When I go to New York I like to stop at the Frick. I trot past the copious Fragonards and visit my favorite paintings. There are many of them…and there are also many Fragonards…why? One, OK; but many? Obviously this guy Frick had great taste and preferred Fragonard, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Fragonard’s most famous painting, The Swing (1766), which is in all the art books, shows a girl on a swing so you can sort of see up her dress. I have always assumed that people did those paintings for sex since they didn’t have advertising, porn, of rock videos in those days. But if you know anything about the French upper class during the reign of Louis the 14th, then you will know they didn’t have the problems with sex that our puritan minds struggle with today. They could easily find somebody to fuck, so why bother with a painting? In fact the lover of the girl on the swing is in the painting on the lower left looking up her dress. And he commissioned the painting simply to prolong an ecstatic moment – a rather valid reason for art.
But if you look closely at the painting, there are other things going on. The girl is tossing off a shoe, the restrictive corset of the foot, with careless abandon in front of a statue of the god of discretion. She seems to know her lover is watching and is boldly flirting, while two leering cupids watch with God’s approval. The swing itself is being pushed back and forth by a man of the cloth. But with all this the painting is not about freedom or sexual rebellion or any of that low class stuff. It’s not about the light, or religion, or the artist’s feelings, or the good peasant. It is about “I am rich and having a good time”. Frivolity is the term for it. Brazen displays of “Let them eat cake” would be a more descriptive label for Mr. Fragonard.
Looking at the Fragonards in the Frick I am amazed at the number of cupids – a little God that normally shows up in popular religious paintings adoring the Madonna, but now are unabashedly flying around adoring the French upper class. The paintings are beautifully done in the Watteau style of the time and they are so beautifully ostentatiously over the top about it, not like our rich who hide their wealth (Donald Trump had to buy a gold shower curtain not a gold coach to drive around in). These paintings represent a lifestyle that is unattainable. A way of life that Mr. Frick could only admire but never achieve. And what better way to do that than own a painting of it…or even several paintings of it.
In defense of the French aristocracy I understand that it was all the rage for women to wear a single red ribbon around their neck, the mark of the Guillotine. Now that’s a fashion statement and I suppose the equivalent for us would be to write pollution across our foreheads with a Bic pen – they still outclass us.
Artillery Magazine Vol 4 no. 2 Nov/Dec 2009