Writing last week

The plausible rebirth of Rococo as an art style

In “The plausible rebirth of Rococo” I intend to investigate why it has been taking so long for Rococo to be recognized and incorporated in the international art historiography as an art style.

Rococo developed in the early 18th century in Paris, France and for a long time it was thought to be restricted to the field of interior decoration. Over 200 years after its appearance, in the 1940s, it was recognized in academic circles for the very first time. During the WWII, Harvard Professor Fiske Kimball flew over to Europe to catalogue Rococo manifestations in homes, churches, and palaces in Paris. His work resulted in the writing and publishing of the first book on the subject,  named “The creation of Rococo”, in 1943.

However, according to reviewers of the first edition of the book(1), although Kimball did offer very interesting comments on architectural changes brought about by Rococo, he insisted on restricting his field to interiors as it can be seen in this extract from the book “it is in the interior and its enrichment that we shall find the essential creative works here discussed.”

It would take another 20 years for Rococo to finally acquire the status of an art style – when it was once again revisited and understood as a broader movement that took place not only in France but also in Europe and South America, and that actually represented and encompassed the ideas in vogue at the time.

Attention has to be given to the fact that in 1968 the title of Kimball’s book was reviewed and appeared for the first time changed to “The Creation of Rococo Decorative Style”, (the author was already dead and his name came out as Sydney Fiske Kimball – Fiske Kimball’s full name, never previously used in his academic work) out of the recognition of a misinterpretation of the amplitude of Rococo.

The changes in the perception of the amplitude of Rococo have not yet been widely assimilated. Visiting websites and browsing books published considerably later, I found definitions and statements that clearly undermine the role the style.

For instance, althought nowadays it is understood among scholars that Rococo had its own agenda, one that is actually quite different from the Baroque, ___ (2) states that “The rococo is the flimsiest of all the generic labels used by art historians, and does not at all imply a profound change from the baroque.” Or  (3)“The later Baroque style was termed Rococo, a style characterized by increasingly decorative and elaborate works.”

It is my theory that this happened in Europe not by accident, but because of the Catholic Church’s concerns with dangers implied in the propagation of the hedonistic life style and the consequences of it. Some theorists say corrections had to de made to religious texts by Jesuits and other theorists incorporating “delight” and “pleasures”  to it. (4)

In Latin America, the European review of the texts arrived with a considerable delay, it was for a long time misinterpreted as Baroque and is still facing a lot of resistance among scholars,  with little to none bibliography on the subject.

1.    Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Nikolaus Pevsner for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

2.   http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/sculpture/baroque-rococo-sculptors.htm

3.   https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/the-baroque-