Trompe l’oeil—French for “deceive the eye”—is a technique favored by artists who want to test the boundaries between fact and fiction. It was especially popular from the 17th to 19th centuries. Now jump to the early–20th century, the Cubist painters Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris, who dismantled objects and reassembled them as reverberations, lines in space. Counterintuitively, trompe l’oeil and Cubism had much in common. Both favored the emphatically flat picture plane, both mimicked other materials, and both riffed on print media. In this show, European and American works of trompe l’oeil are placed alongside Cubist masterpieces. Careful pairings reveal aspects of the paintings no one noticed before. —Elena Clavarino