One hundred percent the best part of rococo art is that all of it looks like someone sat down François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard and explained the basic tenets of Marxism to them in oh, 30 seconds, before giving them the command of “Paint the opposite of that, for the rest of your lives.”
Do you know what rococo art is, exclusively? It’s professional shepherds and shepherdesses wearing gorgeous silk gowns in inappropriate settings, sexily falling asleep while all of their sheep run away. Distribution based on contribution? Not when we’ve got giant beribboned swings to swing on, friend!
FORGET THE CLASS STRUGGLE, LET’S PUT A WREATH OF LACE AND FLOWERS ON THIS COCKER SPANIEL.
SURPLUS VALUE? WHO CARES, WE’VE GOT FANCY DRESSED-UP SHEEP TO LOSE WHILE WE FRITTER AWAY OUR SPARE TIME IN DECADENCE AND ALSO IN PICNIC BASKETS
this cow is for decoration ONLY, this is a FANCY cow
sound asleep, like the proletariat or whomever/more like class UNconsciousness, am I right here
put the house on a bridge, that the working class shall never find us
there’s something so comforting about getting together a bunch of sundries and services and then slowly following asleep surrounded by luxury goods
the only pink tide i care about is when we fill the river with roses for our annual Flower Battle and then someone else has to clean up after us
LUTES ARE AN IMPORTANT PART OF LANDOWNING
“I do my best farming with no shoes on”
[Images via]
Tags: artwork, boucher, fragonard, lancret, marxism, rococo paintings, the opposite of marxism
Everything is reminding me of the Supersizers French Revolution episode where Sue has that ridiculous pastel dessert lunch on Marie Antoinette’s fake farm. Seems like the Dauphine was the complete antithesis of multiple revolutions.
I cannot recommend enough The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette: “In a series of pamphlets written from the 1770s until her death in 1793, Marie-Antoinette is portrayed as a spendthrift, a libertine, an orgiastic lesbian, and a poisoner and infant murderess. In her analyses of these pamphlets, Thomas reconstructs how the mounting hallucinatory and libelous discourse culminated in the inevitable destruction of what had become the counterrevolutionary symbol par excellence.”
Oh man, I read that for a paper I wrote in undergrad about popular perceptions of Marie Antoinette from then up to the present, and it was just fascinating.
orgiastic lesbian?! what an incredible concept.
I misread that as organic lesbian which…is a very different thing.
no reason you cant be both, i suppose
True! not mutually exclusive
I had the world’s craziest Art Appreciation teacher (though I’m not sure there’s a non-crazy variety), and she spent the whole section about rococo making the HUGEST DEAL about how the shoe flying off of the lady’s foot in The Happy Accidents of the Swing was a metaphor for her virginity. I sort of figured the fact that she was kicking her foot up so the dude in the bushes could look straight up her dress* was a little more straightfoward, but nope, she was fixated on that shoe.
*that’s what I saw, anyway.
Given that the dress clearly had like 46 lacy petticoats, I don’t think it matters where the guy was, there was no way anyone would be able to see anything under her dress.
And teachers need to take a deep breath and think before they start making a huge deal about sexual metaphors in class because it gets a little scary. I had an English teacher who was OBSESSED with the red pickle dish in Ethan Frome. Considering it ends up broken, I don’t think it symbolizes what you want it to symbolize, dude.
Are there any English teachers who are not obsessed with the red pickle dish in Ethan Frome?
DOUGHNUTS AND PICKLES is literally all I remember about that book.
No. No, there are not.
To be fair, it’s the boringest book in all of Boringtown and if you have to teach it, it is bound to bring out some unhealthy behaviors.
i dunno…some of my favorite memories of english literature explanation time are my petite favorite professor leaping about the room while she exclaimed about the SEX! hidden in everything.
I should probably stop freaking my freshman out with a dramatic reading of Araby, huh?
“One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: ‘O love! O love!’ many times.”
YOU GUYS WHAT DO YOU THINK HES DOING YOU GUYS
Funny, and nowadays women keep their shoes *on* in porn…
Well of COURSE lutes are an important part of landowning. How else do you lure in unsuspecting trav-…I’ve said too much.
“WE FRITTER AWAY OUR SPARE TIME IN DECADENCE AND ALSO IN PICNIC BASKETS”
this is my goal tbh
those rosy-red cheeks are the rosy-red cheeks of some bourgeois scamps who just KNOW that they are accumulating wealth in the form of blithe livestock.
This statement is 100% true, though:
“there’s something so comforting about getting together a bunch of sundries and services and then slowly falling asleep surrounded by luxury goods”
I first read that caption as “luxury goats” and was wondering where I could find me some luxury goats…
Try here:http://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Home-Services-Hire-G…
i was SO EXCITED but, alas, “Sorry, there are currently no services available in your area”.
