ART REVIEW : ‘American Rococo’: A Colonial Craze for Decoration

The notion of an “American Rococo” seems a contradiction in terms. The very word rococo is as French as Camembert. It connotes a style that reigned along with Louis XV in the aristocratic decadence of the 18th Century. It was garlanded, nonchalant, associated with erotic marshmallow nudes by Francois Boucher and foppish courtiers costumed as shepherds pretending they understood Jean-Jacques Rousseau when all they really wanted was romantic dalliance in the formal gardens of Versailles. In the history of painting it produced but one great artist, Antoine Watteau.

By contrast, Americans of the period are remembered as the flinty inheritors of New England Puritans, full of rectitude and having not a moment for furbelow or frippery. Such few painters as were around included hard-nosed realists like John Singleton Copley and Charles Willson Peale.

Well, as it turns out, life once again acts according to the principle of paradox. There was an American rococo. It came to us indirectly via England disguised under the name Chippendale. Now for the first time the style receives comprehensive survey in the exhibition “American Rococo, 1750-1775: Elegance in Ornament.” Jointly organized by New York’s Metropolitan Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it opens here Sundaywith a spread of some 170 works of decorative art and a conscientious catalogue with essays by Met and LACMA curators Morrison H. Heckscher and Leslie Greene Bowman.

There are at least two ways of looking at the decorative arts. Connoisseurs appreciate their design and craftsmanship. Those of sociological bent examine objects of material culture for their revelations of history and the temper of the times. Actually neither view is complete without the other.

Stylistically the rococo reveals a longing for intimacy in its small scale and an urge to organic nature in its love of stylized vines, tendrils, tiny flowers and seashells. If it were a new manner being promoted by Madison Avenue today it would probably be called “Baroque Lite.” There is an ease about the style that makes it airy, but it has an underlying formality that bespeaks lives of gentrified cultivation rather than beer-bellied sloth. It’s fascinating to examine the flintlock firearms on view and find these weapons of death shaped and decorated with the most exquisite care by wood carvers and metal engravers.

All of this is completely consistent with the main currents of 18th-Century European thought. In France, Rousseau sang the virtues of nature and the noble savage like a present-day ecologist. In England, John Locke spoke empirically of the social contract and the notion that government rests on popular consent. Locke was so revered here that his portrait was a standard subject for carved wood finials.

The rococo was, in a way, a sentimentalized blend of these two notions. When they were purified in the Enlightenment they led to the American Revolution and Jeffersonian Neoclassicism. Same thing happened in France. Their revolution trashed the picturesque and replaced it with Napoleonic revivalist Roman grandeur.

All that suggests linkage between one’s taste in interior decor and one’s politics. Turns out it doesn’t quite wash. In the American Colonies, everyone who could afford it was crazy about rococo and bought all they could, loyalists and rebels alike. The less economically fortunate had inexpensive bookplates and trade cards printed up to give them a touch of class--as witnessed by elaborate examples on view.

Paul Revere, who would gallop to warn the British were coming, was a renowned silversmith. He is represented in the exhibition by some lovely objects from a wedding service. They are the quintessence of restrained rococo lyricism.

Benjamin Franklin spent much time in London before the Revolution, representing colonial interests and his own fasciation with the Chippendale. He supervised the building of a new family house in Philadelphia at long distance, badgering his wife with letters instructing her how to get the rococo details just right.

Philadelphia was the hot pre-revolutionary town. It became the most venturesome and inventive in its use of the rococo. The gallery devoted to Philadelphia furniture bursts with barely restrained self-confidence. Case furniture features showy hardware, chests with elaborately carved architectural tops and imaginative sculptural wood finials. Upholstered pieces are covered with dramatic fabrics in daring shades of blue, green and buoyant yellow.

Without stock markets or banks, affluent colonials used real estate and household possessions as capital investments. Thus the economic vitality of a town could be more accurately gauged by the demeanor of its dwellings and furniture than is possible today.

Boston’s glory days were on the fade so its taste became cautious and conservative. New York was full of loyalists who fled with their rococo treasures or watched them destroyed when revolutionary occupation burned large sections of the city. All the same, there is one surviving serpentine New York card table on view that purely evokes the costumes and attitudes of the period.

“American Rococo” turns around a lot of notions about the revelatory values of decorative arts exhibitions. They are not just shows to be mined for ideas about how to redecorate the study. They are studies about how to rearrange ideas of history. Even the fine arts get nuanced reinterpretation from being exhibited with emphasis on the picture frames.

Copley’s famous portrait of Nicholas Boylston suddenly contradicts the artist’s reputation for sobriety. Look at the subject’s elaborate green robe and jaunty turban and he takes on some of the tipsy intelligence of a Voltaire. Look twice at Peales’ portrait of the Cadwalader family and the American artist’s rational empiricism is seen to melt into the gentle intimacy of a Chardin.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. , through Sept. 27 . Closed Mondays . (213) 857-6000.