Today I'm covering the Rokoko Art Movement. At the end you'll understand the movement, how it fits into history, all of the characteristics and artists that go with it. If this is your first time to my channel, I'm Mrs. Alder and the Art History Geek.
Make sure that you subscribe so that you can learn and experience art history with me every week. Look for the new videos posted on Thursdays. I love teaching the Rokoko Art Movement to my students.
We love poking fun at all the rich and wealthy people and what they do with their money. But before we get into that, let's dive into some of the history. What even is real good? The movement started in the early 1700s, 1702 to be exact. And with all these wealthy people trying to figure out what to do with their money, they sat around and talked to each other and tried to come up with an answer to a question.
What makes you have a happy life? Of course there are tons of answers to this question, but the Rococo movement is all about one answer. If it feels good, it is good. Drink all the wine you want, eat whatever food you want, picnic in lush gardens, and have as many romantic escapades as you possibly can. That's what this movement is all about, and the art followed it directly.
Now the word Rococo comes from this book. This guy named Jean Mondon published a book about the first Rococo art movement in its form. The word Rococo comes from a French word that talks about these shell-like things that were used to decorate grottos or man-made caves during the Baroque time period, which is really important to understand before we understand Rococo.
There are three main things that lead up to this movement. First, the Baroque art style. Second, there was a shift in focus from the monarchy to the aristocracy. Really important.
Third, there was a surge of prestige coming from the Royal Academy of Art. The Baroque style came right before Rococo and it was following on the wings of the Renaissance, which is a really hard thing to do because how do you follow perfection? But Baroque had something up its sleeve. It decided to add drama to the paintings and the sculptures and the architecture.
So with this drama, they have a lot of theatricality, lots of really sharp diagonals, great combos between light and dark. They added the painterly style brush stroke. They used ovals instead of circles because ovals are more dramatically pleasing to look at.
Not so perfect. Let's head over to Germany where we can check out some of this architecture that really blends the Baroque and Rococo style. You'll understand what I'm saying.
Let's head over to the Church of Wurzenheiligen. Yes, I looked up how to pronounce that. By the architect.
Newman. Now as you're looking at this piece, I want you to remember all you've learned about Baroque architecture and see all of those elements there. Gorgeous marble, isn't it amazing?
The tall ceilings, the concave convex movements of the aisles, they don't stand straight like our traditional gothic cathedrals or romanesque basilicas. There's movement, there's theater, there's drama that's happening inside this this room. But But look a little bit closer and you'll start to see some pastel colors.
Greens, blues, pinks. Those don't come from Baroque. They're definitely Rococo. And also there's a lot of organic motifs to it.
It feels like it's growing and it's alive in here. This is what we call architectural fantasy. There's lots of decor without any structural function.
Those columns aren't really holding up the ceiling. They're just there to add beauty. drama, and movement to the piece.
This is the transition from Baroque to Rococo. Let's head over to another building in Germany that is purely Rococo. In Munich, there's a palace called the Nymphenburg Palace. This is the zenith of Rococo architecture. In the very center of the palace, there's a circular room called the Hall of Mirrors.
Yeah, similar to the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. during the Baroque time period. See the connection?
So this hall of mirrors, mean glance inside, the first thing that catches my eye is that pastel blue color. Isn't it gorgeous? Isn't it just light and airy? The other thing that brings that feeling of lightness and airiness is the gilt silver inlaid throughout the walls.
Notice how they didn't choose gold like the Baroque style would have chosen. They picked silver for a very specific purpose. It feels lighter. It feels more frivolous. It doesn't feel as heavy and dramatic, but it still has those elements to it.
Now as you look through this hall of mirrors and you start looking at this silver, you'll notice that it has a lot of vegetation motifs, lots of flora, lots of fauna. Along with these floral motifs, we've got these things called sea scrolls. Can you see those right here? It's really delicate.
It feels organic. It's lacy and sensual and just uncultivated, really lush, really fertile. You can get that feeling in this circular room. So let's talk about those mirrors.
There's a purpose for them. They're reflective. They make the room seem larger, but they also reflect that silver and that pastel baby blue all throughout the room. So you feel as if you are surrounded by it.
It's really intense and it also kind of gets rid of some of the structural aspects of the room so you forget you're standing in a piece of architecture and it becomes this piece of art. You transcend into the ethereal, the otherworldly, as you enter this room. Also throughout, we don't have Christian themes anymore.
This is a big deal, especially because all the art up until this point in Europe is heavily funded by and paid for by the church. So during the Rococo movement, we're kind of shifting our gears a little bit, and now we're just having wealthy people build things like this for their palaces. So you don't have a lot of Christian themes.
