Word: rococo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...much as with stone, drilling out the pupils for an astonishingly lifelike look instead of leaving the eyeballs blank. He chiseled out individual character, pried out the significant wrinkle and the evanescent gesture. He parted his subjects' lips so that they seemed ready to speak. Unlike the rococo court sculptors who used the female figure as cool erotic decoration, the neoclassical Houdon used the solid curves of woman to convey sensible warmth. His Shivering Girl and an even more naked Diana were denied admission to the Paris Salon in 1785. Said a critic: "She was too beautiful...
...design sets for the Italian opera there. (He could not resist turning out a few wicked caricatures of English operatic rehearsals, so satirical that they were long thought to be by Hogarth.) He then began painting imaginary ruins, mingling fancy with the realistic landscapes. And this foretaste of rococo and romanticism created a whole new genre of painting, called caprices, that came to edge out the veduta, or popular views bought mainly by Englishmen gallivanting on the European grand tour as forerunners of today's postcards...
...just to get the telephone number of a boy who has taken his fancy. The boy (Barry Justice) is Antonescu's illegitimate son, and the father is dangling him as pervert bait to land a merger that may save his Depression-gored financial empire. While waiting for this rococo rotter to tot up his accounts with a final bullet, idle-minded theater partygoers may wonder, in days to come, whether this playscript was found in Terence Rattigan's typewriter or his wastebasket...
Inflammations. The people in Silence move through an almost undersea life where they have little communication with one another, less with the surrounding world, and none with God. A woman, her young son, and her unmarried sister travel through a country invented by Bergman, where people speak an incomprehensible rococo-syllabic language, also invented by Bergman. The story line is wavy and apparently aimless. The unmarried woman has a marked erotic interest in her sister. The sister's heterosexuality is fired rather than suppressed by this. It is inflamed further when she goes to a variety show...
...dress of that period also did. Much building in the 19th century suffered from a kind of romantic eclecticism that brought on a gush of half-baked period revivals, and the history of 19th century costume shows quite the same dependence on the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the rococo period, Catherine de Medici and James II. In the architecture of our own time, the compulsion to expose structure to view, to suppress applied ornament and emphasize texture, to express class through refinements of structure-these modes of thought are just as evident in women's clothing. The creators...