Rococo painting
Rococo painting represents the expression in painting of an aesthetic movement that flourished in Europe between the early and late 18th century, migrating to America and surviving in some regions until the mid-19th century. The painting of this movement is divided into two sharply differentiated camps. One forms an intimate, carefree visual document of the way of life and worldview of the eighteenth-century European elites, and the other, adapting constituent elements of the style to the monumental decoration of churches and palaces, served as a means of glorifying faith and civil power.
Rococo was born in Paris around the 1700s, as a reaction of the French aristocracy against the sumptuous, palatial, and solemn Baroque practiced in the period of Louis XIV. It was characterized above all by its hedonistic and aristocratic character, manifested in delicacy, elegance, sensuality, and grace, and in the preference for light and sentimental themes, where curved line, light colors, and asymmetry played a fundamental role in the composition of the work. From France, where it assumed its most typical feature and where it was later recognized as national heritage, Rococo soon spread throughout Europe, but significantly changing its purposes and keeping only the external form of the French model, with important centers of cultivation in Germany, England, Austria, and Italy, with some representation also in other places, such as the Iberian Peninsula, the Slavic and Nordic countries, even reaching the Americas.
Despite its value as an autonomous work of art, Rococo painting was often conceived as an integral part of an overall concept of interior decoration. It began to be criticized from the mid-18th century, with the rise of the Enlightenment, neoclassical and bourgeois ideals, surviving until the French Revolution, when it fell into complete disrepute, accused of being superficial, frivolous, immoral and purely decorative. From the 1830s on, it was again recognized as an important testimony to a certain phase of European culture and the lifestyle of a specific social stratum, and as a valuable asset for its own unique artistic merit, where questions about aesthetics were raised that would later flourish and become central to modern art.
Origins and characteristics of the style
developed from the growing freedom of thought that was being born in 18th century France. The death of Louis XIV in 1715 opened space for a flexibilization of French culture, until then strongly ceremonial and dominated by representations that aimed above all the praise of the king and his power and manifested themselves in a grandiloquent and pompous way. The disappearance of the very personification of absolutism enabled the nobility to regain some of the power and influence that had been centered on the person of the monarch, and the court at Versailles emptied, with many nobles moving to their estates in the countryside, while others moved to palaces in Paris, which became the center of "salon culture," sophisticated, glittering, and hedonistic social gatherings that took place amid literary and artistic discussions. This empowerment of the nobility then made it the main patron of artists of the period.In these salons, the Rococo aesthetic was formed, which displaced from the center of interest historical painting, which was previously the most prestigious genre and which invoked a typically masculine ethical, civic and heroic sense, putting in its place the painting of domestic and country scenes, or of gentle allegories inspired by classical myths, where many identify the prevalence of the feminine universe. In this sense, the role played by women in the society of this phase was very relevant, assuming a force in politics throughout Europe and proving to be generous patrons of art and shapers of taste, the case of the royal mistresses Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, of the empresses Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa of Austria, and organizing several important salons, such as Madame Geoffrin, Madame d'Épinay, and Madame de Lespinasse, among many others. However, in many respects the Rococo is a simple continuation, indeed a culmination, of Baroque values – the taste for the splendid, for movement and asymmetry, the frequent allusion to Greco-Roman mythology, the emotional bent, the ostentatious pretension, and the conventionalism, in the sense of being governed by pre-established criteria accepted by consensus. Rococo painting also illustrates, in its first version, the social schism that would lead to the French Revolution, and represents the last symbolic bastion of resistance of an elite distant from the problems and interests of the common people, and that was increasingly threatened by the rise of the middle class, which was educated and began to dominate the economy and even important sectors of the art market and culture in general. With this, it determined the parallel emergence of a much more realistic and austere stylistic current, whose theme was all bourgeois and popular, exemplified by the artists Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Baptiste Chardin, and which was virtually ignored by the rococo universe, with few exceptions, but which would ultimately end up being one of the forces for its collapse at the end of the 18th century.
