Word: rococo
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...crystal Baccarat table was designed for a 19th century Indian maharajah; the gilded piano was once played by Chopin. But the bearskin rugs, emperor-size bed and rhinestone-studded recreation room could belong only to Liberace, 55. Now music's oldest glitter rocker has opened his rococo Hollywood Hills mansion, complete with toothy portraits of the maestro himself, to public tours at $5.90 a pop. His share of the profits, says Lee, will help support aspiring artists like Protégé Vince Cardell, 35. Thirty-two guides have been trained by Liberace, and four gold-jacketed salesgirls staff...
Packaging is one of the small degradations of Western life. The impenetrable plastic pocket sealing in 290 worth of panhead screws, the jumbo detergent carton, the Vegas Rococo embossed vinyl "presentation" box around a new pen, apart from brown-paper bags (of which, in any case, we use too many) -it is hardly possible to go into the corner shop and find a package that is not ugly or delusive or frustrating or wasteful, or all four. That is why the Japan Society's current exhibition in New York, "Tsutsumu-the Art of Japanese Packaging," should not be missed...
Across the land, many of the old, abandoned monuments to America's past are welcoming visitors as they never did before. There are the august red brick firehouses, the rococo waterworks, the splendiferous banks with marble floors and tellers' grilles that could have come from a Jimmy Cagney heist flick, abandoned churches raised with prayer and artistry, majestic railroad stations, many designed by the finest architects in the U.S. They have been re-antiquated and reinserted into American life with love and ambience-and with food and wine. The fact is that hundreds of classic buildings throughout...
...Boucher, as the Goncourts put it, it was "a vocation to leave some trace of his art on every passing manifestation of fashion." The tumbling, rosy cupids and tiny pastoral scenes with shepherds in knee breeches that are the cliches of rococo chinaware decoration were largely Boucher's doing. He painted on fans and carriage doors, snuffboxes, escritoires and ostrich eggs. And when Louis XV put Boucher in control of the state tapestry factories at Beauvais and Gobelin, he brought about the last flourish of grand-scale European weaving. No designer since Boucher has managed to raise tapestry...
...round, dimpled bottom of Boucher's favorite model, an inhabitant of the Deer Park (as the villa where the royal mistresses lived was called) known as la petite Morfil. Miss Murphy was an Irish girl whom the Pompadour pro cured for her flagging monarch by the utterly rococo device of getting Boucher to paint her as the Virgin Mary in a decoration for one of the royal chapels. She is the ancestor of all the midinettes and grisettes and rotund milkmaids that Renoir was to paint a century later...