Fool-the-Eye Realism

"Please do not touch!" reads the sign posted beside the display of still lifes on exhibit in the University of Wisconsin's Library Gallery in Madison. But the fascinating assortment of smoking pipes, fiddles, Confederate bills, newspaper scraps and crumpled chewing-gum wrappers--all seeming to leap out of the canvases in vivid perspective--is too tempting. Furtively many a viewer last week glanced around to see if anyone was watching, then probed gently at the paintings to see whether the pictures actually were painted or just pasted on.

The 3-D still lifes were the work of the university's artist in residence, Aaron Bohrod. With them Artist Bohrod, 47, emerges as one of the foremost exponents of Trompe-l'Oeil (fool-the-eye) painting in the U.S. since the 19th century's

William Michael Harnett. Trompe-l'Oeil is an off-beat school of art that goes back to the legendary Greek, Zeuxis, who was said to have painted grapes so realistically that birds swooped down to peck at them. Roman and Pompeian decorators used fool-the-eye murals to give the illusion of spaciousness to narrow rooms. By the 17th and 18th centuries, the technique had turned into a whimsical exercise in craftsmanship, and it still enchants many realistic painters throughout the world.

Realist Bohrod started out painting brick-by-brick cityscapes of his native Chicago and did a stint for the WPA before he covered the war in the Pacific and the Normandy invasion as a LIFE artist-correspondent. Focusing now on Trompe-l'Oeil, Bohrod explains: "If explanation of these works is needed at all, I might say that they come about particularly because of my impatience with and my reaction against the scattershot, nonobjective and surface-decoration schools of painting which seem to constitute the bulk of current recognized endeavor." Trompe-l'Oeil work, he knows, "is not popular with the esthete. They say . . . we have a machine called a camera that will do it better. I am not convinced. This is not a speck-by-speck translation. It is a distillation process, sending it through an artist, that makes the difference between this art and a camera job. ... I have never experienced a more gratifying way of working."

Bohrod's most prized ($4,500) fool-the-eye painting in the Madison exhibit is Still Life with Portraits, a weathered door hung with a worn horseshoe, a bugle, an ancient pistol and pictures of Lincoln, Sarah Bernhardt and Henry Clay. Another achieves part of its realism because it was done in collaboration with his seven-year-old son, Neil. Against the usual wooden background, it shows a leaky water pistol, Halloween masks, a torn piece of a newspaper photo and a child's slate. On the slate is a drawing of a witch--by Neil.

*Francoise, now 30, was Picasso's fourth great love. From 1904 to 1917 he lived with a famous beauty known as "La Belle Fernanda." In 1918 he married Ballerina Olga Koklova (who bore him a son), divorced her in 1937. From 1938 to 1945 his girl was Photographer Dora Maar.

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