasso’s young mistress, often bring in the highest prices for Picasso at auctions. Julian Dawes, Sotheby’s head of Impressionist and Modern Art for the Americas called the Picasso painting a “definitive” work in Western art history.

Other major works that will be sold include Ed Ruscha’s Securing the Last Letter (Boss) from 1964 and an untitled Mark Rothko painting from 1958. The latter work derives from a famed series that Rothko produced on commission for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram building. Sotheby’s is offering each painting with their estimates available only on request.

Another by Jasper John’s titled Flags, produced ten years later in 1968, is expected to fetch $35-45 million. Self Portrait, a 1986 acrylic and silkscreen painting on canvas by Andy Warhol will also be a part of the major offerings. It is expected to fetch a price between $15-20 million. Other works by Willem de Kooning and Georgia O’Keeffe will be offered at lower price points between $3 million to $6 million.

Landau died at the age of 102 this March. A former trustees at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, she began collecting in the 1960s. She’d come to know Ruscha, Rothko, and Johns personally in the years the artists were actively working in their New York studios. Eventually, Landau would go on to acquire works by major modern and contemporary artists, among them: Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Jean Arp, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Paul Klee and Louise Nevelson. By 2010, she’d donated more than 300 works to the Whitney Museum.

There are big ticket works by living artists too that Landau cultivated. One of them is Glenn Ligon’s 1991 work I Lost My Voice, I Found My Voice. In the work, Ligon splayed blocks of black text using oil and gesso across a white wood panel. The piece was featured in a 2011 mid-career retrospective dedicated to the artist titled “Glenn Ligon: America” at the Whitney. Though Sotheby’s declined to provide an estimate on the work, which will be offered with it’s estimate available only on request, a representative for the house said it would set a new price benchmark for the artist. The standing auction record for Ligon was set in 2014, when his 1990 work Untitled (I was Somebody) sold at Sotheby’s New York during an evening sale for $3.9 million.

A painting by Mark Tansey titled Triumph Over Mastery II from 1987 is expected to bring an artist record too. The oil painting, which depicts a shirtless figure against a red-toned background is expected to fetch $8 million–$12 million. A record for Tansey was last set in 2018, when his 1988 oil painting Source of the Loue sold for $7.5 million in 2018 at Sotheby’s.

In a statement, Sotheby’s global head of the house’s Fine Arts Division, Brooke Lampley said the remaining collection’s biggest draw is its track record in chronicling important U.S. artists. Lampley said the group of works tell “one of the most comprehensive and era-defining narratives of the trajectory of American Art.”

Gambarin has made a name for himself for using a tractor to create portraits of the world’s most famous individuals, plowing their likenesses into 25,000 square meters of earth in Northern Italy. According to The Guardian Gambarin “said he was inspired by Picasso’s 1907 self-portrait to create….the largest portrait of the Spanish artist in the world.”

“I wanted to dedicate this colossal portrait to Picasso because he is one of those masters from whom you never stop learning,” Gambarin told The Straits Times.

In November 2013, the artistic agrarian hewed out the image of U.S President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in a field in Castagnaro in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of his assassination and, in 2016, he plowed a likeness of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s face with the word “ciao” inscribed under his left shoulder, according to The Guardian.

Also, in 2013, he sketched the likeness of Pope Francis after the religious leader announced a day of fasting and prayer for peace in war-torn Syria. His other subjects include South African president and freedom fighter Nelson Mandela, Leonardo da Vinci, and former U.S. President Barack Obama.

“I expressly call on the Bavarian state government to finally clear the way for the Bavarian State Painting Collections to agree to an appeal to the Advisory Commission,” Culture Minister Claudia Roth told the Bavarian publication Süddeutsche Zeitung. “This is really overdue now,” she said, hinting at passing a new restitution law.

The Limbach Commission, a government-established body that handles restitutions, has attempted to intervene in the dispute over the 1903 portrait Madame Soler by Pablo Picasso, which has been on display at the Pinakothek der Moderne for almost six decades. But the Bavarian State Painting Collections has not agreed to any mediation so far.

The removal of Picasso’s Madame Soler from public view at the museum is the latest development in a long and bitter dispute between the heirs of art collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the Bavarian State Painting Collections, which bought the painting in 1964. The two parties disagree on whether the painting was sold under duress during the rise of Nazis in Germany.

Madame Soler portrays the wife of Picasso’s friend, the tailor Benet Soler, and was painted during the artist’s Blue Period. The museum has denied that this is a case of looted art, since owner-collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy transferred it across the Swiss border to an art dealer in the early 1930s amid rising antisemitism.

