Introduction

This site-specific installation by Flora Yukhnovich (b. 1990) is the English artist’s first solo project in the United States. At once abstract and figurative, Yukhnovich’s work is deeply rooted in the French Rococo tradition. Over the years, she has responded to the art of painters such as François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Nicolas Lancret, and Giambattista Tiepolo. Her Four Seasons is installed in the Cabinet, the space that, between 1935 and 2025, was occupied by Boucher’s series The Arts and Sciences. The Boucher panels have been reinstalled on the second floor, where they originally hung in Adelaide Frick’s boudoir. Yukhnovich’s murals temporarily add a new period room—albeit from the twenty-first century—to The Frick Collection.

Yukhnovich’s cycle of paintings responds to Boucher’s Four Seasons at the Frick. Painted in 1755, these four canvases were intended as overdoors for one of the residences of Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV of France and a great tastemaker and patron of the arts. The Boucher canvases are on view nearby in the West Vestibule, where they have hung since Henry Clay Frick purchased them in 1916. Representing the continuous flow of the seasons, Yukhnovich’s mural focuses on the atmosphere of changing weather and landscape. It is a panoramic, epic, sweeping installation that, like the period rooms at the Frick—the Boucher and Fragonard rooms—envelops the visitor in a world of wonder and dream-like images, elegant while also celebrating what many view as the vulgarity of Rococo art. In Yukhnovich’s work, the heroines of Boucher and Fragonard are integrated with contemporary imagery: the Disney princesses and Barbie dolls that populated her imagination growing up.