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October 18, 2002
Where
Paradox Rules: The Delightful Trickery of Trompe L'Oeil
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De
Scott Evans's Homage to Parrot, c. 1890,
is among the paintings on view in the
National Gallery of Art's exhibition
Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l'Oeil
Painting.
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Seeing
is believing—most of the time. So when we see something that
doesn't exist or isn't exactly what it appears to be—a mirage,
an optical illusion, a counterfeit—we are shaken, puzzled,
and, often, quite amused by the deception. Such is the experience
of viewing a trompe l'oeil painting, says Paul Staiti, Professor
of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation, who has written an essay
titled "Con Artists: Harnett, Haberle, and Their American
Accomplices" on the style, the name of which translates to
"deceive the eye." The piece will be published in a
catalogue accompanying Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries
of Trompe l'Oeil Painting, an exhibition scheduled to run
October 13–March 2 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington,
D.C. The show, which will include approximately 115 paintings
by masters of the genre, will be the most comprehensive treatment
to date of trompe l'oeil.
Focusing on works
by William Michael Harnett, John Haberle, and other nineteenth-century
trompe l'oeil artists, Staiti describes the genre's tradition
of luring viewers, tricking them, and creating "a vexation"
that is "paradoxically pleasurable." Harnett's painting
Old Violin, he says, so agitated and attracted crowds at
the thirteenth Cincinnati Industrial Exposition in 1886 that a
policeman was detailed to stand beside the picture and prevent
viewers from trying to take down its fiddle and bow. Of Haberle's
A Bachelor's Drawer, Staiti writes, "the illusionistic
drawer . . . is nailed shut, as if to dare viewers to get in to
some nonexistent inner space . . . in the center is a painted
cigar box lid attached to the drawer by two leather hinges. Odds
and ends are stuffed into the edges of the lid, indicating that
there is a way to get into the 'space' behind the lid. Haberle
even attached a pull cord to the lid, as if requesting viewers
from Chicago or anywhere else to try to open it up and get to
some suggested deep space that is, of course, not there."
Staiti explains that
other artists went even further in blending presentation with
representation. Jefferson David Chalfant, for example, created
a picture of two stamps, one painted and the other real, including
a (painted) newspaper clipping below that read, "Mr. Chalfant
proposes to paste a real stamp on the canvas beside his painting,
and the puzzling question will be 'Which is which?' "
Elite critics opposed
American trompe l'oeil artists, charging them with creating worthless
imitations easily outdone by photographs, seeking to deceive,
and focusing on common objects that distracted people from contemplating
beautiful or great things. John Ruskin wrote of trompe l'oeil,
"The mind derives its pleasure, not from the contemplation
of a truth, but from the discovery of falsehood. . . . The degree
of pleasure depends on the degree of difference and the perfection
of the resemblance, not on the nature of the thing resembled."
Ruskin was right, says Staiti, that the pleasure of experiencing
a painting by Harnett or Haberle is in "an expanded moment
of passage from suspecting a picture is a deception to knowing
a picture is a deception." The critical point of trompe l'oeil,
he writes, is that "it is irony, not truth or beauty, that
is triumphant. Paradox rules."
At MHC, Staiti teaches
courses in American art, American studies, and film studies. His
publications have focused on artist and inventor Samuel F. B.
Morse, still-life painter William Michael Harnett, colonial portraitist
John Singleton Copley, portraits of nineteenth-century American
capitalists at the New York Chamber of Commerce, and the sea pictures
of Winslow Homer painted during the artist's later years. He has
also curated an exhibition on Copley for the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.
The
counter is
7,611
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