The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (409 page)

Rocky Mountain School
.

Term applied to 19th-cent. American artists who painted the Rocky Mountains in a spirit similar to that adopted by the
Hudson River School
. Alfred
Bierstadt
is the best-known artist of the school.

 
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Rococo
.

Style of art and architecture, characterized by lightness, grace, playfulness, and intimacy, that emerged in France
c.
1700 and spread throughout Europe in the 18th cent. The Rococo was both a development from and a reaction against the weightier
Baroque
style. It shared with the Baroque a love of complexity of form, but instead of a concern for solidity and mass, there was a delicate play on the surface, and sombre colours and heavy gilding were replaced with light pinks, blues, and greens, with white also often being prominent. Elegance and convenience were the qualities demanded by a society tired of the excessive grandiloquence of Louis XIV's court at Versailles, and the Rococo style was intially mainly one of decoration. The word is said to derive from a combination of
barocco
(Baroque) and
rocaille
; like many stylistic labels in the history of art, it was originally a term of abuse, meaning ‘tastelessly florid or ornate’, but it is now used without any pejorative connotations.
In painting, the first great master of the Rococo style was
Watteau
and the painters who most completely represent the lighthearted (often gently erotic) spirit of the mature Rococo style are
Boucher
and
Fragonard
.
Falconet
is perhaps the best representative of the style in French sculpture, but generally the Rococo spirit is seen more clearly in small porcelain figures than in large-scale statues (Falconet himself was Director of the famous porcelain factory at Sèvres). In architecture the Rococo style was much more suitable for interior decoration, with asymmetrical curves and pretty decorative motifs prevailing, than for exteriors, but something of the Rococo spirit—of its refinement and charm—can be seen even in such a regular and relatively unadorned building as Ange-Jacques Gabriel's Petit Trianon (1763–9) at Versailles.
From Paris the Rococo was disseminated by French artists working abroad and by engraved publications of French designs. It spread to Germany, Austria, Russia, Spain, and northern Italy (
Tiepolo
,
Longhi
,
Guardi
). In England it had somewhat less of a vogue, although a substantial exhibition of English Rococo art was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1984 and there are clear reflections of the style even in the work of so xenophobic an artist as
Hogarth
.
Gainsborough's
delicacy of characterization and sensitivity of touch (although completely personal) are also thoroughly in the Rococo spirit. In each country the style took on a national character and in addition many local variants may be distinguished. Outside France, it had its finest flowering in Germany and Austria, where it merged with a still vigorous Baroque tradition. In churches such as Vierzehnheiligen (1743–72) by Balthasar Neuman , the Baroque qualities of spatial variety and of architecture, sculpture, and painting working together are taken up in a breathtakingly light and exuberant manner. The Rococo flourished in central Europe until the end of the century (as in the work of
Maulbertsch
), but in France and elsewhere the tide of taste had begun to turn from frivolity and lightheartedness towards the sternness of
Neoclassicism
by the 1760s.

 
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(1891–1956).
Russian painter, sculptor, industrial designer, and photographer, one of the leading
Constructivists
. His output was prolific and his artistic evolution was rapid, as he moved from
Impressionistic
pictures in 1913 to pure abstracts, made with a ruler and compass, in 1916. He was influenced by
Malevich's
Suprematism
, his
Black on Black
(Met. Mus., New York, 1918) being a response to Malevich's
White on White
paintings. Rodchenko, however, was without Malevich's mystical leanings, and he coined the term *‘
Non-objective
’ to describe his own more scientific approach. In 1917 he began making three-dimensional constructions under the influence of
Tatlin
, and some of these developed into graceful hanging sculptures. Like Tatlin and other Constructivists, however, Rodchenko came to reject pure art as a parasitical activity, and after 1922 he devoted his energies to industrial design, typography, film and stage design, propaganda posters, and photography. It was perhaps in photography that his originality was most evident. In sharp reaction from his abstract work, his photography was geared towards reportage and a pictorial record of the new Russia. But much of this work was outstanding for its exploitation of unusual angles and viewpoints, and his innovative use of light and shadow influenced, for example, the great Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. In the mid 1930s Rodchenko returned to easel painting, and in the early 1940s he produced a series of abstract canvases in an expressionist vein.

 
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(1840–1917).
French sculptor and graphic artist, one of the greatest and most influential European artists of his period. He was the first sculptor since the heyday of
Neoclassicism
to occupy a central position in public attention and he opened up new possibilities for his art in a manner comparable to that of his great contemporaries in painting—
Cézanne
,
Gauguin
, and van
Gogh
. His beginnings, however, were not auspicious. He came from a poor background, was rejected by the École des
Beaux-Arts
three times and for many years worked as an ornamental mason. In 1875 he went to Italy, where (as he later wrote to
Bourdelle
) ‘
Michelangelo
freed me from academism.’ Michelangelo was the inspiration for his first major work,
The Age of Bronze
, which was exhibited in 1878. (Like many of Rodin's statues, this exists in several casts; the Rodin Museum in Paris has examples of virtually all his work. There is also a Rodin museum in Philadelphia.) It caused a sensation because the
naturalistic
treatment of the naked figure was so different from the idealizing conventions then current that he was accused of having cast it from a live model. Two years later, in 1880, his reputation now established, Rodin was commissioned by the state to make a bronze door for a proposed Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Rodin never finished the huge work—
The Gates of Hell
—in a definitive form (he worked on it intermittently until 1900 and the museum never came into being in its proposed form), but he poured some of his finest creative energy into it, and many of the nearly 200 figures that are part of it formed the basis of famous independent sculptures, most notably
The Thinker
. The several casts of the complete structure that exist were made after Rodin's death. The overall design is a kind of
Romantic
reworking of
Ghiberti's
Gates of Paradise
for the Florence Baptistery, the twisted and anguished figures, irregularly arranged, reminiscent of Michelangelo's
Last Judgement
and Gustav
Doré's
illustrations for the
Divine Comedy
. His modelling is often rough and ‘unfinished’ and anatomical forms are exaggerated or simplified in the cause of intensity of expression.
These traits were taken further in some of Rodin's monuments, for example the famous group of
The Burghers of Calais
(1885–95), commissioned by the city of Calais for a site in front of the town hall (another cast is in Victoria Tower Gardens, London). In the figures of the six hostages who face the threat of death Rodin created a profound image of a variety of responses to an extreme emotional crisis. The civic authorities had wanted something in a more traditional heroic-patriotic vein, and the monument was eventually unveiled only after years of wrangling. Even worse hostility was aroused a few years later by his statue of Balzac. This was commissioned by the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1891, but Rodin's design was so radical—an expression of the elemental power of genius rather than a portrait of an individual—that it was rejected. The monument, which ranks as the most original piece of public statuary created in the 19th cent., and which Rodin said was ‘the sum of my whole life’, was not finally cast and set up—at the intersection of the Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse—until 1939. In spite of this kind of controversy, by 1900 Rodin was widely regarded as the greatest living sculptor, and in that year a pavilion was devoted to his work at the Paris World Fair. Apart from his monuments, he did a large number of portraits of eminent personalities and he was a prolific graphic artist, some of his later work especially being notably erotic. Although the literary and symbolic significance he attached to his work has been out of keeping with the conception of ‘pure’ sculpture that has predominated in the 20th cent., Rodin's influence on the development of modern art has been immense, for single-handedly he rescued sculpture from a period of stagnation and made it once again a vehicle for intense personal expression.