Word: rococo
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Every beachcomber knows that sea shells are beautiful, yet few know they are so beautiful that once their shape inspired a style that spread across half of Europe. During the 18th century, painters, sculptors, even candlestick makers all followed the curve of the sea shell. The style was called rococo-itself an onomatopoeic image of the art -from the French word rocaille, meaning fancywork in rocks and shells...
Profuse with C scrolls and S curves, rococo has often been labeled an interior decorator's art. In courtly architecture, such as Munich's dainty Amalienburg palace, plaster tendrils so slather the rooms that the ceiling is inseparable from the walls. Rococo was ornament become form, rather than the link between forms. It added asymmetry to the earlier style of baroque art, as one would add fantasy to fiction. Where the baroque was epic, rococo was lyric. It had a horror of straight lines, as if such were the symbols of reason and order...
...coins (10?), and a posthumous J.F.K. prayer ("Special Delivery from Heaven," $2.95 gift-boxed). Other big-selling souvenirs include martini shakers cunningly shaped like bedpans, rubber and nylon "Golden Goddess Shrunken Heads," and a coffee-table plaque that reads: GOD BLESS THIS LOUSY APARTMENT. Vacationers stand in line for rococo delicacies ranging from frankfurters stewed in champagne (it says) to chocolate-covered frozen bananas...
...morass. Some tried staging productions à la Folies-Bergère, featuring flights of ballerinas being hoisted to heaven on wires, madly flapping their arms and showering rose petals while spray guns hissed perfume into the audience. But the audiences hissed right back, and the Paris Opera, a towering rococo palace covering three acres right in the heart of the city, remained a flop...
...British critic Sir Kenneth Clark wrote once that he understood a certain private collection of Fragonard's rococo oils when he looked at the same owner's collection of butterflies. The collector's eye had plainly drawn strength from the kinship of fragrant, fluttery forms in art and nature. To pin down the taste of California Entrepreneur Norton Simon, 57, the most discriminating art collector on the West Coast (see color pages), is a similar exercise in analogy. But Simon's other collection is companies...