ART115Lecture18 French Rococo

Welcome back, everybody, and we're now moving from the Baroque to the Rococo. So the era of Rococo begins after the death of Louis XIV, who we were just discussing in relationship, of course, to the Palace of Versailles. And the Rococo era is basically from his death until the French Revolution of 1789. So really what we're seeing here is a massive shift in culture away from the court of the king being in charge in the Baroque to now in the Rococo, the salon taking over. And the salon becomes really important for us in a couple of different respects. The word salon really does refer, of course, to the room in which people would meet and gather for elegant soirees and parties. It also has the connotation of being an art exhibition, and we'll see it used that way much more frequently in unit three. But for right now, I want us to focus really on this idea of wealthy people, aristocrats, but not necessarily the ruling families only, the royalty. People who had some money and had some power were beginning to control more of this life and more of the cultural life of the world of Rococo France, as opposed to everything being controlled by the king under Louis XIV. During the Rococo, the aristocracy began to hold parties that they called salons. So it referred to both the room and the party itself, and having a successful salon meant that you had the best guest list of anybody who was competing with you. Think of it as the ultimate celebrity status seeking. These were people who were trying to gather around them the best artists, the best writers, the best musicians, the leading politicians, the people who were at the front of every aspect of culture, the people that you would consider maybe today to be influencers. That's who they wanted at their parties. And increasingly, women had more control over the guest list of the salon than they've ever had over any political aspect of life in the previous era. And so, women are beginning to come more to the forefront. We're also going to see the style of art shift a lot away from biblical and mythological narratives, which I'm sure you're getting a little tired of by now. But the stories now that we'll see in the Rococo are almost scandalous by comparison. There are quite a few painters who really delve into stories about romance and even sort of illicit romance that are being depicted in paintings that are considered masterpieces. They're very, very different from the generation before. So some artists' names to look out for, Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, and then the antithesis of those guys. The group around Fragonard are the artists doing these kind of sensual and almost product kind of stories. Chardin is a French painter who's very much more moralistic in his artwork. So we'll take a look at this kind of shift from the court world we just left into the salon culture. We'll also see the very successful career of Marie-Louise Elizabeth Vichy-Lebrun, a female court painter who becomes kind of a middle ground, I suppose, between the court style and the salon influence. The word Rococo itself, again, is pretty important for us. Rococo this time comes from a French word, rocaille, which means rock or shell. It's a reference to the interior decoration and also somewhat to those exterior grottos we were talking about in the last lecture. So of course, we've already seen the incredible excess of the world of Louis XIV. We've seen his enormous palace, we've seen him controlling the architectural aspects that redesigned the palace, as well as the landscape architecture of that massive estate. He controls fashion, he controls every aspect of life in the court, and you can see that he is very much a ruler who's concerned with his image and with the trappings of his wealth, and really showing off, really displaying that wealth in the palace. So if we think about how excessive this amount of decoration may seem, then I think you're going to be surprised to see how much further it can still go when we get to the Rococo. Check that out. This is not the home of a king. The Salon de la Princesse is essentially a room in which you could hold an elegant party, for sure. So it references both the room and the party itself. But you're looking at something that would be a member of, in the home, rather, of a member of the aristocracy, as opposed to the absolutely tip-top highest member of the royal family. So style and power is now being concentrated more in these influential wealth families. And so the Salon are set up in their homes, particularly in Paris, as this one is. And if you really look at this design carefully, you can see that it's somewhat similar to what we saw. There's lots of gold, there's a mirror, there's a chandelier. But if you go back for a second, look at how rectangular the space is. I mean, obviously it's a hallway, but it is a very straight line, straight wall, straight line, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling, simple curve, and it very much shows you where the wall stops and the ceiling starts. Although it's gaudy and very decorated, it does have a certain level of clarity and even order, organization. When you look at this wall, where exactly does the wall stop and the ceiling start? Is it here, where the painting begins? Because it is kind of carved this way and this way. Or actually, does the ceiling start above this molding here? But then