Instead, you've got Greco-Roman mythology. So some of the goddesses that are depicted here are goddesses of the hunt, a sea of fruit and fertileness. You get the picture so far?
These rooms would have been small, intimate rooms with sparkles. They felt new and exciting and wealthy. All of these wealthy people would gather in these rooms and talk about art, literature, poetry, music, politics. These wealthy people had a lot of time in their hands.
When you get bored, wealthy people You definitely get some romance flowing in these little rooms. It was a very exotic place to be and that led to some, you know, romantic escapades. The way that I remember the Rococo art movement is literally as simple as this.
Rococo? No, no, no. I promise we'll get to all that spicy stuff later.
But first we have to go on to the second bullet. The shift from the monarchy to the aristocracy. Now Louis XIV of France was so powerful, he's the guy that lives in Versailles, that he was able with all of his money to bring France into the center point of the art world, where it stays for a very long time.
Because this was the center of art throughout the world, it also becomes the center of the Rococo art movement. Now when Louis XIV dies, the monarchy moves out of Versailles. They leave that grand country basically. and come back.
And so the monarchy isn't on people's minds as much as it used to be, and it shifts towards the aristocracy, the wealthy people. They held both monetary power and political power. In fact, a small population of France owned 90% of the wealth.
That's incredible. Now, just a reminder for you, this is right on the cusp of the French Revolution in 1789, so you can kind of understand. how history plays a role here.
So with all of this money, the aristocracy are the people that are paying for art. And so art reflects the aristocracy and all of their leisurely activities that they participate in. The third thing that led to the Rococo art movement is the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture. This was a school for artists to come and learn how to do art.
They had hands-on experience, they had lectures. But it was also a place that they could exhibit their art. In 1667, the Academy started opening exhibits biannually, so people could come and look at the art that their school was creating.
And when I say people, I mean men. More on that later. So these men would come and gather in the exhibitions to talk about art and literature and politics, and these became known as the salons.
They'd go to the salon to look at art and to talk about it. Now this was a really good opportunity for artists to display their work and get potential patrons. And this is what paid for the Rococo art movement.
So not everyone could get into the academy. It was a highly prestigious place. First of all, only men allowed.
But they decided to create this hierarchy of art. History paintings were at the very top, followed by portraits, you got genre paintings, landscapes, and then still lifes. That's what was accepted at the Academy at the time. And so that's what Rococo tried to kind of weasel their way into. And they were pretty successful.
So with this switch in... patronage. We've got wealthy aristocracy people hanging out in these salons. They start making salons in their own homes like the Hall of Mirrors that we studied. And this is the birth.
This is the Rococo movement. This is the fertile soil in which it could be birthed. So let's recap.
What led to the Rococo movement? First, Baroque. Second, shift from monarchy to aristocracy. Third, the Academy. I'm about to jump into the characteristics of the Rococo movement, specifically with painting.
I love to hear what my students think about it, so as I talk about this, think about what you do or don't connect to with the Rococo movement and comment below. So the first artist that really breaks way into the Rococo movement is Jean-Antoine Watteau. He spearheads this movement specifically located in France, and he does it with a piece called Embarkation to Cytheria in 1717. Now... The reason he's creating this piece is he's been accepted to the academy and he uses this as his like first piece to show what he can do. They love it.
They love it. It depicts wealthy people on a pilgrimage to this mythical land where Aphrodite was born. So they kind of have to figure out what genre it fits into.
Is it a history painting? Is it a portrait painting? What really is it? So the Academy makes a new genre called the fait grand.
This genre basically means wealthy people and their wealthy leisure activities. So now we've got this new category in the Academy of just depicting wealthy people doing wealthy things. This is huge!
The Academy creates a new genre for one painting and the genre is wealthy people doing wealthy things. basically just Gavilancing through nature and having picnics Weird, but it happens and this ushers in the Rococo movement now. There's one figure I want you to remember her name is Madame de Pompadour and she's actually King Louis the 15th mistress, but she's also a huge proponent for the arts.
She's not monarchy She's aristocracy and she's the one who paints pays for a lot of these artists to create their work and promotes this rococo style and this new thing in the academy. Okay, we're going to talk about the quintessential rococo piece right now. It's called The Swing.
It's done by Fragonard in the year 1766. We're going to talk about some context before we jump in. So the original patron was some wealthy aristocrat whom we no longer know because he didn't want to be tied to this piece anymore. But we do know it was originally given to the artist Doyen to complete, who upon receiving the idea of what this painting was supposed to be like, felt too uncomfortable because it was too centrally explicit.
