Is Flora Yukhnovich’s Neo-Rococo Any Totally different than MAGA’s?

“Allow them to eat cake,” the anonymously-run X account @PatriotTakes declared earlier this month. Following its said mission of monitoring “right-wing extremism and different threats to democracy,” the account issued this declarative alongside discovered footage of a moderately peculiar social gathering. A husky in a pistachio overcoat and breeches spins his flouncy bulldog lover round a patch of overly inexperienced golf grass to the croons of a knockoff Sinatra. On the sting of a night-lit pool, a pink-suited pitbull sporting an extravagant cravat shimmies beside a Saint Bernard whose rose- and ribbon-covered pannier swings in time to “Valerie.” It’s a palm tree pastoral, a fête galante à la Landseer. Or it will be, if the tasteless black tuxedos of the gala-going class didn’t preserve edging into the body.

It’s a picture virtually too excellent for parody: throughout the gauche glamour of a pool home palazzo, the tweet continues, “Entertainers sporting canine masks and Rococo-era 18th-century European aristocratic courtroom costumes danced for Mar-a-Lago visitors.” Dancers finished up as decadent canines might sound extra a risk to style than to democracy, however within the Trump period, the purpose of crying “Rococo!” is to style the previous because the latter. Essential Cassandras (responsible as charged) have present in Trump’s explicit model of gilt inside the smoke-signal of energy wielded each arbitrarily and completely.

But when the previous 12 months has proved these political predictions right, the stylistic attribution—because the Rococo’s stalwart defenders argue—is off the mark. To cut back the Rococo to Trump’s stodgy gold schemes is to misconceive a method that emerged out of a time when vulgarity was as philosophically voluptuous because it was aesthetically so. The Mar-a-Lago Furries performing for his or her “passionate viewers of animal lovers” (the occasion was hosted by the Humane Society) are a greater match for the libertinism related to the century that produced Marie Antoinette and the Marquis de Sade, Casanova and Candide. Couching their refusal of dogma within the language of kink, each Rococo artists and libertine lifestylists turned pleasure right into a tactic of transgression.

Enter into this image Flora Yukhnovich, the Hauser & Wirth-stamped British painter who has made her identify translating essentially the most canonical confections of the Rococo into latter-day Summary Expressions, and whose 4 Seasons (2025)—an homage to François Boucher’s 1755 sequence of the identical title—is on view on the Frick this spring. As her current exhibition on the Wallace Assortment in London—“Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo”—suggests, Yukhnovich has lashed her model to a historic fashion whose fame has, prior to now 12 months, turned even thornier than it already was. If the Rococo was dismissed as frivolous, female, and ornamental—a misstep within the growth of European portray—it now suffers from a confused cultural prominence. And although Yukhunovich claims to see the fashion all over the place—in Barbie dolls and Disney movies, Instagram filters and spotlight reels—her eye appears to have glided proper previous its extra topical—and politically-loaded—hooks in issues like cottagecore and the Oval Workplace.

Operating across the 4 partitions of the Frick’s Cupboard Room, Yukhnovich’s 4 Seasons is put in in what had been, up till the current renovation, the “Boucher Room.” In a transfer which may confuse some guests, her cycle will not be named for the work that used to hold there—the pudgy prodigies who toot horns, shoot weapons, and chase geese throughout Boucher’s eight-canvas sequence generally known as The Arts and Sciences—however moderately for 4 unassuming canvases that the artist made for the marquise de Pompadour, on view in a close-by hallway. Possible conceived as overdoors, Boucher’s 4 Seasons characteristic licentious pairs—and one trio—frolicking in numerous states of undress by way of a panorama so clearly contrived that the Enlightenment thinker (and hard-hitting artwork critic) Denis Diderot complained that Boucher had put parsley in his backgrounds. We’re the privileged voyeurs of pastoral pleasures: In Spring, a hopeful shepherd ignores his goat to weave flowers by way of the hair of a buxom companion; in Summer season, three nude girls loll a few verdant grotto, bathing within the plentiful drool of a gawking stone fish.

In excising the figures from Boucher’s cycle, Yukhnovich’s 4 Seasons nullifies any sense of narrative to underscore as an alternative the extent to which Boucher’s pastorals have been all the time already painterly, the sexuality of their topics mirrored within the sensuality of their brushwork. The person who pushes his luxe woman in Winter, as an illustration, is enamored not of her low neckline however as an alternative by a strip of blue paint flapping in a frosty gust. In Yukhnovich’s cycle, too, fragile strains float like ink dropped in water: a swoosh of crimson in her Winter may very well be the climb of a cardinal; a lick of lavender suggests the way in which the moon pierces a gloaming blue like a glimmer of sunshine by way of cut-glass. Specks of white shake off nice strokes of purple like a snowfall simply disturbed—maybe by the smears of brown and beige that counsel a deer, perhaps two, and a hare, who observe the drift of curious cream snowflakes with nipple-pink facilities.

Yukhnovich is an excellent painter—there’s no query about that. However her 4 Seasons are pastorals not of, however about, paint, and I’m undecided that’s sufficient to hold her intervention on. On the one hand, they remind us that the Rococo was not all the time about flashy metals, and that oil might additionally disorient. However, they take the charged questions the Rococo has all the time raised—about artwork and cash, fantasy and energy, conference and subversion—and whitewash them within the saleable strokes of abstraction, neutering a method which has all the time been divisive.

The Frick payments Yukhnovich’s murals as a “new interval room—albeit from the twenty-first century.” And but, what this cycle says about our fractious current stays frustratingly elusive. Positive, I see Disney within the hyper saturated colours and twirly contour strains, and perhaps there’s one thing of Barbie in a pair of bulbous orbs so taut they appear on the cusp of bursting. However what of it? These sources appear directly outdated and defanged, which is a disgrace, as a result of the Rococo does appear to have a novel, and as but unarticulated, buy in our current.

Throughout my go to, I overheard one customer comment, “It’s giving AI-generated… Have you learnt what I imply?” I do—it’s the way in which that one fashion is grafted onto one other, shifting its look with out participating its construction. Had been it not for the insistent crimson tassels bracketing one wall from the opposite, 4 Seasons would possibly really feel like a computer-generated immersion—the type of “panoramic wallpaper” that Yukhnovich describes in her catalog essay. However panoramas—the invention not of 18th, however the nineteenth, century—have been highly effective political instruments, and that is simply ambient artwork.