Word: rococo
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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...
Although Fragonard is best known for his sensual vignettes of dalliance, he rarely reached such peaks of rococo rendering as in his Fantasy Portraits. Dating from the late 1760s, they are a series of 14 portraits of actual people in disguise-often in the ruffs and cuffs of the preceding century. His The Warrior is sterner than the rest, but still as theatrical as grease paint...
...Warrior's flamboyant pose, exaggerated sword, and improbably wrinkled clothes express the rococo flight from reality. The far-off glint in his eyes suggests the coming romantic cult of genius, the idea that reverie is greater than reason. Fragonard even more daringly juxtaposes colors, such as the reds on the yellow cheek, without transitions of tone-a foretaste of impressionism. Yet the painting's casualness-revered in its day as sublime and picturesque-is a pure rococo attitude...
...Rococo flourished mostly in France. The English, with fewer aristocrats, boast little more rococo art than Hogarth. In southern Germany and Austria, the style showed itself in churches whose walls dripped with absurd cockleshell trappings: in the 1770s, the Archbishop of Salzburg had to ban all "distracting pious trumpery and theatrical representations repugnant to the true worship...