what is this element where the ceiling is really starting to carve in that direction as well? You could almost argue that every surface above here is kind of a hybrid of wall and ceiling, almost until we get to this point. And notice there's no 90-degree corners to the floor plan of this room. Obviously, the walls are 90 degrees to the floor, but there's no 90-degree corners. This room is more like an octagon. Everything is rounded. It's more natural in its shapes. The framing of the paintings is not rectangular or square or circular. It's this bizarre shape, almost like the bat symbol from Batman. There are no terms for exactly what this shape is. It fits that particular architectural element. It's a much more elegant, curvaceous, and arguably highly overly decorated style than anything we've seen up to this point. So, the idea of the culture changing here also allows us to think about people to determine for themselves, as opposed to listening to the dictates of a king, what is going to be important to them and how they want to spend their time, how they want to think about their lives and how they want to be perceived by the generations that come after them. These are artists or people who are really interested in promoting a lifestyle of luxury. See that in the ceiling. I mean, this almost looks like decoration on a cake. It is far more elaborate than what we've seen up to this point. And you see that in all kinds of examples of Rococo architecture. Now, this room is more of a rectangular hall, but look at the framing on the paintings. Look at the crowning frame over the mirror elements. This is, again, taking the idea of what was fashionable in the court of Louis XIV and pushing it even further. If you look at the molding, it has become carved sanctuary, gilded to be gold, and this elaborate trompe-l'oeil, illusionistic painting above it, it starts to trick you into thinking that this is part of the wall as well. So there's an enormous amount of decorative illusionism that's happening throughout this entire era. So some Rococo sculptors are still making works that would be presented outdoors. They might be presented in the grottos that we were talking about earlier. But a lot of attention gets paid to the Rococo painters, and of them, Watteau is a probably the most significant, at least at the beginning of the era. Watteau, in fact, is such a well-respected painter that in order for his work to be included in academic settings, the Academy invented, for the first time in a long time, a new category to describe the work of Watteau. And Watteau's paintings, particular type of scene, became known as fête galante, or elegant party, essentially. The fête galante is an outdoor affair. Most often, it does involve eating and drinking, but people would dress elegantly as if they were going to a ball, but the event would be held out of doors. And quite frequently, they would bring everything that you would expect indoors out to these events. Carpets might be put down. You would have furniture, and certainly not our cheap, plastic, foldable, transportable furniture. We're talking about the kind of furniture you would have in your home. You would eat off china and drink from delicate crystal glassware. It would be as elegant as if you were in someone's mansion, but you would be out in nature. So, the fête galante that's presented here is actually also telling the story, or telling a story, rather, from a popular play. And I think that's kind of fascinating. We have now a story that isn't from the Bible. It isn't a mythological story. And it's not truly a genre scene. This is not everyday people doing everyday things. What you're seeing is actually drawn from a very popular play of the period. And that particular play told the story of the island of Scythera as a kind of romantic escape that people went to. And one of the best lines from the play is that a maiden hardly ever returns from Scythera without a lover or a husband. So, the idea is that this is all about romance, but also a hookup, I guess you could say. So, when you look at the figures in the painting, it just looks like old-fashioned white people in fancy pants, clothes from old timey times, and who cares? But there's actually, even though they appear to be really very different people, these three couples kind of represent three stages of romance. And if you look closely, you've got this couple who seem to be very into one another, like they have no attention for anyone else around them. This couple, though, seems as if she is wanting to stay put and he's pulling her forward. This couple, even more so, the male seems to be kind of forcing her to leave, get on with things, while she looks wistfully back at the early stages of romance, beginning with the stage where you have no time for anyone except the person you've fallen in love with. So, the subject is overly sweet, I suppose, highly romantic from a point of view of telling a story of romance. But it definitely isn't your world. If you look at those trees, the way they're painted, you can almost see each individual leaf separately, which is fairly unbelievable. The artists of the Rococo were known for believing that nature was unruly, and that really their job as painters was to make it look prettier, make it more organized, right, make it come to their ideas of composition and beauty. One painter, in fact, from the period, once said that nature is too green, and