Le rococo est-il décoratif?

Abstract

In Rococo historiography, the first half of the eighteenth century is generally described as the golden age par excellence of decoration. The so-called major arts are often considered to have played a lesser role in its artistic development. The period is thus systematically associated with artefacts produced by artisans, hence belonging to a less dignified category in the artistic hierarchy. In order to investigate the ideological background of this assumption, the article focuses on the debates on art which emerged, mainly in France, in the 1740s. These highly biased discourses, targeting the so-called bad taste of contemporary French painting and interior decoration, shaped a vision of the first half of the eighteenth century of which many aspects were later inherited by Rococo historiography, especially in its relation to decoration.

Surface Value: Ways of Seeing Decoration in Architecture

“…The political dimension of semantic exclusion and the representative role of decoration has been addressed by scholars in their efforts to rehabilitate and reposition the still much-maligned rococo (Scott 1996;Michel 2000;Bailey 2014;Magnusson 2017). 'In order for decoration to work', Scott writes, 'to command the patronage of the great, post-Renaissance theory demanded that it should deflect attention from the technologies of its manufacture and obscure the antagonism around which its production was organised' (Scott 1996: 7).…”