Comparisons

• Watteau, Pilgrimage to Cythera 
• Boucher, Mme de Pompadour

The painters of the French court before the Revolution utilized a style termed “rococo” for its similarity to a playful architectural décor. Subject matter revolved around the activities of the French aristocracy, a leisure class who prided themselves on their education, manners, and elaborate taste. Watteau characters appear in a garden party with an allusion to the allegorical island of love. Mme de Pompadour was Louis XV’s mistress and led court taste while in power. She is shown reclining in full dress among the lavish articles of a palatial interior.

Key Topics

The role of the artist in the political revolutions that have characterized the last two centuries worldwide. 

• Artistic shift: in revolutionary France, artistic styles changed from the sumptuous Rococo to the more Spartan Neoclassicism, in line with the overthrow of the absolute monarchy and the aristocratic art forms associated with it.

• A new country: Neoclassicism was adopted as the style for architecture in the new American republic, and artists developed a style to suit the “Promised Land.”

• The democratic impulse: kept alive by artists in nineteenth-century France, this gave rise to the new style of the realism in art; Impressionism can be seen as an escapist response to the continuing turmoil.

• In the service of the revolution: artists in Mexico revived the ancient art of mural painting to glorify a new Communist regime.

• Varying fortunes: in Russia, the Constructivists’ radical abstraction, designed to serve the new industrial state, was later outlawed by Stalin.

• Nation-building: Communist China prescribed didactic art and its artists contributed to the personality cult of Chairman Mao.