The Drawings of Francois Boucher (review)

The exhibition of drawings by François Boucher that premiered at the Frick Collection in the fall of 2003 and traveled to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, where it remains on view through April 2004, marks the three-hundredth anniversary of the artist's birth. Expertly organized by the American Federation of Arts, the show had as its guest curator Alastair Laing, a leading authority on Boucher and Advisor on Paintings and Sculpture to the National Trust in London. Laing had also curated the major, touring retrospective of Boucher's work held in 1986-87, and this exhibition of the artist's drawings continued much in the same spirit as the earlier venture, presenting a careful selection of works and interpreting their technical, stylistic, and thematic development within the context of the artist's overall career. The accompanying catalogue contains an appreciative introduction by Pierre Rosenberg, evidently intended for general readers, and a short essay on Boucher as a graphic artist by Laing, followed by Laing's scholarly entries on the exhibited drawings, all of them illustrated in color. Useful to students of Boucher and of the style pittoresque—as the Rococo was sometimes known in the eighteenth century—the catalogue does not break new ground in critical studies of the artist, and avoids addressing some of the recent innovations in the field. The exhibition, however, was assembled with great sensitivity to the visual thrust of Boucher's work, highlighting the artist's extraordinarily sensual approach to the graphic medium, not just in his portrayal of the nude body—the most widely known aspect of his work—but in the very materials and methods with which he worked. "The Drawings of François Boucher" was, indeed, a veritable celebration of line, shadow, texture, and a pervasive, writhing energy that informed all of the varied subjects and scenes on view.

Installed at the Frick Collection under the direction of the Chief Curator, Colin Bailey, the exhibition was spread among three rooms whose small scale and sensitive lighting brought out to best advantage the intimate appeal of the drawings. Upon descending the stairs into the principal exhibition space, a visitor immediately confronted a grisaille decorative design by Boucher that epitomized the Rococo style for which the artist is known: a title page for an engraved allegorical monument to the British admiral Sir Cloudelley Shovel (cat. no. 68), the drawing presented a swirling ring of allegorical figures, cupids, clouds, and nautical imagery, each element curving and twisting into the next to generate a constant circular motion. In his introductory catalogue essay Laing reminds the reader that Boucher's decorative style was significantly inspired by the Italian Baroque art that the artist had encountered during his early stay in Rome, and one could indeed see the resonance of a seventeenth-century artist such as Pietro da Cortona in the dynamic forces at work within this drawing, with its play of gray washes and white highlights and its chaotic plunge of horses, sea god, and wrecked ship in the watery, lower section of the design. But the interaction of elements in the drawing also called attention to another, more radical aspect of Boucher's style, which although not addressed by Laing, has been discussed elsewhere as a key element of the Rococo¹ : an equalizing, as opposed to hierarchical, approach to compositional organization, in which all the players—cupids, gods, horses, waves, even Sir Cloudesley's coat-of-arms teetering asymmetrically on one side—share visual prominence in the design.

The exhibition catalogue begins with a section on Boucher's earliest work and then branches into chapters on the various subjects his drawings address: the nude and...