Word: rococo
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...from the powerful crankshaft rhythms of Yucatan Chacmool figures. But the best pieces here, such as the stone figure of a standard-bearer from Chichen Itza with its fierce gaze and crippled foot, are beyond such comparisons. From the delicately modeled stucco glyphs of Palenque, imbued with an almost rococo elegance, to the frightful severity of Aztec pieces such as the cuauhxicalli, or blood receptacle, in the form of a stone eagle, ancient Mexican sculpture is as powerful as any in human history...
There is no kind of artwork that has not been forged, from Cycladic idols to Watteaus, from medieval manuscripts to rococo porcelain elephants, from Michelangelo drawings to paintings by Constable, Picasso or (a great favorite) Renoir. It used to be said that Camille Corot painted 800 pictures in his lifetime, of which 4,000 ended up in American collections...
...malls are stocked with everything from disposable diapers to dried sea cucumbers that sell for up to $1,000 per lb. Signs in English and Spanish compete with those in the Korean Hankul alphabet and in Chinese ideograms. When Roman letters appear, they are often tricked out in the rococo accents of Vietnamese...
...history. His series of poplars near his house in Giverny -- their slender, stately trunks along the banks of the Epte reflected in the water and forming an almost abstract palisade, the S shape of their bushed-out tops strung along like a festive garland -- pays homage to French rococo, Fragonard in particular. Like his lyric images of a stretch of the Seine from 1896 to 1897, the paintings show how unrelentingly conscious Monet was of the abstract basis of design, even when painting the mistiest veils of color...
...beyond this, Rowlandson absorbed -- and anglicized -- a general style: he was a rococo artist, though this is partly hidden by his love of satire (never a rococo trait). He constructed his designs from whiplash lines and curvilinear rhythms. He was devoted to Rubens, preserving on a tiny scale the rush and tumble and fullness (if not the grand muscular articulation) of that master's paintings. British critic Sacheverell Sitwell was right to compare Rowlandson's sketch of guests floundering, bare-bottomed and head over heels, down the staircase at a "crush" at Somerset House to Rubens' Last Judgment in Munich...