And that's when Fragonard picked it up. We're going to talk about some of the artistic style that Fragonard uses in this piece, and you'll have a better understanding of art from this time period. So we're first going to talk about the lighting of the piece. Notice how the light directs your eye. There's a strong swath of diagonal light coming from the upper left and it leads you right to the main focus of the painting, which is this woman in a pink frilly dress.
The rest of the painting's kind of hidden in shadows. It's not important. She's the focus.
So let's focus in on her. When you look at her dress, you can see the pastel color pink is used. A lot of Rococo artists use pastels, blues, soft greens, pastel pinks, yellows, those kind of colors.
When you zoom in on her dress here, you can see that they also use a more painterly approach that the Baroque style started. So painterly, when I say that word, I mean you can see looser brushstrokes. You can see that there was an artist's hand in this piece.
You can really see that in her silk dress. So she's the center, but the surrounding area is also really important. First thing I want to point out here is you can see that the setting is this fertile, overgrown, abundant garden. You can see very closely if you look in the back that there's like a fence there, so maybe this is a fenced off garden, but there's frothy light-kissed trees that are dappled in sunlight.
It feels abundant. It feels fertile. It feels gorgeous.
Now right through that center we've got really strong diagonal line from a tree branch. This comes from that Baroque period. We've got that movement that comes with it, but it almost looks as if this diagonal like energizes the piece because that branch almost looks like a strike of lightning as it like fills this with like frenetic energy, right?
It like blasts through the painting. These are what are called intrigue. pictures.
And what I mean by intrigue is you're doing something that you shouldn't be doing because that's way more fun. So we know that there's something probably naughty happening here because this is the Rococo movement. So here we've got three main characters. The female in the center that catches your eye at first. Let's talk about her.
She's gorgeously dressed in an aristocratic style. She's got fluffy folds of fabric. Lots of F's. Um, going on and she's swinging on a swing and she lifts her leg up and her shoe flies off in this flirtatious manner.
Let's look at the men that follow her. Notice how they have this triangular, they make up this triangle base that comes from the Renaissance. Look at the man that's deep in the shadows. He's the one that's pushing the swing. He's controlling the motion.
He has this goofy smile on his face as he's pushing the swing and He's probably, I mean it's been said that he could be a bishop of some sorts or a religious figure or he could just be a chaperone of some sort to this for this girl. But then looking at the other male character you can see he's relaxing in the fertile lush grounds and is also being quite playful. So in this scene you have the female kicking up her foot. And if you look at the eye side of the young man, you can see it goes directly up her skirt, which he holds his hat in front of him as if to say like, oh, I'm not looking.
It's very coy. It's very playful. But the female is giving him permission to look as she kicks her leg up.
So what we have here, it looks like a literal love triangle that's happening, right? And the young woman is just having the time of her life as she has these two men that don't know about the other kind of playing along with her. Looking at the statues that are happening around here, off to the left you can see Cupid, who's holding his finger above his lips in a silent shh, as if this is secretive, this is naughty, don't tell people what's going on here. And then down below the female, kind of by that chaperone figure, you can see two more cupids and they're attached with a dolphin. who is a mythological figure often connected with Aphrodite, the goddess of love, which is very fitting for this.
And dolphins and water and surging of romantic escapades, it's all there. Finally, I want to direct your attention to that cute little doggy right in the right-hand bottom corner. He's at the foot of the chaperone, and he is unhappy. You can see he's yapping.
You can almost hear it as you look at this little guy. And from history, we know that dogs are a symbol of loyalty and fidelity. Now, this dog looks to be upset, as if it is upsetting to see disloyalty and infidelity.
So, that's what this painting is all about. Now, how does it fall under the Rococo style? First of all, remember, Rococo, no, no, no. It's a very naughty scene, very, like, very sensually charged. But, In ways to think about the Rococo art movement, I would say just think of all the F words you can and use those to describe it.
It's frothy, frivolous, flirtatious, fertile, fancy, flowing. Literally any F word you can think of, you can use to describe this scene. Yes, including that F word you're currently thinking of. So to summarize everything we've covered. Three main things that led up to the Rococo movement.
The Baroque art style, the shift from the monarchy to the aristocracy, and third, the rise of the academy. We studied Fragonard and his famous painting The Swing, where we learned all about the characteristics of Rococo painting. So what comes after Rococo?
It doesn't last too long. People are still looking for the answer to the question of how do you lead a good and happy life? They tried it out with Rococo and they soon lead on to the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism where they decide that in order to lead a good and happy life, you are moral.
You're a good standing person. You're a part of your community. And that's what the art reflects. I hope you guys found this video helpful. You can download a summary of the Rococo movement in the PDF that's linked below.
Please feel free to comment. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And if you like this video, hit that like button and share it with your art history friends.
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