According to the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the dealer Justin Thannhauser offered Madame Soler, as well as four other Picasso paintings, for sale in October 1935, only a few months after Mendelssohn-Bartholdy died of a heart attack.

But under threat from the Nazis, Thannhauser fled Germany and then Paris in 1940 to the US with the unframed paintings in his luggage.

In November 1964, the Bavarian State Painting Collections purchased Madame Soler from Thannhauser through a Liechtenstein-based company, and then it was hung in the Pinakothek der Moderne museum.

The Pinakothek der Moderne has asserted that painting’s transfer to dealer Thannhauser is valid and Madame Soler is not a case of looted art. However, historian Julius Schoeps, a descendent of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, argued otherwise in a 186-page book titled Who owns Picasso’s ‘Madame Soler’? How the Free State of Bavaria dealt with a spectacular Nazi-looted art case that was published last year.

The stance of the Pinakothek der Moderne could also contradict the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, a set of international guidelines that the Federal Republic of Germany co-signed.

The Art Newspaper, which first reported the news of the painting’s removal, noted that two other Picasso works previously owned by Mendelssohn-Bartholdy were also the subject of a settlement between his descendants and the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Picasso’s lifeless body forms the basis for a work by the Spanish artist Eugenio Merino, titled Aquí Murió Picasso (Picasso Died Here), 2017. Rather than being based on Picasso’s actual corpse, it draws inspiration from the image of the artist that many associate with him: the blue-striped Breton shirt, white linen pants, espadrilles.

The work is also quite literally larger than life. Picasso was said to stand 5 feet 4 inches tall, whereas the sculpture is just over 6 feet long.

According to the Spanish publication El País, the sculpture “managed to concentrate groups of onlookers” on opening day. La Vanguardia described the work as “death as a souvenir,” one of the “main centers of attraction for selfie addicts” and the “safe way get likes on Instagram.” 

Curated by Los Interventores and presented by ADN Gallery, the sculpture was conceived as a critique of mass tourism, the art fair industrial complex, and the general selfie-fication of the cultural sphere. The work all but begs fairgoers to snap pictures of themselves next to Picasso’s body.

“The sculpture is basically a Tourist Attraction we made based on the Dean MacCannell’s 1976 book The Tourist,” Merino wrote in an email to ARTnews. “In the book, the author explains the characteristics of an attraction, and for us, it was basically what the art world and the art fairs have turned into.

“Institutions and companies wash their image in culture,” Merino added, “that’s why it’s important that this work presents itself, openly, as an object to be sold but also from which to extract symbolic value. A place where a ‘tourist art consumer’ can have its selfie…a souvenir that reminds us they were here, where Picasso died. Obviously, [it’s] as fake as any tourist attraction.”

The work comes in an edition of three and sells for a tidy €45,000. ARCO runs through February 26. 

According to a lawsuit filed against the museum in a Manhattan court on Friday, relatives of the original owners, Karl Adler and Rosi Jacobi, and a group of Jewish nonprofits sought the return of Picasso’s 1904 canvas Woman Ironing.

The painting, which was produced during Picasso’s early Blue Period, shows a frail woman bent over while ironing. According to a note published on the museum’s website, it is a “quintessential image of travail and fatigue” that Picasso produced in his early 20s.

In the court documents, Adler’s West Coast–based descendant Thomas Bennigson claims the couple sold their collection while taking a financial loss as they prepared to flee Nazi persecution in Germany in 1938. According to the lawsuit, Bennigson claims his relatives were forced to relinquish the Picasso “well below its actual value.” Bennigson alleges that Adler would not have parted with the piece when he did “but for the Nazi persecution.”

Adler, who was active as an art collector in the early 20th century, served as chairman of a namesake German-based leather manufacturer. According to the suit, he was targeted under Nazi policy that stripped Jews of their wealth.

Adler acquired the Picasso painting from Munich-based dealer Heinrich Thannhauser in 1916, only to sell the painting back to the dealer’s son Justin Thannhauser in October 1938. The suit claims Adler sold the painting in order to raise cash to fund short-term visas in order to flee Germany. Adler and Jacobi eventually landed in Argentina in 1940.

The suit states that the dealer repeatedly loaned the work to museums from 1939 on, citing its insurance value between $20,000 and $25,000. The suit claims that price was far inflated from the $1,385 he paid Adler to purchase it. Thannhauser posthumously gifted the work to the museum in 1978 decades after the war.

