Archives November 2024

On a day in the spring of 2017, which was typical in every other aspect, Flora Yukhnovich—a student of fine art, aged 27, lacking a distinct style, noticeable profile, or promising future—ascended the grand marble steps of the Wallace Collection and returned an hour or so later, determined on the artistic vision that would establish her as the leading British painter of her peers. Amidst the Gouthière timepieces and Jean Ducrollay snuffboxes, she encountered Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, the iconic French masterpiece that encapsulates the 18th-century rococo movement’s playfulness and flirtation through a captivating trio of characters: a coquette resembling Marie Antoinette, elevated in airy blush-silk skirts; her bewigged, betrayed spouse hidden in the shadows of a picturesque woodland; and her ancien régime admirer, reaching out as she provocatively sends a ballet-pink slipper toward him in the velvet foliage below.

“It seemed like all these elements I had been contemplating converged,” Yukhnovich shares with me today about the 25-by-31-inch art piece that, over the centuries since a libertine French baron ordered it, has been replicated in everything from Disney’s Frozen to a fridge magnet on Etsy. She’s seated on a shaky folding stool in her southeast London studio, her head tilted in a manner that accentuates her own similarity to one of Fragonard’s characters: copper hair, a heart-shaped visage, alabaster skin, and Cupid’s-bow lips. Up until that moment, she explains, her MFA had been spent entertaining her “whimsical interest” in the froufrou through Spode’s Blue Italian porcelain and early 2000s Cath Kidston wallpapers, and feeling somewhat embarrassed about it. (It’s hard to visualize her teenage idols, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach, engaging with Sèvres’s elephant-head vases with any serious intent.) But with The Swing etched in her memory, she abruptly “felt the drive”—and started questioning how and why decorative had come to mean inferior, the feminine inevitably equated with the trivial.

Four years on, Tu Vas me Faire Rougir (You’re Going to Make me Blush)—one of three Permanent Rose-coated reimaginations of Fragonard she created for her graduation exhibition—sold at Christie’s for £1,902,000, transforming her, with the fall of a gavel, into a genuine blue-chip artist. Over time, she broadened her focus beyond Fragonard to include other rococo masterpieces—Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s heavenly allegories, Nicolas Lancret’s bucolic scenes—unveiling the ways in which they had influenced fashionable concepts of the “coded feminine,” both historically and in the present. Consider 2020’s Warm, Wet N’ Wild, which recontextualizes Katy Perry’s maraschino-adorned “California Gurls” video within the lush, bountiful setting of Watteau’s fête galantes. This piece was acquired by a private collector, through Sotheby’s, for £2,697,000 in 2022.

If you are at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum this summer, do not be amazed to spot groups of Swifties, dressed in their Eras tour outfits and adorned with layers of friendship bracelets, dashing through the expansive halls of the South Kensington venue. The explanation? “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” a new complimentary exhibit which showcases 16 of the 14-time Grammy-winning pop sensation’s most iconic outfits—from her music videos, performances, album artwork, red-carpet moments, and all 11 eras—exhibited alongside instruments, accolades, and storyboards from her personal collection, some of which have never been revealed before.

Importantly, this isn’t one of the V&A’s individual exhibitions, but an exhibit with installations sprinkled throughout the entire museum, each presentation opening an intriguing conversation with the building’s design and permanent pieces, guiding guests on an exciting treasure hunt as they pass by Renaissance sculptures, medieval textiles, and 18th-century artworks in pursuit of the next Swiftian artifact. Each of the 13 stops—designed to avoid chronological order, like the Eras tour—boasts appropriately dramatic displays created by Tom Piper, famous for his projects with the Royal Shakespeare Company and surrounding the Tower of London with poppies, while Kate Bailey, the museum’s senior curator for theater and performance, has directed the entire endeavor, planting Easter eggs and ensuring each segment enhances our comprehension of this often-mythical personality.

Though Taylor herself didn’t participate in choosing the displayed items, Bailey mentions her archive was exceptionally accommodating in granting her complete freedom, so much that one of the primary hurdles was narrowing her selections down to just one or two pieces per era. There was also the consideration of timing—assembling the exhibition in merely a few months, so that it could both encompass The Tortured Poets Department era and align with the second phase of the Eras tour in London—and the necessity for collaboration. “This is a project that has actually involved the entire museum,” she reveals. “I’ve been collaborating with colleagues from different departments and engaging curators in various galleries to unlock these historic spaces. And that was challenging because, in many instances, these were initiatives we’d never undertaken before.” Her aim, she expresses, was to construct something that, “like Taylor’s performances, merges spectacle with that sense of closeness.”

The initial stop on the tour exemplifies this. Enter the museum via the grand archway on Cromwell Road, turn left, and ascend two sets of stairs to reach the first era: Lover. Here, you’ll discover the silk Versace shirt and loafers Taylor wore in her self-directed music video for “The Man” in 2020, complemented by the wig and facial hair which transformed her into a wealthy playboy, her director’s chair from the shoot, the best-director VMA she earned for her work, and a continuous loop of the video itself.