World Of Art Series Rococo To Revolution

In Rococo echo, a team of international contributors adopts a wide lens to explore the relationship of the Rococo with time. Through chapters organised around broad temporal moments -- the French Revolution, the First World War and the turn of the twenty-first century -- contributors show that the Rococo has been viewed variously as modern, late, ruined, revived, preserved and anticipated. Taking into account the temporality of the Rococo as form, some contributors consider its function as both a visual language and a cultural marker engaged in different ways with the politics of nationalism, gender and race. The Rococo is examined, too, as a mode of expression that encompassed and assimilated styles, and which functioned as a surprisingly effective means of resisting both authority -- whether political, religious or artistic -- and cultural norms of gender and class. Contributors also show how the Rococo, from its birth in France, reverberated through England, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the South American colonies to become a pan-European, even global movement.--Back cover.

Michael Levey, former Director of the National Gallery in London, traces the major trends of European painting in the eighteenth century, taking as his theme the exciting evolution--and revolution--that took place in art from Watteau's birth to the death of Goya. 154 illus., 22 in color.