Word: rococo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...these pages, TIME presents exclusive photographs of the salvage operation, the Titanic itself and some of the recovered treasures. Among the objects brought up by French divers: a bronze teapot and coffeepot, a leather valise, a rococo vase, a statue of a cherub from the Titanic's first-class grand staircase and a ship's safe, which may contain a fortune in jewelry...
Correspondent Jeanne McDowell found Sex Researcher Shere Hite settled serenely on a satiny love seat in Hite's rococo Manhattan apartment. Instead of the antimale polemicist that McDowell had been warned about, she discovered a soft-spoken woman with a passion for classical music and antique clothes. "Walk into her house, and you feel as if you have entered another, gentler era," says McDowell. "And yet there she is, at the center of a storm about some of the most contentious issues of our time...
...local material. Thus they invented forms peculiar to America, like the deeply carved blockfront desk with shell motifs made by Townsend and Goddard in Newport, R.I. But American neoclassical "constitutional" furniture radiates a sense of lightness and straightforwardness; it rejects excess decor as a sign of cultural effeminacy. The rococo did not suit the democratic, mercantile temper. It spoke of royal courts. The desire for a general style that asserted first principles, tended toward abstraction and worshiped antiquity -- this mattered greatly to the young Republic in the 1780s...
...sure, London's Royal Opera and the Vienna State Opera remain committed to traditional opera staged in traditional ways, sung by the same coterie of jet- bound stars who appear at the Met. And the old style still has its rewards; the Royal's Der Rosenkavalier, a rococo dream handsomely sung and lovingly led by the company's new music director, Bernard Haitink, is impossible to envisage any other...
...strain between the all-over pattern and the real motifs gives his Nice paintings their special vitality. But the strain was real, and in extreme cases, like Decorative Figure on an Ornamental Ground, 1925-26, it induces an almost palpable discomfort. The sheer congestion of pattern -- rococo mirror, painted wallpaper, overlapping rugs, Ming blue planter -- dismays the eye while seducing it, and the architectonic forms of the nude halt the whirling of color like a massive log brusquely jammed in the gears of a machine. This is the creation not of a complacent man but of an artist...