At the Frick, Flora Yukhnovich Offers a Swirling Response to a Rococo Masterpiece

Flora Yukhnovich (b. 1990), one of the fastest rising art market stars of the past five years, has brought her brushy, romantic paintings to New York’s Frick Collection The British artist, known for melding abstraction with the traditions of French Rococo and Italian Baroque, has created a site-specific mural inspired by the museum’s beloved François Boucher (1703–1770) series “The Four Seasons” (1755).

“Flora has developed this language very much of her own,
in the field of abstraction, but bordering figuration. With her paintings, you’re always trying to work out, is it abstract? Is it figurative? Is it somewhere in between? What is it? That’s what is very exciting to me,” outgoing Frick chief curator Xavier Salomon told me. (After 11 years in his current position, Salomon is leaving next month to become director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon.)

He first met Yukhnovich at a 2021 opening in London at her dealer, Victoria Miro, and decided to set up a studio visit. What he found was an artist who seemed to bring the Baroque into the 21st century, infusing the peachy pink pastels of the Rococo into sweeping, floral-inspired tableaux that somehow tapped into contemporary pop culture.

“Pretty much from the beginning, there was an idea of could she do something for the Frick?” Salomon said. While the museum doesn’t collect contemporary art, it does work with living artists, inviting the likes of Arlene Shechet (b. 1951), Nicolas Party (b. 1980), and, still on view, Vladimir Kanevsky (b. 1951) to respond to its historic holdings. Yukhnovich was a natural to join their ranks.

An Artist on the Rise

“Flora is someone who is very avidly looking at Rococo art, art of the 18th century in France and Italy,” Salomon said. “As a curator who works on historic objects, it is very exciting to see a young, talented artist dialoguing with the art of that time, bringing it into a contemporary world.”

But it isn’t just the Frick that has found itself captivated by the young artist. Yukhnovich’s work has struck a chord with many in the art world, tapping into a burgeoning Neo-Rococo movement.

In 2017, fresh out of grad school at City & Guilds of London Art School, Yukhnovich secured her first gallery representation. She immediately began building up a waiting list for her work—not to mention a social media following now approaching 100,000.

Her first painting to come to auction, at Phillips New York in 2021, astonished with a $1.17 million result on an estimate that topped out at just $80,000. She’s since sold nine more works at auction for over $1 million— including one just last week at Phillips London. She has a £2.69 million ($3.6 million) record, set in 2022, and a 100 percent sell-through rate, according to the Artnet Price Database. In 2023, mega dealer Hauser & Wirth added Yukhnovich to its roster; her eagerly awaited debut show with the gallery opens at the end of the month in Los Angeles.

Yukhnovich’s show at the Frick isn’t even the first time she’s been invited to make work about Boucher at a storied institution. Last year, she installed two new oil paintings atop the grand staircase at London’s Wallace Collection for “Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo.”

“The two projects were along the same path,” Salomon said. “They’re both great artists, Flora and Boucher. Obviously they’ve never met in person, but you see them responding to shapes and colors and textures and subjects in the same way.”

The History Behind “The Four Seasons”

In August 1916, museum founder Henry Clay Frick purchased Boucher’s “Arts and Sciences,” the paintings now in the Boucher Room, from the dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). The next month, he got an unexpected letter. It was from American heiress and art dealer Virginia Bacon (1853–1919). She had changed her mind about selling Boucher’s “The Four Seasons,” recently inherited from her late brother-in-law Edward Rathbone Bacon (1848–1915). Did Frick still want them?

Frick sent off a check for $159,000, and the paintings were his. But the works’ origin story dates back to the reign of King Louis XV (1710–1774). The artist painted them for Madame de Pompadour (1721–1764), a member of the French court and the king’s official mistress.

Her life was remarkable. Born to a middle-class businessman, Madame de Pompadour rose to a position of great power and influence on the strength of her charm and beauty, but also her wits and education. She held great sway at court due to her relationship with the king, and became both a leading patron of the arts and major collector.

Boucher was Madame de Pompadour’s favorite painter, and his works, including paintings and tapestries, decorated her lavish home, the Château de Bellevue. (The two were quite close, and he even taught her the art of etching.) Her patronage and taste helped define the richly ornate sensibilities of the Rococo period, which is presently enjoying something of a revival.

