Word: rococo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...enter the wonderful world of good design now on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, you pass fluttery rococo plaster nymphs in the ornate beauxarts classic entrance hall. The abrupt aesthetic change is like jumping from a sauna into a cool swimming pool. Titled "Design Since 1945," the exhibition (through Jan. 8) presents a world based on the primacy of function, which beautiful form is supposed to follow automatically. It often does. Modern style is the only authentic one of our time, and modernists and their friends therefore peremptorily equate modern with good. It often...
...Krull offers battles, special effects and a hero and heroine with all the humanity of furniture on feet. But there are ingenuities of décor and character here. The Beast's fortress contains vaulted corridors that resemble a vulture's rib cage; his lair is a rococo igloo; walls close in on Lyssa like giant pillows. The senior good guys, notably Ynyr and Cyclops, move with a certain sad majesty. The Cyclops' knowing wink (or is it a blink?) is a hint of mature fatalism: he knows too much about this world-our world-to participate...
...seen in 18th-century paintings--the way gentlemen stood with their toes turned out, the way people's hands--rested lightly on the bosom." Reportedly, he worked unusually long and hard with his troupe to supply the stances, the facial expressions, the ties that would keep Sheridan's rococo dialogue from flagging. The results are impressive...
...those ripe interfolding fields, that mildly blowing air, that dewy sparkle on the face of a static world? Constable did to the perception of landscape in paint what William Wordsworth did to it in verse: he threw out the allegorical fauna that had infested it since Milton and the rococo-nymphs, satyrs, dryads, Vergilian shepherds and Ovidian spring deities-and substituted Natural Vision for the Pathetic Fallacy...
...current exhibits demonstrate his lifelong fascination with every permutation of show business and fashion. No graphic artist and designer of his time has displayed greater versatility and playfulness in creating modes of illusion. Take the mysterious objects in the Dyansen Gallery windows. Rococo confections of white foxtails and myriad colored stones, they are headdresses that once topped the nakedness of Paris showgirls. On the gallery walls are Erté's original paintings of the sets and costumes he created for such disparate productions as George White's Scandals in New York City in the '20s and Mozart...