Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Rococo? It\u2019s not everyone\u2019s cup of tea. Frivolous, decadent and elitist. Sentimentalised and much too pretty-pretty. Even once described as \u201chysterical and effulgent\u201d \u2014 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\u2019s reputation was utterly guillotined; even in 1860, when the Louvre was offered one of the genre\u2019s best-known pieces, Jean-Honor\u00e9 Fragonard\u2019s \u201cThe Swing\u201d, their answer was a robust \u201cnon\u201d.Which is how the painting came to be in London\u2019s Wallace Collection, together with a treasure trove of what are now considered the masterpieces of Rococo painting \u2014 by Fran\u00e7ois 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. \u201cI became much more interested in what the paint could say, how the paint itself could speak of flesh, of someone\u2019s body or personality: capturing a likeness became much less interesting and I wanted to explore other things with the paint,\u201d the 34-year-old says.But, during her MA course at London\u2019s City & Guilds, \u201cI 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.\u201d In the library she discovered a book on Fragonard, and \u201cfound this painting that was amazingly expressive, was a play on the decorative, had a sense of humour. That was my a-ha moment.\u201dShe 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, \u201cit felt a bit subversive \u2014 to be painting cherubs.\u201dSince then, her contemporary take on Rococo \u2014 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 \u2014 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\u2019s for \u00a31.9mn in 2021; her auction prices have now reached $3mn.)The paintings play with scale \u2014 a grape or a rosebud can be enormous, a bird tiny \u2014 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, \u201cThis work has given me permission to go back to things I loved, that gave me joy.\u201d Things, such as cartoons, stories, movies, which \u201cframed the way I see things\u201d. She unashamedly loves fantasy, Barbie, Disney, Harry Potter, fairytale\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009many 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 \u201cchronically online\u201d. 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. \u201cI feel like there are two parts: the analytical part and the sensory part\u201d and, for her, escapism, in art or any other form, is not a dirty word: \u201cYou go somewhere, you come back and you\u2019re changed by it \u2014 it\u2019s not like turning off your brain, it\u2019s like a parallel space.\u201d She is intent on unpacking the relationship between the Rococo and notions of femininity, and traditional signifiers of femaleness that\u00a0the style has bequeathed to everything from china tea sets to Disney\u2019s Frozen.\u201cAfter the Rococo period, it came to be known as a feminised aesthetic,\u201d she explains. Obviously wrong though this was, \u201cI wanted to examine that connection \u2014 why is it here, in this particular perfume ad, or whatever.\u201d Art historian Melissa Hyde, in an essay that takes the appropriately playful form of a letter to Fran\u00e7ois 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: \u201cI realised that it doesn\u2019t make sense to do anything except reference history: it\u2019s always about finding connections.\u201dWhat\u2019s more, although everything is apparently light and fun, and although she asserts the value of \u201cunserious things\u201d, the pleasures Diderot termed \u201cagreeable vices\u201d 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 \u2014 \u201cWarm, Wet \u2019N Wild\u201d, \u201cMaybe She\u2019s Born with It\u201d, \u201cI\u2019ll Have What She\u2019s Having\u201d \u2014 include \u201cIf All the World were Jell-O\u201d which, she says, came from a vintage advertisement showing a man canoeing across a lake of jelly. \u201cHe was ready to eat the world,\u201d she remarks. \u201cThat typifies the male gaze.\u201dTwo new titles have just been added to her oeuvre. The Wallace Collection\u2019s director, Xavier Bray, invited Yukhnovich to make a contemporary insertion into the museum\u2019s gloriously ornate interiors and hang among its plethora of richly ornamented pictures and objets. The new works, two glowing oils, are \u201cA World of Pure Imagination\u201d and \u2014 in a clever play both on Rococo\u2019s roots in theatre and pantomime and its frequent subject matter \u2014 \u201cFolies Berg\u00e8re\u201d; they are responses to two Boucher pastorals, considered some of his finest. Hers are now installed at the top of the Wallace\u2019s 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\u2019s a fascinating and revealing juxtaposition. For the Wallace Collection, it\u2019s quite a departure: contemporary art only enters its halls in special exhibition galleries. For Bray, it has been a delight, \u201ca conversation, both intellectual and visual,\u201d he says. \u201cArt historically, something is happening.\u201dWas it an unusual challenge to make site-specific pieces? She was, she says, very aware of the wallpaper, the marble columns, the lush surroundings: \u201cI kept Photoshopping the paintings into the setting as I went along.\u201dThat\u2019s not her only creative use of technology in the studio. As she works, she makes digital images of the paintings-in-progress: \u201cI photograph the work, do several digital reworkings as I progress the painting. Then I can paint the next stage. But,\u201d she says with a laugh, \u201cI felt like it was cheating, for a while.\u201dNext up, she is working towards a show in Copenhagen in September, drawing on the f\u00eates galantes. Called Into the Woods, it celebrates women in landscape \u2014 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, \u201cmore bacchanalia, perhaps verging on chaos\u201d.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. \u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201dPerhaps Yukhnovich will experience another \u201ca-ha\u201d moment.Flora Yukhnovich and Fran\u00e7ois Boucher: The Language of the Rococo is at The Wallace Collection until 3 NovemberFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Rococo? It\u2019s not everyone\u2019s cup of tea. Frivolous, decadent and elitist. Sentimentalised and much too pretty-pretty. Even once described as \u201chysterical and effulgent\u201d \u2014 in fact, this late Baroque style has come in for every sort of attack since its 18th-century heyday in pre-Revolutionary<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-122205","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122205"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122206,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122205\/revisions\/122206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}