it's badly lit, that only he could control would be considered beautiful. That's a pretty intense idea. So, this image is sort of the most famous of Watteau's paintings, although he did a couple variations on the same story, and you can see the same type of thing is happening with our three couples here, as they are meant to be getting back on board the ship to leave Sithra and go back to their sort of day-to-day lives. The reason that I mentioned that this was from a play is pretty important for us to remember that, of course, people had different forms of entertainment than we're accustomed to today. And one of the very popular forms of entertainment in the Rococo was, of course, the theater, and the Commedia dell'Arte style of theatrical production was very popular in Western Europe. And the Commedia dell'Arte, of course, starts in Italy, but the idea is that the actors represent stock characters. They are not necessarily full-on stereotypes, but certain characters have certain characteristics. I think archetype would be a better word for describing how these characters are to be perceived. So, there are hero characters, there are buffoons, there are characters who are always unsuccessful in love, there's the unrequited lover. They're kind of stock types. Now, that may seem very stilted and silly to us and very unrealistic, but in our own culture, we do have examples of stories where characters fall into pretty rigid roles. I mean, most of our television series have hero characters and villain characters, and that's pretty clear. If you've ever watched a soap opera, you know immediately who the always good people and always bad people are. And in a way, it kind of operates a bit like Commedia dell'Arte in terms of us being able to understand the types of people presented. So, with those paintings, very often are people in outdoor, elegant party scenes, enjoying nature, but enjoying elegance, and of course, falling head over heels in love, and you see that again and again. This would be a really good example of fit gallant that includes actors who seem to be performing dressed in Commedia dell'Arte attire, the musician character right here. So, you certainly get the feeling that it's a life of leisure, it's a life of elegance, it's a life of entertainment. Obviously, it's not for poor people, right? Clearly, it's for people who have some money. Actors of the Commedia Francaise, that's the French equivalent of Commedia dell'Arte. And so, you can see that as you might expect, the people who fall into the category of entertainers, of actors, sometimes are on the fringes of society, in a way, and are on another level, regressing what that culture can be about and ideas that it can express and concepts that it can deal with. Even though they seem silly to us, these characters from the Commedia dell'Arte tradition are somewhat recognizable and relatable. The character at the left is the one who is most often associated with unrequited love. He always falls head over heels in love and can never get the girl. It's kind of funny to think about, but you've got this sense, even in the painting itself, that the sculpture is telling the story. It's turning its back on him and he's all bereft about it. There are definitely stock characters in this image of our Commedia dell'Arte clown, but there's also a drunken clown there. So, there's variations even within clown type. The Italian Company of Actors would give you a great example of what this Commedia dell'Arte is. And so, they are being a little over the top, a little obvious, a little exaggerated, but all for the sake of this elegant entertainment, Italian comedians, these people are performing for wealthy clients. And it's absolutely a mark of sophistication to be able to hold one of these parties. So, Boucher is our next important painter, and Boucher is definitely someone who's associated, probably most closely, with the mistress of Louis XV, with Madame de Pompadour. And that's who you see in these paintings. And she absolutely is the epitome of high fashion style during the era of the Rococo. You can see, quite shockingly, that the neckline of the dress has moved significantly lower than what we saw in other cultures during the Baroque. The flatness from the top of the neckline of the dress to the waist is definitely kind of important for holding the waist in, giving the tiniest waist possible. But these enormously exaggerated muscles underneath the skirts to make the hips appear as wide as possible, and to create this elegant feeling, sometimes women would have to go sideways through doors to navigate in this style of fashion. You can see how petite her little feet and shoes are underneath all of this massive amount of fabric. This is not the kind of clothing that you could just throw on and go about your day. This would require a lot of effort, a lot of time, and some strength to be able to carry it around. So, Boucher is very much showing us what the wealthiest leaders of society are wearing, and he is not above sharing some kind of shock images of sensuality. This painting is known as the Brown Odalisque, the Blonde Odalisque, and so the reference is to the hair color. Odalisque, though, is a term that refers to the idea of a harem girl, and so we're seeing kind of an eroticized male fantasy in these. They're really surprising to think about, but definitely we have this feeling that the characters that are being