The Curve of the Sea Shell

Every beachcomber knows that sea shells are beautiful, yet few know they are so beautiful that once their shape inspired a style that spread across half of Europe. During the 18th century, painters, sculptors, even candlestick makers all followed the curve of the sea shell. The style was called rococo--itself an onomatopoeic image of the art --from the French word rocaille, meaning fancywork in rocks and shells.

Profuse with C scrolls and S curves, rococo has often been labeled an interior decorator's art. In courtly architecture, such as Munich's dainty Amalienburg palace, plaster tendrils so slather the rooms that the ceiling is inseparable from the walls. Rococo was ornament become form, rather than the link between forms. It added asymmetry to the earlier style of baroque art, as one would add fantasy to fiction. Where the baroque was epic, rococo was lyric. It had a horror of straight lines, as if such were the symbols of reason and order.

This week in New England, rococo makes good viewing at an informative exhibit in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., which has a new acquisition (see opposite page) by the rococo painter Jean Honore Fragonard.

Hems Heavenward. Fragonard, who flippantly signed his works "Frago," was an exemplar of the rococo age. Born in 1732, he studied under Franc,ois Boucher. He was befriended by the American minister in Paris, Benjamin Franklin, and by Madame du Barry, who commissioned him to do the series called the Progress of Love that is now in Manhattan's Frick Collection. One of his best-known works shows a girl on a swing, her hems heavenward, being pushed while her lover looks up.

Although Fragonard is best known for his sensual vignettes of dalliance, he rarely reached such peaks of rococo rendering as in his Fantasy Portraits. Dating from the late 1760s, they are a series of 14 portraits of actual people in disguise--often in the ruffs and cuffs of the preceding century. His The Warrior is sterner than the rest, but still as theatrical as grease paint.

The Warrior's flamboyant pose, exaggerated sword, and improbably wrinkled clothes express the rococo flight from reality. The far-off glint in his eyes suggests the coming romantic cult of genius, the idea that reverie is greater than reason. Fragonard even more daringly juxtaposes colors, such as the reds on the yellow cheek, without transitions of tone--a foretaste of impressionism. Yet the painting's casualness--revered in its day as sublime and picturesque--is a pure rococo attitude.

Rococo flourished mostly in France. The English, with fewer aristocrats, boast little more rococo art than Hogarth. In southern Germany and Austria, the style showed itself in churches whose walls dripped with absurd cockleshell trappings: in the 1770s, the Archbishop of Salzburg had to ban all "distracting pious trumpery and theatrical representations repugnant to the true worship of God."

Aristocrats as Shepherds. From the porcelain, etchings, and gold-and silverwork at the Atheneum, it is evident that rococo was a way of life, abandoned, whimsical, undemanding. Artisanship lavished on a table centerpiece produced a jungle of gilt. The etchings tell of nature tamed in a palace park, where artificial ruins and Chinese pagodas were built to provide fantasy.

Rococo was a royal style, yet one born of relief at the passing away of the splendor and pomp of Versailles and Louis XIV. Aristocrats yearned to lay aside their powdered wigs and play peasant. Marie-Antoinette's fake hamlet in the Trianon park was a doll's house for kings in fustian and queens in dirndls. Watteau and Boucher drew members of the nobility in shepherds' clothing. But aristocracy saw poverty as happy simplicity, not as a wretched problem. Came the French Revolution of 1789, and the wistful sound in the sea shell was no longer heard.

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