:*(
Please consider my application for the position of Lazy Rococo Shepherdess…
Going by the example of Marie Antoinette, that’s not a position with a lot of job or neck security.
But sleeping on things and putting flowers on dogs are 2 of my core competencies!
I would suggest improving your Looking Stoic In A Chiton and Weaving Stoically In The Face Of Unwanted Romantic Attention While Your Husband Is At War competencies for the oncoming wave of neoclassicism.
Yeah, listening to dudes talk/play a lute at me is definitely an area where I can improve
my qualifications include but are not limited to:
* experience with wearing corseted bodices
* a developed preference for going about barefooted
* extreme willingness to nap in the shade of trees and the company of sheep
I live for the day I have a fancy cow, a silk polonaise, and a secluded grove in which to listen to the enchanting, dulcet sounds of a peasant boy with a bagpipe.
Dulect and bagpipe: two words you don’t often see in the same sentence.
That’s because an insufficient number of people truly appreciate the melodious musicality of the bonny bagpipe.
<3
Most of us, when we see “bagpipe”, automatically think of the Great Highland Bagpipe, which is louder and has rather more BLAT! compared to other bagpipes. Some types of bagpipe really are (comparatively) dulcet, designed to be played at medieval dance parties instead of cutting through battlefield noises.
This is what it has come to, folks: Every time I look at #7, I am sure they are taking a selfie.
HA! “Oh Rupert, if only this flower could capture our likenesses in this moment…”
This is 100% how it looks when I try to do rural things. Really. Swear to god.
one hundred percent the best part of the toast is the art. I love this so, so much.
Dang, I thought this was what society was supposed to look like after the state withered away.
I didn’t even make it to #3 before I was thinking, “all these people have remarkably soft, perfect feet for barefooted sheep-tenders,” which is something that never occurred to me before when looking at rococo painting. And then I got to the last one. Clearly, Mallory can bend our thoughts from a distance merely by turning on her computer and clicking on an image.
An awful lot of these seem to have little naked baby statues somewhere in them.
James Herriot gave me a very different impression of what herding sheep is like, and now I want to see all these ladies in their ornate silks crouched on a hillside at 4 am in February, one hand up a sheep, trying to simultaneously unhook a breech lamb from the holy tangle it made of the umbilical cords and encourage their twin to start nursing.
Then they wash their hands in a bucket of icy water with pine tar soap and proceed to the next desperate sheep.
“Come live with me and be my love, your hands are small and will do less damage during lambing.”
5000 points to your house for bringing up James Herriot, and have another 1000 for that astonishingly clear mental image. (The silk, oh lawd the silk up those hills…)
Counterpoint: if they were wearing over-alls and the dogs were all beagles or some shit, and the flowers were more utilitarian (cornflowers and such), and the lighting was slightly less soft, and the lads and ladies were clearly just sharing a meagre ploughman’s between breaking rock or building an autobahn or whatever, this would work as Marxist art. Not all commies require harsh angles in their art, you know, Ortberg!
RIDICULOUS. If they were wearing different clothes and with different, working dogs, and clearly in the middle of work, they would be entirely different paintings! Of course it wouldn’t be so decadent if the setting and work being performed were fundamentally different! Bosh to this theory.
Pffft, beagles are not remotely working dogs. Beagles are four-legged alimentary canals.
One end is bark, the other not, both ends being equally obnoxious.
…were we coworkers once?
Either you worked analyzing/creating Marxist works of art OR you had a coworker who would say “Oh yes, but what if we changed every significant fact in the situation, THEN your argument would not hold up, would it, hmmm?” with such frequency that you recognize them on the internet.
Either way I must hear more. If you are too busy to pitch, I will settle for tantalizing comment-based anecdotes over the next ten years.
That’s Realism, and Realism is horrible.
“We are but simple, humble shepherdesses in miles and miles of diaphanous silks. Here are the elaborate curls and ribbons of the working class, and the pure white linens which we wear while spending our days surrounded by livestock.”
You will know we are but commoners by our lily white skin, we who work all the day in the out-of-doors.
“See us eating the crude white-flour pastries and and Pâtes de fruits that are the daily meal of the peasant.”
“Observe the small and elegant hunting dogs of the proletariat.”
looks like agricultural labour under full communism tbph
My favorite thing about rococo is how the name sounds exactly so much like what it is. (Also, it sounds like the sound a rooster makes in some other language, although maybe mixed up. Or maybe it’s an Evil Rooster laugh.)
I’m pretty sure those are Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, not Cocker Spaniels in #1 and #3. (Complete dog breed obsessive, sorry.)
There’s a song, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8EOHvMCTKU