presented are somewhat fantasy, but we know that real people posed for them. And in point of fact, the model most likely for this piece very briefly was having an affair with King Louis XV, and so we know that these are to some extent based in some ways on real people, or at least on the ideas of real relations. Boucher often gives us images of people in kind of low settings and very idyllic romantic things, and that's very common to the Rococo style. For the purposes of the aristocracy, he of course also paints fairly erotic images of mythological scenes, as we see that here with Diana resting after the bath, or Toilette of Venus. This was commissioned by Madame de Pompadour. Now, of course, she was the most famous mistress of the king, and so this image is sort of meant to decorate her apartments, partially for her pleasure, but also partially to please her lover as well. So the Boucher piece to know is the one on the left, it's Cupid a Captive. I want to reiterate with this one that it's kind of something that we forget about. We think of Cupid as making people fall head over heels in love, but remember Cupid has both types of arrows in his quiver. He has a gold arrow that causes the instant falling in love, and he also has the iron arrow that causes the instant fall into dislike or into hatred. So you can see that capturing Cupid is also about capturing his power. The women are definitely trying to disarm him, to take those arrows for their own purposes. So that brings us then to Fragonard, and he is absolutely, I think, the master of what the Rococo is all about. It is style over substance, I suppose you could say. The colors are often quite pastel, bright and soft. The images are overly romanticized in a lot of ways, and what you'll see with a lot of his work is that he was not above certain subjects or certain storytellings that some of his compatriots were less willing to paint for their clients. So oddly, even though he was successful for the most part early in his career, he did fall out of favor fairly quickly, and it was not until really the 20th century that his reputation would be reconsidered. And I think one of the reasons that you might find him falling out of favor is because some of the stories are a little bit on the naughty side. This is one such story. This is Blind Man's Bluff, and if you look closely, you can see obviously we're at an outdoor party, and one of the games the partiers are playing is this blindfold where people have to try to find one another, but one person can't really see because of the blindfold. But if you look carefully, you can see her eye quite clearly peeking out underneath the bottom edge of that blindfold. So she knows exactly where she is. She is pretending to not be able to see so that she can kind of lead this young man into this little grotto area where she can then have a little romantic fling with him. So there are, on the surface, these very sweet, very proper-looking, old-fashioned European people going about their free lives, but underneath there's this tension of extreme eroticism. Some of the images are much more blatant than others, and that's certainly the case with Fragonard's The Bathers from 1765. But if you look at the way he's painted nature, you can see that those leaves, trees, even the clouds don't look real at all. They're very much like imagined landscape or the idea of a landscape. The focus of the painting is clearly on the bodies of the models. The Fragonard to know for the test is The Swing, by far his most famous piece. And again, on the surface, it just appears to be a young-ish, aristocratic woman in a garden or park and whatever. Big deal, right? But if you look closely, you can pretty quickly work out that there are other people there with her. Behind her to the right is her chaperone, who is literally in a shadow and can't quite see what's going on. If you follow her eyeline, she's clearly looking down, and behind this bush blocking him from view of the chaperone is her lover. So he has agreed to hide there, to meet her there at the specific day and time. Even though they know that she'll be accompanied by the chaperone, it's going to give opportunity for a little bit of a trust. You notice that she is accidentally kicking off her shoe or her slip, which is providing him really perfect eyeline straight up her skirt, which is shocking in some ways. At first glance, this seems very safe and sweet and almost sickly sweet. It's all pastel pinks and greens. It almost looks like a wedding cake decoration. But the more you look at it, the more you see that really what's happening here is a fanciful, romantic storytelling. What you see in the center here is a statue of Cupid who's holding his finger up to his lip, shush gesture, and pointing downward toward the lover just in case you get right away. And again, our landscape is rather unreal. It's almost surreal. I'm not exactly sure where that branch is coming from or what trunk it should be attached to, because the fading value, the sort of atmospheric perspective effect that's happening in this background seems to also be happening immediately behind her head. It's not a realistic depiction of nature in any way, but it's a highly stylized one. You can definitely see the little look on her face. She knows exactly what she's up to, and he is thrilled to bits to be able to be enjoying this little spectacle. There are several scenes kind of like