The Brooklyn Rail

In her solo installation at the Wallace in London, painter Flora Yukhnovich responds to the institution’s exemplary collection of Rococo paintings (among other works, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (ca. 1767–68) is housed there) while simultaneously taking direct aim at longstanding concerns about the “feminizing” quality of the Rococo and worries that all-over painting might skew toward the decorative. From the style’s emergence in the early eighteenth century, aesthetes denounced the Rococo’s appeal to “feminine taste,” as Lord Shaftesbury did in 1713, while critics well into the twentieth century used it as a comparative tool to diminish and dismiss artworks deemed merely ornamental. “Let [such painters] create an atmosphere in which to move, not solo works of art,” wrote Clement Greenberg in 1945, and aim to fit into “the general décor of modern life,” rather than make epic, standalone, painterly statements. Boucher and Fragonard, he concluded, did the same.

For The Language of the Rococo, Yukhnovich’s two paintings, A World of Pure Imagination and Folies Bergère (both 2024), have been made to the specifications of two Boucher works, Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain and Pastoral with a Bagpipe Player (both 1749) and have replaced the Bouchers at the top of the Wallace’s monumental staircase. Installed in gilt frames, with their titles affixed at the bottom edges on gold plaques as in Old Master collections, Yukhnovich’s paintings do indeed fit beautifully with the gallery’s aesthetic, responding to the varied hues of the room: the Wedgewood blue of the striped silk wallpaper, its steel-blue marble pilasters, and the tufted round bench at the center of the space, colored somewhere between cerulean and a bottle green. The paintings’ suggestions of flowers even call out to a small casement-window sculpture gallery which overlooks a park. The effect is a glorious reminder of the pleasures of color at a moment enamored of the dull greys and beiges of so-called “quiet luxury.”

But the paintings do more than that: Yukhnovich has created all-over painterly abstractions, with relationships to Modernist, heroic, non-objective canvases—I thought especially of Jules Olitski’s, a Greenberg favorite, sprayed pieces—as well as to more recent artists working in similar veins, such as Cecily Brown, Will Cotton, and even the “Lighters” of Wolfgang Tillmans. A World of Pure Imagination appears from a distance to be an abstracted still life, with the suggestion of green grapes and Manet-derived wilting peonies tumbling in a maelstrom of petals. But close looking hints at a chaotic tussle: there are what appear to be goats, perhaps a leaping cow, and maybe a donkey… or is that Bottom? Fairies or putti might be at work here: a luscious peach is so ripe that its soft skin is splitting… or is that a bottom? Yukhnovich is playing with the possibilities of paint as well as the possibilities of Rococo painting: The Swing notoriously permits a reclining lover a look up into the skirts of his paramour, while Boucher dabbled with the appeal of erogenous zones, “interspecies sensuality,” and the analogies of musical instruments to loveplay. The event of A World of Pure Imagination—the action it requires as we move in and out and around the room to gaze at its pendant, Folies Bergère, with its bursting pearls, flitting flower-derived ladies, livestock and woodland creatures, and made-up lips, as well as its titular homage to Manet and the cabaret he referenced—reminds me not only of Harold Rosenberg’s observation that action painting is “not a picture but an event,” but also of ways that the Rococo has been described. In his investigation into the origin and meaning of the nonsense word “rococo,” the art historian Nicholas Newman wrote, “The word is neither singular nor even a thing.… rather, it is an event. It is critical to suspend the search for what meaning resides in the term rococo by instead interrogating what is done in the name of rococo.” It is in the name of the Rococo that Yukhnovich probes pure painting.

As a result of her interventions, too, Boucher also receives a chance to explore that potential. The Boucher paintings have been moved to a first-floor white cube gallery, where they hang without their frames. Somehow, maybe as the result of decades of seeing ill-considered gilded frames on Modernist works, we can intellectually process the idea of historical frames on abstract paintings more easily than the image of an unframed Old Master painting. Hung from brackets low to the floor in this raw space, instead of high on the walls above furniture and the heads of the viewers, the paintings’ figures turn out to be nearly life-sized, brushwork is apparent, and the tacking nails attest to the hand’s labor. With an economy of means not often affiliated with the Rococo, this exhibition’s tactics reveal the work of Boucher, “the most Rococo of artists,” to be Painting. Meanwhile, in this enclave of male Old Masters, Flora Yukhnovich’s subversive reclamation of the “feminine” in eighteenth-century art exposes a surprisingly supple and radical Rococo.