The suit alleges that Guggenheim is in “wrongful possession” of the work. The heirs first filed a claim to recover the painting in June 2021.

“The Guggenheim takes provenance matters and restitution claims extremely seriously,” a museum representative said in a statement to ARTnews. The museum said that it has conducted “expansive research and a detailed inquiry in response to this claim, engaged in dialogue with claimants’ counsel over the course of several years, and believes the claim to be without merit.”

The statement pointed out that the complaint filed over the weekend “strikingly fails to acknowledge” that the Guggenheim contacted the former owner’s son, Eric Adler, to confirm the painting’s ownership while researching the work in the 1970s. No members of the family raised concern over the work at that time, according to the Guggenheim.

The museum claims that Adler’s sale of the painting to Thannhauser was “a fair transaction between parties with a longstanding and continuing relationship.”

It is not the first time the New York institution has dealt with a legal battle over art linked to Thannhauser. In 2009 the museum settled with the heirs of another persecuted collecting family over the Picasso painting Le Moulin de la Galette; the family claimed Thannhauser acquired it as a “product of economic duress.”

And in December, another group of descendants of a different collector sued the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over the 1970s sale of a van Gogh painting alleged to have been improperly sold by Thannhauser during the war.

And yet … what art historian, walking through a gallery of American art, has not paused in front of an earlier trompe l’oeil painting by John Frederick Peto or William Michael Harnett and thought, “Isn’t this awfully like a Cubist painting?” Overlapping planes? Check. Wood-graining? Check. Printed lettering? Check. Even the subject matter—violins or other musical instruments suspended from walls and panels—directly anticipates that of Cubist still life. Taking a deep breath, the art historian reflects that there is no way that Picasso, Braque, and Gris could have been aware of these obscure American paintings. It’s a remarkable coincidence, that’s all.

“Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition,” now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, demolishes the assumption of Cubism’s total originality. The curators, Emily Braun (professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center) and Elizabeth Cowling (professor emerita at the University of Edinburgh) have reconstructed a European tradition of trompe l’oeil painting beginning in 17th-century Holland and Flanders. The familiar American examples from the 19th century fall into place as late examples of a style then two centuries old. Building a bridge to Cubism, Braun and Cowling include specimens of late 19th- and early 20th-century wallpapers borrowing motifs and devices from the trompe l’oeil tradition. The exhibition also includes an amazing trove of Cubist still lifes: 15 by Braque, 20 by Gris, and 30 by Picasso. Often the Cubist pictures are paired with close antecedents from the old master tradition. Sometimes, in stunning feats of detective work, they are paired with samples of the original wallpapers the artists used.

One section of the exhibition, “Things on a Wall,” brings together Harnett’s Still Life—Violin and Music (1888) with Cornelius Norbertus Gijsbrechts’s Trompe l’Oeil with Violin, Music Book, and Recorder (1672) and Braque’s Violin and Sheet Music: “Petit Oiseau” (1913). All three paintings show a suspended violin accompanied by sheet music. In the Gijsbrechts, the violin hangs from a wood-paneled wall; in the Harnett, from a hinged door comprising three wooden planks. The background of the Braque is also divided into bands. Retrospectively, it makes the parallel planks in the Gijsbrechts and the Harnett seem like ancestors of the Cubist grid.

Conversely, of the three meticulously painted patches of trompe l’oeil wood-graining in the Braque, two seem to belong to the wall, so one could reasonably conclude that, here too, the background consists of wood paneling. The charcoal hatching of the Braque brings it closer in mood to the soft shading of the Gijsbrechts than to the dramatic light and dark of the Harnett. But the strong shadow cast by the nail at the top of the Harnett uncannily anticipates the famous nail-plus-shadow in Braque’s epochal Violin and Palette of late 1909, also included in this exhibition. If Braque’s nail was inspired by something other than the Harnett, it must have been something very similar.

Another section of the exhibition, “Papyrophilia,” is devoted to the love of paper. One of the standouts here is Wilhelm Robart’s drawing Trompe l’Oeil (ca. 1770–80), showing an assortment of printed pages strewn on a granite tabletop. There’s a calendar, two title pages, a sheet of sample fonts, an announcement from the Dutch East India Company, the music and lyrics of a song, a map of Europe, and three engravings of Dutch landscapes with travelers. It’s a quodlibet: from the Latin for “whatever pleases.” The black and white of the printed documents contrasts with the lively color of the granite, represented by dots of black and white sprinkled across a teal ground. Where many trompe l’oeil pictures show objects suspended from walls, here the emphasis is on horizontality. In the exhibition, the framed drawing is placed flat on a wooden sideboard, reinforcing its horizontal character.

