ART
THE exhibition of Bavarian rococo at the Victoria and Albert Museum is admirably selected, admirably displayed and admirably breaks new ground for most of us in this country. How define with accuracy the limits of rococo? It stretches backwards into the grandeur of baroque, forwards into the extravagances of the romantic movement; it embraces artists as diverse as Watteau and Jakob Prandauer, architect of the mon- astery at Melk. The seventeenth century was baroque—as some would have it, the Jesuitical answer to the Reformation--but as Catholicism became increasingly courtly and court life increasingly like a charade, the baroque lost its power, grew capricious, more epicurean in its cult of beauty. Rococo created a world of make-believe and fancy, of cinderella-coaches and magic ballrooms and visions of paradise; an eclectic world which embraced. Pulcinello and Harlequin and all the dragons in China. All is dalliance and yearning and florid charm. It was perhaps the first true expression of art for art's sake.
From the little grottoes of Versailles it took its name, and from France its motifs and its formula:, spread like wildfire through the Catholic world, until every prelate and princeling had set his heart on a Versailles of his own. Little shock-waves reached even palladian and protestant England: Hogarth's serpentine `Line of Beauty' and the Chinese pagoda in Kew Gardens may be regarded as coming within the perimeter of its influ- ence. Baroque was born in Rome; rococo
in Paris. In southern Germany where they met, their fusion found its happiest and most consistent expression—less classical than in France, more theatrical than in Italy. The limits in time are perhaps 1720-1780. It is the cream of this art—mostly dating from the two decades between 1740 and 1760— which has been brought to London by the Auswartige Amt in Bonn and the Bavarian Government.
Waves, flames, fronds, the whiplash, the corkscrew twist—these supplied the charac- teristic line of rococo; compositionally it exploited impetuous diagonals and broken curves and abrupt foreshortenings and open forms; it replaced the grave sonorities of the baroque palette by pastel shades of sage green and grey-blue and boudoir pink. It is an art of excessive movement combined with excessive grace. While in its exteriors it seldom completely forgot the lucid canons of the previous century, rococo frothed and foamed through the interiors of its palaces and monasteries in a flood of theatricality which united architect, painter, sculptor, plasterer and joiner. It was perhaps the last common language of form in Europe until the present day, and it was, in a sense, the final decadence of that development which began with the Renaissance, and which placed emphasis on spatial depth in painting, an illusionistic effect of surface in sculpture, on grace and counterpoint in movement.
Dazzling in its so-appropriate spotlight, one of the earliest exhibits at South Kensing- ton is an almost life-size votive figure in silver of the kneeling Crown Prince Maxi- milian Joseph of Bavaria. In the finesse of detail with which skirt and ribbon, cuffs and cushion are executed, may be seen that mastery of technique and certainty of execution which run through the whole period; in the extravagance of its thought and charm of conception a symbol of all that rococo stands for. There are doors and wall-panels from the Reichenzimmer of the Munich Residenz (which was destroyed in the war); mirror tables from Wiirzburg; a magnificent cope from the old Court Chapel of the Prince Elector's palace in Munich; tapestries; fayence from Ansbach and Kfinersberg; church and secular plate of tremendous opulence, including the very tine monstrance from Munich, but some- times of less appeal (for example, the Augsburg centre-piece overreaches itself and the baptismal flagon from the same workshops almost foreshadows Gaudf in the extravagance of its forms). From the Nymphenburg factory comes a complete set of porcelain figures from the Commedia dell' Art' by Franz Anton Bustelli—gay and elegant echoes of courtly affectation. There are florid masterpieces of sculpture by names unknown in this country, like the Mourning over the Dead Christ by Aegid Verhelst the Elder (move round it and the figures seem to be taking part in a ballet), but the exhibition is dominated by the Bavarian sculptor Ignaz Giinther (1725-1775), some thirty of whose painted carvings, mostly in limewood, are shown. With their small heads, their flying draperies, their theatrical gestures, these figures are- executed with such consummate skill, the performances they are giving so superb, that it is idle to criticise the absence of what was never intended to be there. These are the peak of rococo sculpture, and the present oppor- tunity to study them should not be missed.
M. H. MIDDLETON
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