“This exhibition is a dialogue between two artists, Boucher and Flora, but the shadow of Madame de Pompadour is very much there,” Salomon said. “She was very accomplished and an incredibly intelligent and clever person, which applies to Flora as well. I wish I could be a fly on the wall in a room with the two of them, hearing what the conversation would be like.”

It is unclear where Madame de Pompadour originally hung “The Four Seasons,” but the paintings have an irregular  shape, with corners added later—and subsequently removed during restoration— to make them rectangular. That suggests they were meant to be displayed above a doorway.

Originally, Frick wanted to incorporate the series into the Boucher Room, but that space only had two doors over which to hang them. Nevertheless, these Rococo treasures became part of Frick’s Beaux-Arts mansion, which he filled with treasures from throughout European art history—from 14th-century Old Masters through to then-contemporary canvases by the Impressionists.

There’s an interesting through line across the centuries for “The Four Seasons.” Created for the mistress of the French king in one of Europe’s wealthiest courts, mere decades before the nation’s social inequality sparked a violent revolution, the paintings came to America during the increasingly stratified Gilded Age, and wound up in the collection of Frick, who some art historians characterize as a robber baron. Yukhnovich has created her own take on “The Four Seasons” at a time when wealth inequality continues to rise globally. Against that backdrop, it’s worth noting that the Frick’s admission fee is now up to a whopping $30, up from $22 before the reopening, a prohibitive sum for many art lovers.

Fitting in at a Gilded Age Mansion

Yukhnovich’s project graces the walls of the museum’s first floor “cabinet gallery,” which, until the recently completed renovation and expansion, was home to the Boucher Room. Those ornate wooden panel paintings are now back upstairs, recreating the boudoir of Frick’s wife, Adelaide Childs (1859–1931), and leaving space for Yukhnovich in work her magic just around the corner from “The Four Seasons.”

“When I began responding to Boucher’s ‘Four Seasons,’ the Disney musical  came to mind. Boucher’s portals reminded me of Mary and the children leaping into Bert’s pavement drawings, landing in a surreal pastoral of farm animals,” Yukhnovich wrote in an essay for the exhibition catalogue. “It’s a painter’s dream.”

She has been influenced by Boucher since grad school, when she first encountered his work at the Wallace: “In an instant, I was sitting crossed-legged on my bedroom floor again, playing with Barbies and peering into Polly Pockets, surrounded by plastic pinks and pastel greens,” Yukhnovich said. “I was hooked.”

At the Frick, she’s created a panoramic installation designed in response to the room’s architecture, the canvas shaped to fit around the windows and doors. For the first time, Yukhnovich, who recently moved to New York and completed the project here, made a canvas designed to be applied directly to the wall for installation.

“I wanted to make something that operates kind of like a painting, kind of like a wallpaper,” Yukhnovich said in a video for the museum’s acclaimed YouTube channel. “I thought it would be so interesting to have something that really interacts with the space, in the same way that Boucher’s work will have been set into the architecture.”

“It’s a very contemplative space,” Salomon said. “You just sit on the bench in the middle and looking around you’re surrounded by this whirlwind of shapes and color and art.”

The finished paintings read as landscapes, hints of mountains and vegetation seemingly forming and reforming before your eyes. Somehow, Yukhnovich has captured the hopeful rebirth of spring, the endless days of lazy summer, the crisp embrace of fall, and the long, frosty, chill of winter in her brushstrokes. There’s a sensual nature to her work that echoes the themes of luxury and seduction in Boucher’s original compositions.

“It makes me look at the abstract qualities in Boucher and suddenly, you know, instead of just looking at shepherds frolicking in a landscape in the 18th century, you start thinking about.
What decision is he making about color, about positioning figures, about the landscape, about the relationship between the two, about the shifting light?” Salomon said.

The two artists’ paintings differ in an obvious way, in that Yukhnovich has left out the rosy-cheeked men and women that star in Boucher’s series, like the young gentleman tucking flowers into his beloved’s hair, or the voluptuous women reclining by a fountain in various states of undress. But stare at her works long enough, a figure—or at least parts of one—might begin to appear amid the dreamy, swirling colors.

That’s by design, Yukhnovich said: “I always have some sort of hint of the bodily in the work.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com