Cooper-Hewitt's Rococo: Behind the Curve

Covered silver tureen and platter designed by Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier, made by Henri-Guillaume Adnet and François Bonnestrenne
Photo: © Cleveland Museum of Art

By Martin Filler, Guest Blogger

One symptom of getting older is an increase of the been-there-done-that syndrome, with its odious and sometimes unfair comparisons. Just as I've "retired" certain operas after definitive performances, some exhibitions inevitably prompt unsurpassable memories of earlier shows on the same subject.

I'm afraid that's the case with the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum's recently opened and typically haphazard stylistic survey, Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1730-2008, which remains on view through July 6. One of my all-time-favorite decorative arts shows was "The Rococo in England" 1986, at London's Victoria & Albert Museum, an impeccable overview all the more instructive because it focused on a country not usually associated with that strenuously frivolous Continental aesthetic.

As has been true of several Cooper-Hewitt efforts in recent years---big, unfocused catch-alls akin to the Guggenheim's under-curated, overstuffed blockbusters---this round-up of 370 objects contains more than enough wonderful things to justify a visit. But "Rococo's" ridiculously overreaching timeline, presumably intended to make an antiquarian taste "relevant," negates any notion of serious scholarship. By including so many works that have nothing to do with the subject (forgetting strict chronology, which I don't demand), the Cooper-Hewitt flouts scrupulous standards upheld down the street at the Metropolitan Museum.

"Rococo" is vaut le detour for one artifact alone: the drop-dead Meissioner silver tureen (above) that opens the show with such a bang that everything thereafter is a letdown. Swarming with life-size life-like crustaceans, this dizzying maelstrom is as sublime yet inherently architectural as the Bavarian pilgrimage church of Vierzehnheiligen or Amalienburg pavilion.

But what does Alvar Aalto's 1931-32 bent plywood Paimio chair have to do with the capricious spirit of the Rococo, beyond an ingenious use of S-curves? Nor should the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau or today's blobby post-Bilbao biomorphism be presented to a credulous public as Rococo revivals, implicitly or not. This kind of superficial thinking has fed intellectual disrespect for the decorative arts, and it's sad to see a prominent museum perpetuating the problem.