The inclusion of the landscape engravings in the Robart anticipates Cubist works such as Gris’s The Guitar (1913), where the musical instrument, although abstracted into vertical strips, is accompanied by a fragment of a 19th-century engraving showing a woman with a child on her shoulders, running through a forest. In a broader sense, Robart’s drawing prefigures the accumulation of documents and images in Robert Rauschenberg’s work of the 1950s. Leo Steinberg famously described Rauschenberg’s pictorial space as a “flatbed picture plane,” comparable to a tabletop or a bulletin board “on which objects are scattered” so that the surface stands “for the mind itself,” processing a stream of unrelated data. Perhaps postmodern art starts with Robart.

The last section of the exhibition borrows its title, “The Artist Is Present,” from Marina Abramović’s 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Here, it refers to works in which artists assert their authorship by means other than a conventional signature. In John Haberle’s Imitation (1887), the artist’s name appears on what looks like a scrap of paper, cut out from a printed catalogue and affixed to the fictive picture frame. Authorship is reduced to a simulacrum, like the trompe l’oeil banknotes and stamps “glued” to the black ground and the frame. Braun and Cowling pair this with a 1914 papier collé by Picasso, depicting a Cubist drawing of a pipe and sheet music affixed to a speckled sheet, and mounted within a “frame” assembled from strips of wallpaper imitating a carved wood border. A label attached to the frame bears the artist’s name, written in block letters. The frame’s trompe l’oeil carving and the label’s hand-printing seem to mock the idea that Cubism might ever become a “museum” art.

Scholars have long been at a loss to explain the emergence of colored dots in Cubism, but Braun and Cowling have solved this mystery: the black and white dots on the mauve background of Pipe and Sheet Music are obviously modeled on the kind of trompe l’oeil granite found in Robart’s 18th-century drawing—and in a late 19th-century wallpaper included in the exhibition. However, Picasso goes beyond the boundaries of conventional trompe l’oeil by continuing the field of dots in two slanting bands that extend over the pipe and sheet music. Furthermore, the dots change color as they traverse the drawing: in one band, they are yellow and red; in the other, red and purple. The sober imitation of granite gives way to a delirious play of color.

Other sections of the exhibition address a range of related themes. The show opens with “Origin Story,” containing pictures related to the birth of trompe l’oeil painting: the legendary competition between two ancient Greek painters to see who could produce a more realistic picture. “Trompe l’Oeil and the Artisanal Tradition” focuses on Braque and Picasso’s use of wood-graining and marbling, bringing their Cubist pictures together with the housepainters’ manuals and samples that helped inspire them. Similarly, “The World of Wallpaper” juxtaposes Cubist pictures incorporating wallpaper with real-life samples from the period. Some of these are fascinating in their own right: in a 1910–11 wallpaper simulating a Venetian blind, the repeated stripes of the blinds exert a hypnotic power like Frank Stella’s “Black” paintings of 1959 or Bridget Riley’s undular stripes of the mid-1960s. (Gris used this wallpaper in a 1914 painting that is reproduced in the catalogue but was not, alas, available for the exhibition.) “Trompe l’Oeil and Typography” brings together 17th- and 19th-century paintings including hyperrealistic newspapers with Cubist works incorporating strips of newsprint.

“Shadow Play” explores the mind games that Picasso played with cast shadows—some
real, some fake—and also the mysterious black silhouettes of objects in the Gris paintings. “Paragone,” titled after the traditional rivalry between painting and sculpture, features Picasso’s Cubist reliefs made from painted wood and sheet metal, dissolving the distinction between mediums. “Things on a Table” goes beyond the borders of trompe l’oeil proper, pairing tabletop still lifes from the 17th and 18th centuries with works by Gris and Picasso.

In the catalogue, two additional articles accompany the eye-opening introductory essays by Braun and Cowling. Drawing on the research from her 2016 book on Cubism’s artisanal origins, Racines populaires du cubisme: Pratiques ordinaires de création et art savant, Claire Le Thomas provides the first detailed account in English of Braque’s early training as a housepainter and decorative interior painter, an education that prepared him to revolutionize the facture of avant-garde art. Rachel Mustalish, a conservator at the Metropolitan, explains the originality of Gris’s collage technique: where Braque and Picasso tended to overlap large patches of paper, Gris cut his found materials into small, exact shapes that he fitted together with the precision of marquetry.

“Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” will keep art historians busy for years. There is much more to be said about trompe l’oeil’s relationship to Cubism, and also about its oblique relationship to mainstream old master painting. Cowling vividly evokes the disdain directed at the style by traditional artists and critics, who dismissed it as a “low, flat, vulgar skill.” But the technique has a particular formal character that is not described adequately as mere “skill.” Trompe l’oeil depends, rather, on the avoidance of key aspects of conventional “realism.”

In traditional perspective, bodies and objects are foreshortened along diagonals leading to one or more vanishing points. In theory, the illusion of mass and space should be credible only if the viewer is standing in the right place. In practice, perspective works perfectly well from a range of viewing positions. Spectators ignore the discrepancy between how things are represented and how they would actually appear if seen from one side or the other. The need to make this unconscious correction does not diminish the realism of the image—but it does make it less illusionistic.

Successful trompe l’oeil maximizes illusion by getting rid of perspective. Everything is flattened, facing the viewer. Recession is indicated solely by the overlapping of forms, accentuated by the use of shadows to separate one plane from another. Harnett’s Violin and Music creates a more powerful illusion than Gijsbrechts’s Violin, Music Book, and Recorder by using stronger shadows. The trompe l’oeil painter succeeds by drastically simplifying the rules of the game. But this simplification may vitiate the artistic quality of the result. Although more striking, the Harnett is not as good as the Gijsbrechts.

Cubism makes things more complicated. In 1908 and 1909, Picasso and Braque divided the surfaces of bodies and objects into facets, transforming them into something like the wireframe figures used in digital animation. In 1910 Picasso shattered the unity of the object, breaking it into independent planes supported by a scaffolding of vertical and horizontal lines. This revolutionary Cubist “grid” replaced traditional perspective with something radically different, not something simpler. In 1911 Braque realized that the independent planes of his quasi-abstract compositions could be filled in with realistic details like stenciled lettering or wood-graining. In 1912 Picasso and Braque begin filling these “receptor” planes with actual objects like strips of wallpaper or newsprint. They borrowed from the vocabulary of trompe l’oeil painting because its realistic details made such a powerful contrast with the complex, abstract framework of their overall compositions. A Cubist picture like Braque’s Violin and Sheet Music: “Petit Oiseau” includes illusionistic details but is not illusionistic as a whole. The contrast between the spare charcoal lines of the scaffolding and the dense, tactile patches of wood-graining might serve as an analogue for memory, which recovers some details with clarity while others remain shrouded in vagueness. It is a picture of thought, like Steinberg’s flatbed picture plane.

Finally, it would also be useful to think about the absence of trompe l’oeil from the work of Fernand Léger. He was the fourth member of the group of “essential Cubists” who were represented by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler before World War I, and collected by G.F. Reber in the 1920s and Douglas Cooper after World War II. They are also the only four Cubists included in the Leonard A. Lauder Collection, promised to the Metropolitan in 2013. (Braun has served for many years as its curator.) Léger was never interested in trompe l’oeil, but after World War I he began to incorporate advertising imagery into his Cubist work, and wrote about the billboard and the shop window as models for contemporary art. Advertising provided another way to get the real into compositions on the verge of abstraction. Like trompe l’oeil, it created a productive tension within Cubism. The combination of different visual languages into complex wholes makes the Cubist pictures on view at the Metropolitan as exciting today as they were when they were made.  

“Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, through Jan. 22, 2023.

This article appears in the December 2022 print issue of Art in America, pp. 22-24.

The gallery’s owners, Anne and Herbert Pfeffer, were found guilty on November 18 of buying, and subsequently concealing, art that was stolen from two of Picasso’s daughters, the gallerist Aimé Maeght and Jacqueline Picasso.

The verdict brings to a close an investigation that began over 10 years ago, when it was revealed that Frédéric “Freddy” Munchenbach, a handyman employed by both Picasso and Maeght, had used keys to their respective homes to snatch the pictures on multiple occasions between 2006 and 2008.

According to the Art Newspaper, at least 553 drawings and original prints by Picasso, worth more than $13.8 million, were stolen from the sisters, who live next door to each other near the Parc Montsouris in Paris.

In 2011, Muchenbach was detained for four months in relation to the thefts. Despite the fact that he confessed to the crimes, he was ultimately released because the statute of limitations on those crimes had come to an end.

During the trial, the Pfeffers denied any wrongdoing, but the court ruled that the couple were “well aware” that pictures they sold or hid were part of the trove of works stolen by the handyman. Anne and Herbert will serve suspended sentences of two years and one year, respectively.