this, an entire scene about the progress of love that very much emphasizes the same type of playfulness, gameplay relationship. But when you look closely at the way that nature is rendered, you can see that there is by no means an attempt to make it seem real. It's really meant almost to be a fantasy world. My favorite one in Progress of Love is this one where the girl is obviously trying to get her boyfriend to wait a second so that whoever is observing her will eventually leave so that they can actually have their little get-together. But she's trying to protect him and keep him from coming over the wall just at that moment. She wants to make sure that whoever is there to supervise her has changed their attention or has left. You can see she's kind of a little in shock. This is one of the most shocking of the images, I think, personally. It's called The Bolt, and you see what's happening is the male figure is fastening a deadbolt to the chamber door so that she can't escape. There's a very tense story being told. Of course, we're meant to find it somewhat erotic and romantic that she is perhaps falling, swooning under his influence, but it's also very, very threatening. We talked a little bit about this before, but I just wanted to pull in the additions to the gardens of Versailles. This is Marie Antoinette's quote-unquote play village, which was built for her around 1783. And the idea is that she would then be able to pretend to be a peasant and live the way the common people did as almost a form of entertainment. I think it doesn't take much imagination, especially when you look at the date. Think about 1783 is not terribly long after our revolution in this country, right? So if this new form of representative democratic government governed people by the people by a vote, as opposed to just taking the orders of a king, the world is changing a lot. And you can imagine why. How enraged would you be if you were a peasant living in the countryside in France, and you found out that the queen was enjoying pretending to be as poor as she even had a pretend playhouse to live in her little humble shack. And you know that that little playhouse of hers is bigger than a lot of people's permanent homes to begin with. It is the ultimate in tone deaf excess by the leading upper class. So you can kind of get the feeling as we get to the end to how much the world is going to change by unit three. Chardin, I definitely wanted you to know just as kind of an antidote to all of that excessive erotic kind of imagery that we saw from the other. This is very much more in keeping with neoclassical that we'll see emerging toward the end of the 1700s into the early 18th. Clear, very moral and very upstanding. Definitely the attention to the moralizing still life still exists in Chardin's work. And you can see that the paintings themselves are often really beautiful studies of representing what the world's like. It isn't excessive or false. Other painters of this period tend to be. It's one of my personal favorites, I think, of Chardin is this still life that still is kind of an allegory representing all of the arts. You've got painting and sculpture and poetry. You've got suggestions of music as well. It's really quite remarkable. Pieces to know for the test or piece rather to know for the test is the one to the right. It's called usually Grace or Grace at Table. It is showing a very, very moral story in comparison to what we've seen otherwise today. And this example is the youngest children in a family knowing to pray before they eat. You can see the effect of their mother on their moral upbringing. Definitely want to take a quick look at Marie-Louise Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun. It's a long name. She marries into the same family that Charles Lebrun, of course, is the Zion of, that the sort of leading aristocratic painters of the 1600s into the 1700s. You see here that she is also in her self-portrait painting herself painting. It is almost astonishing to think how many of these we have seen at this point. When we saw male painters doing self-portraits, sometimes they were holding the brushes. But it was rare that you actually saw them painting the image in the painting as if we're being told, trying to show you, I'm trying to prove to you that I can do that. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for a female artist to be able to maintain a career. And in Vigee-Lebrun's case, in particular, she was so successful, really doing better than some male painters, that they kind of tried to shame her out of her art career. In fact, at one point, a rumor was started that she had spent this excessive amount of money on this party that turned into an orgy, which never happened. But just the idea that this woman painter was being lascivious was enough to try to bring her down. So it's like starting a false rumor about someone just to try to take them down. It's also intriguing, I think, to see these two images paired up. On the right, you have the official court portrait that she was doing, Marie Antoinette, with her children. On the left, you see a self-portrait with her own daughter. And I think you can really clearly see the difference between the official state portrait and an image of reality. I think there's one that clearly shows a close family bond connection. And obviously, that's the image right here of her. It's just a beautiful, beautiful painting.