Rococo Echo: Art, History and Historiography from Cochin to Coppola ed. by Melissa Lee Hyde, and Katie Scott (review)

Uprootedness, global dislocations, and eccentric visions of time are at the centre of this edited collection, which seeks to reframe the rococo as a discursive style perennially reactivated and reformulated from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. While the book draws upon prior art histories dealing with the formal characteristics of the rococo rooted in Ancien Régime France (a territory brilliantly remapped by the scholarship of editors Melissa Lee Hyde and Katie Scott), it also destabilizes the notion that a style can only be interpreted within a geographically and temporally bound framework. Hence the operative use of echo and modes of aurality for reconceiving the relationship between style and time as ‘the delayed return, echoes re-echoed, scattering and proliferations, incomplete or fragmented reproductions, and drifts and gaps of meaning’ (p. 4). Ranging in scope beyond painting and interior decoration, the subjects discussed are refreshingly diverse. They include art criticism, collectors and collections, mimes and photographs, film and installations, furniture, and a clock covered with pansies. How rococo revivals enabled individuals to fashion national, political, and sexual identities, often in countertempo to the revolutions that swept through Europe over the course of the nineteenth century, is explored in the first section. Whereas Victorian art historian Emilia Dilke idealized the French rococo as a vision of moderate republicanism, aesthetes across the channel amassed private collections with the aim of recuperating a rarefied world of aristocrats. Tom Stammers reminds us in his fascinating contribution on the obscure collector Louis Du Molay-Bacon that, however reactionary his protagonist was, political upheaval made possible the unearthing of rococo trouvailles and bibelots. This dialectic of ‘revolution and recuperation that ran through nineteenth-century collecting’ (p. 76) meant that dainty treasures were to be found by sifting through heaps of Revolutionary rubble. Among the essays concerned with the eighteenth century, Colin Bailey provocatively suggests that a concept of rococo painting hardly existed in the eighteenth century since the style primarily proliferated in the realm of ornament prints, a persuasive claim neatly expanded in Gauvin Bailey’s exploration of rococo ornament’s mobility and its travels from the secular salons of Enlightenment Paris to the humid religious sanctuaries of Rio de Janeiro. Such resonances between essays convincingly show how this mercurial style wove its way through different times and locales, a goût nouveau never quite belonging anywhere. This theme of unbelonging can be found in the last essays, devoted to the rococo of our own time, from the anachronistic fashions in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006) as an expression of youth in revolt, to the unlikely adaptation of Fragonard’s frothy paintings in Yinka Shonibare’s installation show Jardin d’amour, held at the Musée du quai Branly in 2007. Staged in an institution devoted to ‘primitive’ cultures, rococo’s delayed and unexpected return in Shonibare’s work demonstrates how the style can serve as a powerful instrument of cultural critique, especially the second time around.