Rococo!? To be honest, I've never really got on with it. Baroque's flighty little sister always seemed to be trying a bit too hard, wearing her mum's old clothes. The art, and the architecture, always seemed a bit too flowery, too twee, too biscuit tin to take seriously. I'd not even given it that much thought. I could probably name a handful of rococo artists (Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard) although Wikipedia chucks in Tiepolo, David, and even Gainsborough, Goya, and Chardin into the mix so what do I know?
Francois Boucher - Pastroal with a Bagpipe Player (Historic title:La Couronne accordee au berger - The Crown awarded to the Shepherd) (1749)
Flora Yukhnovich is twenty-two years younger than me, however, and she has no problem with the rococo style. In fact she's very inspired by it and we should not hold the fact that Rishi Sunak hung one of her paintings in Downing Street against her. That's not her fault.
The Wallace Collection are currently hosting Flora Yukhnovich and Francois Boucher:The Language of the Rococo, a dialogue (if you like, Boucher's been dead for 254 years so he doesn't have much to add) between the two artists but not, as I may have hoped, much of a trip into the world of the rococo. It's one full room with two Boucher paintings and then you go up a ridiculously ornate flight of stairs where you can see some more Bouchers, hung at angles that make your neck hurt looking at them, and two Yukhnovich works inspired by them.
That's your lot. But it was free so I'm not complaining. It's always nice to have a look around the Wallace Collection even if most of the art and design is a little 'saccharine' for my personal taste. It is, however, one of the view places in London, in Britain even, in which you can really get your teeth into the baroque and the rococo. In fact, in Britain, rococo was originally known as 'French taste' and the closest any major British name got to working in rococo was with the furniture design of Thomas Chippendale.
Instead it thrived in French hotels, Italian chandeliers, Russian vases, and German churches that looked like giant wedding cakes. The most prominent artists were, of course, French and Francois Boucher was one of those. But I can't say his seductive bagpipe players (could there be a less seductive sound than that of a bagpipe?), flirty damsels, sheep, and dogs do much for me. Even though they've been executed with no little panache.
Francois Boucher - Pastoral with a Couple near a Fountain (Historical title:Les Raisins. Pensant-ils au raisin? - The Grapes. Are they thinking of the grape?) (1749)
Grapes, I will agree - especially in their fermented form, have played a historical, and still current, role in multiple seductions and that's not lost on Boucher who shows off his 'French taste' with a subtly erotic (for the time) painting of some young lovers getting juiced up. Of course, there's a dog and a sheep there because why the fuck not?
Boucher began his career in the 1720s, working as a printmaker making etchings of Watteau's drawings but a decade later he became enormously successful when he became Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour's chosen artist. The two paintings above were painted as chateau decorations for a civil engineer called Daniel-Charles Trudaine, a new name on me but apparently one of the primary developers of the present French road system and the instigator of the supposedly infamous Trudaine Atlas.
Boucher liked to call his works 'pastoral', an idealised depiction of nature inhabited by 'bucolic lovers' and popularised by Renaissance artists like Titian and Giorgione and now, in our modern era, it is Flora Yukhnovich who has been handed the baton but I'm not totally convinced she's done all that much with it. The paintings are okay, they look nice, but they don't really make you feel anything and the supposed references to Walt Disney, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Barbie don't really stand up to any degree of scrutiny.
Her cornucopias of hazy, gauzy, flowers could be quite easily ignored but as they were part of the exhibition I'd come to see I thought I ought to take a look. I did - and I was left cold. Even if the colours, and the thought behind these works, comes from a warm place. The original era of the rococo came to an end when the French Revolution demanded more hard hitting art. We live, again, in a time of immense political turmoil and though, hopefully, heads will not be rolling any time soon this lightweight art just doesn't speak to me anymore. Escapism is good but change is better. Improbable bagpipe seduction aside, I'm handing this one to Francois Boucher.
Flora Yukhnovich - Folies De Bergere (2024)
Flora Yukhnoch - A World Of Pure Imagination (2024)
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