[New York Peasant by Wilfrid: August 10, 2007]
Fragonard, of course, has been lounging about the Frick Museum for a long time, but the Progress of Love series has been temporarily shifted out of the refurbishing "Fragonard Room" and hung in the skylit East Gallery.
Experts say the current location brightens up the colors and makes the pictures fresh again. It prompted a fresh look, on a desperately muggy August morning. Unfortunately, the natural light actually obscures through glare the upper parts of some of the large panels - an effect which presumably changes during the day.
The Progress, strictly speaking, is a series of four large canvasses painted for the dining room of Madam Du Barry: "The Pursuit", "The Meeting", "The Lover Crowned", and "Love Letters". These were completed in the early 1770s, in Fragonard's early forties. They are now shown with two additional large panels, "Love Triumphant" and "Reverie" which Fragonard added to the series some twenty years later.
Twenty years is a long time, especially when it comes to love. What's more, the series effectively straddles a period of gross social upheaval in France. The love paintings of the 1770s are ornaments of the ancien regime at its grandest. The bright eyes and polished cheeks of Fragonard's cherubic, aristocratic lovers reflect nothing but placid confidence in the endurance of their pastoral, erotic, roccoco paradise.
The two late panels post-date the revolution and bloody execution of a large part of the class from which the artist drew his patrons. I know nothing about Fragonard's experience of the "terror", but other contemporary accounts depict his fellow Parisians enduring a stark de-mystification of the body. The carefree coquettry of the early Progress simply doesn't share the world of the guillotine and the basket.
What of the two later panels? "The Reverie" is a calmer, more austerely colored continuation of the series. It repeats the conceit of the garden statuary's ironic commentary on the lovers' conduct (one wonders if Peter Greenaway had these works in mind when he made The Draughtsman's Contract). "Love Triumphant" is something else though - rough-hewn, appearing unfinished in comparison to the flawless polish of earlier Fragonard, pushing a palette of phosphorescent oranges and reds at the viewer.
Here, cherubs - angels, not cherubic lords and ladies - tumble through a smoky sky, gloating and falling, towards a glowing redness. Love's triumph? What can that be but bedding the beloved - in its own way, a demystification perhaps? The first panels had not been innocent of sexual imagery: the trees, in particular, burst and spume against the pale skies. But that was symbolic, that was play. Here a fire burns. It is surely not my imagination only which detects the forked flicker of a devil's tail in the lower third of the painting. It is instructive to watch a supreme painter of innocence seek to depict experience as well.
Find Fragonard at the Frick here.
