CURLICUED
A small exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Fragile Beasts, collects prints with motifs in the spirit of the grotesque. This style has highly specific origins; it was born when ceiling frescoes from the Domus Aurea were uncovered in Rome in the sixteenth century. These elegant, ancient panels are decorated with sepia-colored angels, wrestlers, garlands, centaurs, leopards, and flowering trees, all depicted in profile against a light-filled sky. Grotesque is a baroque style, characterized by curving, curlicued forms that incorporate, very literally, the figures of plants and animals, including humans, so that they seem to be morphing into each other. Grotesque forms have a bizarre half-object half-thing quality; they spring strangely to life, with a tenuous, slithering identity.
The exhibit itself, of small prints displayed behind glass, didn’t hold me. But as I moved through adjoining galleries, with displays of Tiffany glass and Victorian birdcages, and through the museum itself, the old Carnegie Mansion, lined in carved wood panels and lit with decorative iron chandeliers, I felt as if I were submerged in the grotesque. The rich, thick ornament in the objects and the architecture feels animate, as if the place is a living thing. This whirling, stirring quality might not be unique to the grotesque, but characteristic of all premodern art. Before God was in the details, life was in the ornament.
