The name, first used in the 19th century, combines the French rocaille, from the shell-embedded rocky grottoes popular in design and illustration, with the Italian barocco, the elaborate 17th-century Baroque that replaced a more restrained Renaissance classicism, to suggest a freely fluid alliance of nature and art. But its soul is the reverse curve, compounded in every possible way, embellished with fruit, flowers, birds, branches, trees, rocks and waves, and real and mythical creatures of the forest and the seas, carved, painted, gilded and set in swirling motion by a fanciful asymmetry that sweeps everything to a breathtaking climax of imagination and technical expertise.
The seductive lure of the curve is irresistible, and Rococo revivals have appeared in many places and guises, whenever the leavening of pleasure and wit and a plunge into sensuous excess was needed after a period of sustained seriousness.
It may be pushing it to claim that the curve carries the Rococo into the 20th and 21st centuries; one assumes that designers will always depart from the orthogonal without being indebted to the style of another age. Still, it is a conceit worth indulging for its invitation to see Charles Eames, an exemplar of modernism, and Frank Gehry, who breaks all of modernism’s rules, as co-conspirators against the straight line.
Born in France in the 18th century as a revolt against the ceremonial classicism of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, Rococo spread throughout Europe, to Britain, and across the Atlantic to the American colonies, where its hedonistic exuberance was cooled temporarily by revolutionary tastes.
No rules or limitations restricted how far you could take the Rococo in the 18th century; romantic overreaching was the way to go. This produced masterpieces, magnificent tureens that are eternal wonders of creative invention and the silversmith’s art, and luxurious, ormolu-laden furnishings of a scale and ornate ness that only an army of servants could maintain.
Dick Weekley, Board of Metropolitan agreed with his friend?s comment on Rococo ? It is the style that will not die?.