In a period in which the old traditions were beginning to dissolve, rococo painting represents an opposition to the academic doctrine, which tried, even during the high Baroque and especially in France, to impose a classicist artistic model as a timeless and universally valid principle, whose authority was placed above questioning, just as political theory validated absolutism. In this wave of liberalism and relativism, art began to be seen as just one more thing among so many that were subject to the fluctuations of fashion and the times, a view that would have been inconceivable until recently. As a result, the inclinations of the period tended toward the human and the sentimental, directing production not toward heroes or demigods, but toward ordinary people, with their weaknesses, and who sought pleasure. The representation of power and grandeur is abandoned, and the public of rococo painting seeks to see in it rather beauty, love, and the relaxed and captivating grace, excluding all rhetoric and drama. For this the classical tradition was still of use, by offering for the artists' inspiration a body of themes quite attractive and suitable for the hedonistic and refined mentality of the elites, who rejected all austerity and reinterpreted the classical past in the light of the ideal and bucolic Arcadia, of the fantasy of a Golden Age where nature and civilization, sensuality and intelligence, beauty and spirituality were harmoniously identified. Neither this theme nor this interpretation were, in fact, new; they had existed since the Roman Empire and remained present in Western culture almost without interruption since their origin, both as a simple romantic and poetic artifice and as a resource for psychological escape when times proved hostile or excessively sophisticated, thus becoming a powerful symbol of freedom. In the Rococo period the innovative note was that of the world of the Arcadian shepherds and the gods of the Greco-Latin pantheon virtually only the backdrop of the natural environment remained, this "natural" being more often than not a cultivated garden, and the protagonists of the moment were the aristocrats and the enriched bourgeois themselves, with all their fashionable apparatus, engaged in brilliant conversation and whose heroism was summed up in amorous conquest, embodying the pastoral idea more in keeping with the conventions of a social theater. In representation, just as the Baroque was prolix, the pastoral Rococo is succinct; despite the uniqueness of setting, formally the painting is an accumulation of discontinuities, and what most confers the effect of unity is atmosphere rather than description. In this way, the Rococo appears as the link between the ceremonious classicism of the late Baroque and the sentimental pre-Romanticism of the middle class.
This fantasy universe was also in line with the conceptions of the time about the illusionistic nature of art. For the critics of that time, the pleasure that art can provide is only possible when the spectator accepts the terms of the game and submits to being illuded by a kind of magic. The problematic involved in artistic illusion was not unprecedented, and the question whether an activity based on imitation and lure of the senses could be morally justified or worthy of intellectual attention has accompanied European thought since the questioning of Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle in Ancient Greece. During the 18th century, this topic took on a new color in the deliberate quest to somehow confuse and disorient the audience, removing them from the circumstantial and concrete to throw them into the ambiguous and fluent world of the theater of representation, a practice that otherwise did not find unanimous support and was criticized by many moralists, concerned about the concomitant dissolution of the sense of reality and the firmness of ethical values encouraged by these paintings. Likewise, not all artists had this goal. Important painters of the time, more engaged in an idea of reforming and moralizing art, such as Hogarth and Goya, strove to overcome the conventions of illusionism and help the public restore, as Matthew Craske puts it, "the clarity of their vision." Thus, one finds positions with varying degrees of closeness to or distance from objective reality, in a dialectic that provided much of the strength for the creativity of this period. It is also important to point out that, according to the sophisticated culture of the aristocracy, civilization was a necessarily artificial phenomenon, and an educated and polished spectator was expected to be able to make the subtle distinctions between the real and the fictional, to be able to deal with the complexities of art, and to be able to defend himself from crude charlatanism and cheap illusion, indicating the cultivation of his intellect and his erudite baggage.
Another important contribution to the formulation of Rococo aesthetics was the establishment of the concept of art for art's sake initiated by Alexander Baumgarten in 1750 and further developed by Kant in the following decade. He stated that the main goal of art was pleasure, not utility, conceiving the aesthetic experience as coming from the contemplation of the beauty of an object, and understood as the sensual stimulation of undifferentiated thoughts, devoid of utility or purpose and detached from morality. For Kant, ideal beauty does not declare itself completely, but rather remains constantly arousing ideas without exhausting them. Thus meaning is not in the determination of any one concept, but in the incessant dialogue between imagination and understanding. This is why he qualified art as a "serious game," seeing in it aspects of playfulness such as freedom and disinterest. In this way, the Rococo definitely raises in Western art the question of aestheticism, in the very ambiguity that surrounds its representational method and its essential goals, making clear the primordial convention that if painting exists, it exists for an observer and to be looked at, but handing over to future generations the serious problem of, according to Stephen Melville, "to say that what happens to a viewer in front of a painting is fundamentally different from what happens to a person looking at a wallpaper or a landscape through a window," a dialectical element that would become crucial to the modern discussion and validation of art itself, of artistic making and understanding, and of the autonomy of Aesthetics, and which has not yet been satisfactorily resolved.
Technically, Rococo painting tends toward a greater freedom than in Baroque or academic painting. The brush strokes are clear and nimble, with the creation of textures and an effect sometimes similar to that of impressionist paintings, giving many compositions an aspect of sketch, of unfinished, which engaged the viewer more efficiently, asking him to mentally complete what had been presented schematically. Realistic detailing and the primacy of line are denied, the perspective of space is shortened, creating a more enclosed setting, the backdrops are more simplified, favoring the foreground, and suggestive effects of atmosphere are sought. The representation of the clothing, however, tends to be real enough to show the sumptuousness of the fabrics and the richness of the jewelry and ornaments worn by the models. As for color, a central aspect in the Rococo, the concern of its artists reached extremes of complexity. Manuals for amateurs and beginners written at the time, instead of giving gradual instructions on combinations of primary colors, jumped directly to mixing schemes with dozens and dozens of gradations, and the refinement in this area, at the level of professionals, was naturally much sharper, even developing its own symbolism involving each type of tone.