Word: fragonards
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This week in New England, rococo makes good viewing at an informative exhibit in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., which has a new acquisition (see opposite page) by the rococo painter Jean Honoré Fragonard...
Hems Heavenward. Fragonard, who flippantly signed his works "Frago," was an exemplar of the rococo age. Born in 1732, he studied under François Boucher. He was befriended by the American minister in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, and by Madame du Barry, who commissioned him to do the series called the Progress of Love that is now in Manhattan's Frick Collection. One of his best-known works shows a girl on a swing, her hems heavenward, being pushed while her lover looks...
...British critic Sir Kenneth Clark wrote once that he understood a certain private collection of Fragonard's rococo oils when he looked at the same owner's collection of butterflies. The collector's eye had plainly drawn strength from the kinship of fragrant, fluttery forms in art and nature. To pin down the taste of California Entrepreneur Norton Simon, 57, the most discriminating art collector on the West Coast (see color pages), is a similar exercise in analogy. But Simon's other collection is companies...
Especially appealing: William Blake's watercolors (through May 24), Houdon's perfectly balanced terra-cotta sculpture of Diana the Huntress, Bellini's St. Francis in Ecstasy, Holbein's Sir Thomas More, La Tour's Education oj the Virgin, Fragonard's series of canvases representing "The Progress of Love," commissioned and rejected by Madame Du Barry...
FRICK COLLECTION-Fifth Ave. at 70th. Handsomely hung in the spacious surroundings of the mansion are most of the 159 masterpieces in the collection by such master painters as Titian, Bellini, El Greco, Goya, Fragonard, Gainsborough and Turner...