Empowered by its new setting, work once considered frivolous becomes visual thunder.
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It was like a social iceberg melted: Overnight, stultifying court etiquette and social hierarchies began loosening.
This wasnt an art of kings, queens, and the church triumphant.
It was first and last meant for pleasure, decoration, celebration, and love.
Indeed, some of the naughtiest paintings of the last 300 years are Rococo.
You know this painting even if you dont know you know it.
A young woman in a coral-colored dress swings on a velvet seat in a park.
We dont know if hes her husband, a lover, a stranger.
He raises one hand in surprise or hosanna and with his other holds his hat up toward her.
His pose echoes the naked Adam in Michelangelos Sistine Chapel in a fun pas de deux of flirtation.
The Swingis not in the Frick collection.
(Theyre also about the largest paintings in the museum.)
We get a simmering vision of love drenched in aesthetic dopamine.
There are pinks, powder blues, blooming fruit trees, bouquets of flowers.
When Fragonard showed the first four works to the comtesse, however, she rejected themas passe.
Fragonard packed up his paintings and left.
Later, he completed a fifth painting in the south of France.
I love them more than I ever have.
Consider The Pursuit chapter one.
Three young girls in billowy dresses lounge like little bored Venuses in a park.
Its sweet and sappy;the girls react in a combination offauxalarm, tittering glee, and disinterest.
The central girl, however, has jolted upright.
She extends both arms out and tippy-toes on her slipper.
Feel the jolt, a fish biting the line of first amorous interest.
She looks directly at the rose.
She seems game, unafraid.
(I see him as already out of his league or maybe thats me projecting.)
Next comes The Meeting.
Beneath a voluptuous Venus statue, our heroine is alone on a terrace.
On the right side of the painting is a young man.
But shes raising her hand to stop him, looking in the opposite direction.
Whatever the story, shes running this show.
The next painting is The Lover Crowned.Something feels amiss here; irony and self-consciousness have entered the picture.
Musical instruments are strewn about.
She holds a garland of flowers over his head as he moons at her from below.
Their emotional tenors are so different, though.
Shes warm but not ardent; her passion is under wraps.
These couples and characters might perish outside this cloistered world.
Chapter 4 is Love Letters.Our couple is in a woodland clearing.
Theres an ominous heart-shaped opening in the canopy of leaves behind them.
I see haze on the horizon, a waning cooler light.
While shes amused, hes a puppet in love.
A King Charles spaniel at their feet looks out at you like it knows something is off.
A putto statue seems alarmed above them.
The girl is blushing but still not especially involved.
You suddenly realize weve never even seen these two truly embrace.
Around the time that the comtesse rejected these works, the roof fell in on Fragonard more generally.
By 1778, Rococo was becoming discredited.
There were new, pre-Revolutionary allegiances in art to Greek and Roman ideals.
Rococo was seen as decadent, anti-Revolutionary.
If art wasnt for the greater good, it wasnt seen as good at all.
Secession movements multiplied throughout Europe.
The state reasserted its powers.
Fragonard died in 1806, forgotten and shunned.
He finished one last major project before that.
Now we find the female protagonist in a psychic environment we have never seen before.
Shes deserted, ghostly, spent, forsaken, collapsed.
Here, Fragonard finally looks outside his lifelong palm grove of pleasure to what would eclipse and kill it.
The painter had always avoided the dangerous intimacies and true vulnerabilities of love, even as he depicted romance.
But his world had always been under pressure.
The landscape was always closing in.
