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American Rococo
| Article
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20457 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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5 / 1992 |
1,680 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
For pre-Revolutionary Americans, elegant meant "English." The colonies retained not only the language and customs of the motherland, but the fashions as well. The English were more than happy to indulge the colonial taste for things English. In fact, it was their policy to import raw materials from the colonies and send back finished goods for sale. Indeed, they sought to protect and exploit this situation by instituting taxes and duties, most of which were safely ignored by the colonists until the end of the French and Indian War (1754-1763).
After the war, the English decided they should get compensation for money spent defending the colonies. To that end they imposed the Stamp Act (1765), taxing all commercial documents and publications issued in the colonies, followed by the Townshend Acts (1767), which taxed British-made glass, lead, paint, and paper, as well as Oriental tea. Such measures led directly to the Declaration of Independence. But in the meantime, these regulations served to encourage the colonists to "buy American." Merchants signed "nonimportation agreements" to boycott English furniture, china and other manufactured goods. The result was not an aversion to English styles, but merely a preference for colonial products--just business, nothing personal.
The English restrictions proved mostly short-lived, but their impact on colonial production of luxury goods was lasting. An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art contains nearly two hundred decorative arts objects, from furniture and silver to maps and clocks, representative of the period between the French and Indian war and the Revolution. Organized by Morrison Heckscher, curator in American Decorative Arts Department, and Leslie Greene Bowman, curator of decorative arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, American Rococo, 1750-1775: Elegance in Ornament is a showcase for the fledgling colonial craft industries that emulated the English, even while competing with them.
The rage in mideighteenth-century London was the international Rococo, called Chippendale in England. A mode of extravagant ornament, its hallmarks were shells, curlicue scrolls, acanthus leaves, and assorted flora and fauna laid out in asymmetrical schemes. These swirling motifs were generally engraved on printing plates or carved on furniture. There were traces of Rococo in America in the 1740s, and it persisted after the Revolution. But the frilly style was largely supplanted by urbane Neoclassicism, deemed more appropriate to the founding of a nation.
Rococo crossed the
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