The Brooklyn Rail

“Lovely,” was the word I heard again and again in tones notably unhushed at the Flora Yukhnovich installation at the Frick Collection. “Lovely” is such a lovely word, soft, alliterative, undemanding. This pronouncement on the qualities of Yukhnovich’s installation, a kind of pastiche of François Boucher’s Four Seasons isn’t wrong, but it does point to a problem—a problem not with the work per se but with its placement in the Frick.

The Frick over the past several years has put its collection of objects originally intended by Henry Clay Frick to be “pleasant to live with” in conversation with contemporary works that at least complicate such pleasantries. The 2021 installation Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters juxtaposed works that showed lineages and divergences—Doron Langberg and Jenna Gribbon with Hans Holbein, Salman Toor with Vermeer, Toyin Ojih Odutola with Rembrandt and again Holbein—and even where the connections seemed tenuous to me, the pairings were provocative. The problem with Yukhnovich’s installation and where it fails where the earlier exhibition succeeded has little to do with Yukhnovich’s gifts as a painter, which are plentiful. Rather, the trouble is that the Frick and Yukhnovich don’t need each other at all—but they want each other badly.

When the Frick’s truly extraordinary collection temporarily moved to the Breuer building, it was a breath of fresh air, to use a well-worn phrase, for the obvious reasons: getting the art away from the opulence of the mansion allowed it to be seen as art itself rather than a shrine to one man’s (mostly excellent) taste. Like many, I loved the friction effected by an essential aesthetic mismatch between art and architecture. In bringing the collection home, the order of things has been restored, and we can breathe easy. But a temporary installation might serve as an opportunity for just a little bit of breathlessness.

Yukhnovich wants to stop our breath, at least for a moment, and the painterly accomplishment of her work might have. According to Ted Loos’s feature in the New York Times, Yukhnovich has said she hopes her work is “destabilizing” to the Frick’s frequenters. Loos comments wryly, “But she meant that in the nicest, very British way.” It seems more than a little dismissive and, quite frankly, unfair to refer to a young, woman artist as “nice” and “British” (read: female, frilly, fussy). There are hints of subversion in the work, particularly in an abstracted globular fleshliness that at times seems to mock via acts of inflation the femmes that populate Boucher’s work. She gives us blobs of Boucher injected with filler, and certain shapes suggest disarticulated body parts. There is something of the grotesque in all Boucher’s sumptuousness, Yukhnovich’s installation whispers, if only the setting made her voice easier to hear. In interviews, Yukhnovich has spoken eloquently (and with echoes of Willem de Kooning’s writings) about the role of flesh in both that which is represented and in the work of representation, the physical labor of painting. Accordingly, what is most admirably evident in Yukhnovich’s work is not only her love of painting but also of paint itself. But, sitting in the center of Yukhnovich’s room, I didn’t hear the murmurs of an audience whose expectations had been destabilized. I heard about loveliness.

Much of the darkness that gingerly dances around the edges of Boucher’s work disappears. In Adelaide Frick’s boudoir, Boucher’s “The Arts and Sciences” series shows cherubic figures grazing danger. In Fishing and Hunting (1750–52), a secular putto aims his gun at a duck at a range so close that duck brains would surely bloody his sweet face should he let his bullet fly. In Architecture and Chemistry (1750–52), a bellows-bearing baby shrinks from burning coals. These barely suggested threats, comedically rendered, are evacuated from Yukhnovich’s work. Such evacuation can’t be reduced to the effect of abstraction. One might solely think of one of the artist’s more recent influences, de Kooning, to see abstraction as looming.

But Yukhnovich’s installation is more specifically in conversation with the straightforwardly amorous Four Seasons. In its description of the installation, the museum emphasizes the work’s contemporaneity by tying it to more modern myths of love: “the heroines of Boucher and Fragonard are integrated with contemporary imagery: the Disney princesses and Barbie dolls that populated [Yukhnovich’s] imagination growing up.” Growing up is hard and love is a dangerous game: as 2023’s Barbie film showed us, there is trouble in paradise, and any toddler will tell you (if they could only gain entry to the Frick!) that Disney princesses are always in peril. The Disney comparison is compelling on a formal level. A friend—an academic landscape painter—recently walked me through the classic Disney animated films from the 1950s through ’80s, drawing my attention to the meticulously rendered backgrounds against which the animated figures heaved and sighed and struggled even if only against the walls of a crystal casket made for death-like sleep to be cured by true love’s kiss. Nonetheless, the comparison to Disney and Barbie does Yukhnovich no service because the Frick isn’t asking us to grow up here, only to refine our taste. We are left contentedly dreaming in Barbie’s dreamhouse—or, more accurately, Henry Clay Frick’s.

There is a place in the art world for Yukhnovich’s dreaminess and our own delight in reworked but recognizable forms; art’s value does not lie solely in its discomfiting nature. But the Frick isn’t that place because it is simply too much that place already. There are places where we might see more clearly Yukhnovich’s subtle critique of both the Rococo and its reception. But at the Frick, like music absent of dissonance, juxtaposition without friction provides no source for aesthetic contemplation, let alone transformation. There can be no satisfaction in resolution where there is nothing to resolve.