GOLD RUSH A Venetian desk from 1760 reveals rococo’s rapid expansion.

Photograph: Courtesy Elizabeth Dee Gallery

You’re forgiven if you’ve never made the visual connection between psychedelic posters announcing 1960s rock & roll bacchanals and the sumptuous furnishings from the court of Louis XV. That’s the unexpected pleasure of the Cooper-Hewitt’s new rococo exhibit, a show both scholarly and accessible that traces how a design idea can rear its sinuous head again and again, across time, geography and medium.

Spilling out onto two floors, “The Continuing Curve” looks at rococo as both an aesthetic and a free-spirited attitude born in 18th-century France. Louis’s court cabinetmaker Juste-Aurèle Meissonnier (a favorite of royal mistress Madame de Pompadour) is credited with originating the fanciful style, and museum’s first-floor gallery shows how his naturalistic ornamentation was implemented in gilt-bronze candelabras, swirling silver tureens, gold-encrusted commodes and a multitude of housewares. Meissonnier’s prints of fleshy cupids intertwined with unbridled foliage (several of which are on view) disseminated a new sensuous vocabulary throughout Europe. Tableware, textiles and furniture—including a silk-velvet stadtholder chair from the Hague and a gilded writing desk from Venice (above)—illustrate how the style was quickly adapted across the Continent and even into America.

On the second floor, we revisit the various revivals rococo enjoyed in the 19th and 20th centuries, emerging as a counterpoint to the rational angularity of classical design. Though the effect is far more streamlined, you can see the telltale organic tendrils in embroidery from Art Nouveau craftsman Hector Guimard (famous for his metalwork in the Paris Metro) and iridescent vases by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The exhibit’s coda is a display of contemporary works that offer the broadest definition of what could be considered rococo. Frank Gehry’s curvy corrugated-cardboard chaise and Dale Chihuly’s spermatic wall sconce aren’t too much of a reach, but isn’t Verner Panton’s stackable side chair—a minimalist red s made of injection-molded plastic—the antithesis of untamed ornamentation? Somehow, through the Cooper-Hewitt’s playful lens, this slinky silhouette finds its essential whimsy.

—Hilarie Sheets