Return of Rococo: the beautiful and the beastly by Rosalyn Frances
What do you think when you hear the word rococo? Women in pale pink or mint green satin, seated in a verdant park awaiting the sweet music of a troupe of travelling musicians? Perhaps Rococo evokes extravagant bronze candlesticks, one-hundred-piece ceramic dinner services or tablecloths of gathered tulle? No matter how voracious an art-history buff you are, it is unlikely that your most immediate thought is Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) or choice scenes from box office sell-out Frozen (2013). However, as the current Wallace Collection exhibition “Inspiring Walt Disney” persuasively demonstrates, it may be time to pay closer attention to the art historical roots of one of America’s most recognisable animation studios.
With its origins in the word rocaille, French for pebbles or shells, Rococo seeks to describe a florid and curvaceous style that emerged in 18th century France, encompassing everything from the visual and decorative arts to literature. As Helen Jacobus notes in the catalogue essay, “over a century later [the Rococo’s] impact was still being felt in later iterations such as the nineteenth-century Rococo Revival and even Art Nouveau”; Disney is part of this tradition of revivalism. In the twenty-first century, the Rococo continues in reverberate: in fields of design, fashion, costume, interiors and in art, including the historically informed practices of Genieve Figgis, Flora Yuknovich, and Anna Von Freyberg.
The first room of the exhibition is a strikingly dark and atmospheric chamber. Here an installation pulled from footage of a 1934 Disney clan trip to Paris is playing, Walt, Edna, and Roy Disney are shown passing through the hall of mirrors at Versailles, visiting Marie Antoinette’s private apartments and traversing formal gardens, smiling photogenically all the while. Walt Disney was apparently captivated by Europe, visiting it on numerous occasions, and we get the sense of an animator that was hungry in his research process.
On other screens, extracts from two early studio animations from The Silly Symphony play, The Clock Store (1931) and The China Shop (1934). In both, Rococo ceramic dancers, dressed in fanciful eighteenth-century costume, are given movement, as if enchanted by Merlin. The two animations are juxtaposed with a fabulous ceramic couple produced in the Höchst manufactory, male and female dancers extend their pale dainty arms to greet each other, hands elevated at the wrists, feet crossed in fifth position.[1]
Two Porcelain Dancers, Höchst manufactory, c.1758, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In the three short years between the two animations, the complexity and scenic depth achieved by the artists advanced considerably. Watching the extract from The China Shop, is a tangible sense that the Disney studio were closely modelling their animations on such porcelain dancers. Look at the balletically elevated chin of that little, blue-coated gentleman!
The China Shop, Disney Studios, 1934, animation. Image Source: YouTube.
These scenes read like passages to two layers of long passed history – the eighteenth century in which they are set, and the early 1930s, which, for millennials like me can feel almost as distant. This room feels as if eighteenth and twentieth centuries have been collapsed into a magical hybrid. Throughout the exhibition, the historical focus of generations of Disney studios is a theme continually impressed upon the viewer, whether that be in the form of character designs for the Beast which draw on Hyacinthe Rigaud’s state portrait of King Louis XIV, or masterful designs for the anthropomorphised furniture in the same film by Peter J. Hall.
The exhibition suggests that the maximalism, excess and performativity of the Rococo was part of the reason the artistic movement was consistently revisited by the studio. In the central section of the exhibition, we see a gallery of architectural drawings, pulled from preparations for Cinderella (1950) and Beauty and the Beast. Artists for the latter film, including Mel Shaw and Hans Bacher, produced concept art which combined Rococo influences with elements from other eighteenth century styles including the Baroque and Neoclassicism. Hans Bacher’s gouaches for the castle are notable for drawing out the drama and intensity inherent in eighteenth century decorative arts to help convey the tale’s narrative arc. His designs utilise an excess of curvatures and plasterwork mouldings, a sketch for a palatial drawing room seems cloaked in pathos – foliate table legs and pentagonal mirrors lying derelict and forgotten, the spell on the Beast still unbroken.
In this middle room, an attention to the drawing development for the ballroom is placed in conversation with film footage of the ballroom scene from Beauty and the Beast. This brings the drawings into full focus, giving us the opportunity to appreciate the cascading baroque structure from the movie that you may have missed on first viewing in the nineties or noughties.
Hans Bacher, Visual development for Beauty and the Beast (1991), c.1989-1990, gouache on paper. Image source: Twitter.
Visiting the exhibition and learning of Walt Disney’s archival practice of voraciously collecting European fairy tales, it seems likely that the Rococo’s aristocratic associations were an important part of their appeal. In the popular imagination, the mid-eighteenth century style is strongly associated with the ancien regime, the last breath of the monarchy prior to the revolution. In this way, for contemporary viewers, the Rococo may assume an almost ghostly aspect, imbued with the tragic memories of a monarchy disbanded. The style is thus peculiarly relevant for fairy tales infused with magic, which recall a long gone, imaginary Europe, distant enough that the animation of cups and saucers seems almost possible - disbelief can be - just momentarily - stopped in its tracks.
One contemporary artist who also capitalises on this magical, or in her words “spiritual” aspect within the Rococo aesthetic is Genieve Figgis, who paints captivating small-scale acrylics recalling artists including Fragonard and Boucher. Although the scenic background is strongly abstracted in her work, the viewer has a sense of eighteenth-century opulence in the curved architectural niches, rich fabrics and exposed flesh that is so reminiscent of artists like Boucher; just wonder upstairs from the Walt Disney exhibition to the staircase landing of the Wallace Collection, and cast your eye over some of his large-scale history paintings, to compare. Unlike the 1990s animations of Walt Disney, however, or their Rococo prototype, Figgis’s paintings are distinctly macabre; viewed up close faces dissolve into clotting paint.
Genieve Figgis, Pink Stage, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 31 x 39 inches. Image Source: www.genievefiggis.com
Although the Rococo is not in itself macabre, as Figgis makes it, it does tread the boundary between what is beautiful and tasteful and what is ugly, and this tension was evidently of interest to members of the Disney studio working on Cinderella (1950). For example, we see that in their early character sketches, Disney colourists including Fini Rudiger and Bianca Majolie created exaggerated rococo costume styles for the ugly stepsisters and stepmother with chocolate box bows, inflated skirts, and high foreheads (c.1940). These designs were ultimately not chosen for the final film, in favour of a simpler and easier to animate nineteenth century style. However, looking at these early drawings, it is likely that the artists were aiming in their costume choices to gesture towards the deceptiveness of wealth and fashion, and its potential to disguise a less than perfect character; a flurry of satin cannot, it seems, ever fully conceal an absence of virtue.
In the final room of the exhibition, the show comes to a sparkling conclusion. With rocaille rivulets adorning three walls and a distorted blackened mirror on the fourth, twisting golden furniture everywhere, the space becomes an Angela Carter-esque vestibule, a palace room long since abandoned. In this room there are no drawings or animations. Works of art are stripped back to items predominantly from the Wallace’s own collection. But, far from undermining the lively aspect of the former rooms, the viewer instead has a strong sense that the objets d’art have been enlivened with the presence of fairy-tale; we have been given fresh eyes with which to view the visual culture of the eighteenth century. Recall the moment at which the fairy godmother, tilts her wand, and the pink gown of Cinderella becomes a sparkling white.
[1] Readers who are as fascinated with the interconnections between dance and the visual arts will be excited to see the Wallace Collections invent programme. https://www.wallacecollection.org/whats-on/an-enchanted-evening-with-english-national-ballet-school/