Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Rococo? It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Frivolous, decadent and elitist. Sentimentalised and much too pretty-pretty. Even once described as “hysterical and effulgent” — in fact, this late Baroque style has come in for every sort of attack since its 18th-century heyday in pre-Revolutionary France. Kitschy apple-cheeked shepherdesses in a pastoral fantasy or peachy-toned coquettes cavorting in miles of floaty muslin hardly correspond with more recent ideas that art should have spiritual and intellectual heft. After the French Revolution, Rococo’s reputation was utterly guillotined; even in 1860, when the Louvre was offered one of the genre’s best-known pieces, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s “The Swing”, their answer was a robust “non”.Which is how the painting came to be in London’s Wallace Collection, together with a treasure trove of what are now considered the masterpieces of Rococo painting — by François Boucher, Antoine Watteau as well as Fragonard and others. There it was discovered by British painter Flora Yukhnovich, whose instant affinity with Rococo launched her into an original and highly successful career. Now her own work can be seen there too.Yukhnovich (her married name) trained as a portrait painter before changing tack. “I became much more interested in what the paint could say, how the paint itself could speak of flesh, of someone’s body or personality: capturing a likeness became much less interesting and I wanted to explore other things with the paint,” the 34-year-old says.But, during her MA course at London’s City & Guilds, “I thought I had to make serious, important paintings. I felt I was drying up because of that pressure: I wanted to make something playful and fun.” In the library she discovered a book on Fragonard, and “found this painting that was amazingly expressive, was a play on the decorative, had a sense of humour. That was my a-ha moment.”She was responding to an aesthetic that allowed full rein to her ludic, fantastical imagination as well as to bathing in the sensory qualities of colour and paint. And, with a more pared-back aesthetic all around her, “it felt a bit subversive — to be painting cherubs.”Since then, her contemporary take on Rococo — luminous semi-abstractions in which almost-recognisable genre elements (fruit, silks, flowers, faces, animals, clouds, pastoral settings) are melted and exploded in a riot of colour and luscious paint surfaces — has catapulted her into critical and art market success. (In one of the biggest recent auction surprises, one of her graduate-show pieces sold at Christie’s for £1.9mn in 2021; her auction prices have now reached $3mn.)The paintings play with scale — a grape or a rosebud can be enormous, a bird tiny — and with controlled disorder. And with astonishing colours: searing aquamarine, striking greens, frothy whites, and of course every possible pink. As an artist, she says, “This work has given me permission to go back to things I loved, that gave me joy.” Things, such as cartoons, stories, movies, which “framed the way I see things”. She unashamedly loves fantasy, Barbie, Disney, Harry Potter, fairytale . . . many of them tastes formed during her childhood (she was born in Norfolk, but went to boarding school from the age of seven). She watches trashy films as well as good ones, likes reality TV. Very addicted to screens, she describes herself as “chronically online”. But in case that sounds as if the work is as superficial as Rococo is generally thought to be, Yukhnovich injects a strong intellectual element. “I feel like there are two parts: the analytical part and the sensory part” and, for her, escapism, in art or any other form, is not a dirty word: “You go somewhere, you come back and you’re changed by it — it’s not like turning off your brain, it’s like a parallel space.” She is intent on unpacking the relationship between the Rococo and notions of femininity, and traditional signifiers of femaleness that the style has bequeathed to everything from china tea sets to Disney’s Frozen.“After the Rococo period, it came to be known as a feminised aesthetic,” she explains. Obviously wrong though this was, “I wanted to examine that connection — why is it here, in this particular perfume ad, or whatever.” Art historian Melissa Hyde, in an essay that takes the appropriately playful form of a letter to François Boucher about Yukhnovich, underlines the point that this feminising (even the gendering of the colour pink) can be a gesture of defiance of convention or an assertion of female agency: Yukhnovich both embraces and critiques these ideas. Art history is always essential: “I realised that it doesn’t make sense to do anything except reference history: it’s always about finding connections.”What’s more, although everything is apparently light and fun, and although she asserts the value of “unserious things”, the pleasures Diderot termed “agreeable vices” when he wrote about Boucher, nothing is without its double entendre. The titles of her works, for instance, sprightly and full of pop-cultural allusions — “Warm, Wet ’N Wild”, “Maybe She’s Born with It”, “I’ll Have What She’s Having” — include “If All the World were Jell-O” which, she says, came from a vintage advertisement showing a man canoeing across a lake of jelly. “He was ready to eat the world,” she remarks. “That typifies the male gaze.”Two new titles have just been added to her oeuvre. The Wallace Collection’s director, Xavier Bray, invited Yukhnovich to make a contemporary insertion into the museum’s gloriously ornate interiors and hang among its plethora of richly ornamented pictures and objets. The new works, two glowing oils, are “A World of Pure Imagination” and — in a clever play both on Rococo’s roots in theatre and pantomime and its frequent subject matter — “Folies Bergère”; they are responses to two Boucher pastorals, considered some of his finest. Hers are now installed at the top of the Wallace’s grand staircase, in place of the Bouchers; they are framed in ornate gilt and shown on turquoise watered silk wallpaper; the Bouchers, with their scenes of cute rustic lovers amid their sheep, are now downstairs, frameless, against white walls.For both sets of work, it’s a fascinating and revealing juxtaposition. For the Wallace Collection, it’s quite a departure: contemporary art only enters its halls in special exhibition galleries. For Bray, it has been a delight, “a conversation, both intellectual and visual,” he says. “Art historically, something is happening.”Was it an unusual challenge to make site-specific pieces? She was, she says, very aware of the wallpaper, the marble columns, the lush surroundings: “I kept Photoshopping the paintings into the setting as I went along.”That’s not her only creative use of technology in the studio. As she works, she makes digital images of the paintings-in-progress: “I photograph the work, do several digital reworkings as I progress the painting. Then I can paint the next stage. But,” she says with a laugh, “I felt like it was cheating, for a while.”Next up, she is working towards a show in Copenhagen in September, drawing on the fêtes galantes. Called Into the Woods, it celebrates women in landscape — Eve, Venus and more. Next year brings her first major show with Hauser & Wirth (who represent her jointly with Victoria Miro) at their Los Angeles gallery: it will be, she says, something of a move away from the Boucher aesthetic, “more bacchanalia, perhaps verging on chaos”.Before that, though, Yukhnovich is making a move to New York. Why? Her answer is a purely painterly one, based on her fascination with the great American abstractionists. “I’m really a figurative painter who has worked backwards towards abstraction: I want to go to New York and try to understand what they [the US painters] were doing, and work out abstraction as a language on its own terms.”Perhaps Yukhnovich will experience another “a-ha” moment.Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo is at The Wallace Collection until 3 NovemberFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
