Pink Is for Girls

By ROBERT HUGHES

There is one trap of reputation for those rare artists who come to epitomize their age: when the society goes down, so do they. An extreme case in point was Franc,ois Boucher. The son of a French needlework designer, he became the most successful French painter of the 18th century, the favorite of Louis XV and his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Born in 1703, Boucher lived through the climax of the ancien regime and died less than two decades before it did. "In him," wrote Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, in their great defense of rococo art published almost a century after the death of Boucher, "French 18th century taste was manifest, in all the peculiarity of his character. Boucher was not only its painter but its chief witness, its chief representative, its very type."

Then the tumbrils rolled over Boucher's luxurious fancies, burying them; the stringent austerity of neoclassical thought wiped them from the roster of "serious" art. Even today, Boucher's work--a fine sampling of which, drawn from North American collections, opened last week at Washington's National Gallery--seems a rather indefensible pleasure. Of course it is not; we have merely been taught to distrust his unalloyed, socially pliable hedonism.

Shepherds and Eggs. Boucher's capacity for work was enormous. By 1770, the year of his death, he had by his own reckoning completed more than 1,000 paintings and some 10,000 drawings--ranging from elaborate pastels like the 1738 portrait of Boy Holding a Carrot (which some critics argue is actually a parsnip) to swift crayon jottings of the nude. Collectors snapped up both his drawings and his rapid oil sketches, such as the vigorous and almost romantic Mercury Confiding the Infant Bacchus to the Nymphs.

For Boucher, as the Goncourts put it, it was "a vocation to leave some trace of his art on every passing manifestation of fashion." The tumbling, rosy cupids and tiny pastoral scenes with shepherds in knee breeches that are the cliches of rococo chinaware decoration were largely Boucher's doing. He painted on fans and carriage doors, snuffboxes, escritoires and ostrich eggs. And when Louis XV put Boucher in control of the state tapestry factories at Beauvais and Gobelin, he brought about the last flourish of grand-scale European weaving. No designer since Boucher has managed to raise tapestry to that pitch of worldly exuberance and erotic charm.

Boucher was an eminently sociable artist but not a profound one. He could take any theme--classical myth, the fete champetre, or fantasies about the Emperor of China--and, decking it with foamy light and gamboling bodies as firm as little pink quails, create from it a microcosm of civility and pleasure. The Allegory of Music (1764) became for Boucher an occasion to gently eroticize the myth; the nuptial flutters of the muse's doves are clearly of more interest than the musical score behind them.

But he was never able (or, for that matter, inclined) to raise his art to that Mozartian pitch of psychological tension at which Watteau's lovers and courtiers exist. Boucher, unlike Watteau, had no vision of a fragile society whose pleasures, no matter how refined, are menaced by time. Boucher painted pleasure as though it were a perpetual state, coquetry without end, threatened by neither satiety nor boredom. The elements that constitute his afternoon kingdom take on a preternatural luxury as objects; the sky, swarming with clouds of putti and looping swags of fabric, itself acquires the crisp sheen of taffeta or Chinese silk, dyed, rinsed and gleaming; landscape and woods undulate in a feathery quiver, surprised in the act of love.

The foundation of this airy palace of fiction (Boucher was far too rational, too much a Frenchman of the 18th century, ever to confuse art with reality) was, inevitably, the female nude, for which Boucher discovered a fresh convention. Since the chill goddesses of the Fontainebleau school in the 16th century, the nude in French art had retained some measure of Gothic proportion-- elongated torso, small high breasts -- and a distinct aura of remoteness. Boucher's nude was small, full and rounded: a compact little machine `a plaisir, borne up like a plump rose on tumultuous puffs of cloud or sprawled, replete with the matter-of-fact enjoyment of her own narcissism, on a tangled day bed. Indeed Louis XV's true escutcheon was the round, dimpled bottom of Boucher's favorite model, an inhabitant of the Deer Park (as the villa where the royal mistresses lived was called) known as la petite Morfil. Miss Murphy was an Irish girl whom the Pompadour pro cured for her flagging monarch by the utterly rococo device of getting Boucher to paint her as the Virgin Mary in a decoration for one of the royal chapels. She is the ancestor of all the midinettes and grisettes and rotund milkmaids that Renoir was to paint a century later.

Almost Great. "There was an ar dor in Boucher's imagination, but not much veracity and still less elevation," wrote a stuffy diarist named Marmontel. "His encounters with the Graces had never had a respectable setting." It is not far from that to the later outraged philippics of Diderot, who treated Boucher's hedonism as a moral menace -- "simperings, affectation, nothing but beauty spots, rouge, gewgaws."

If Diderot sounds unjust, it is not simply because the tone of our culture has swung back to a less civilized amorality in which our pornography is brutish. It is because, when the routine conventions of his work are subtracted, Boucher remains a startling and almost great painter. The sensuousness, the lively plasticity of drawing, the marvelous sensitivity to color and texture, the ironic grasp of elaborate mythologies and allegories still remind us of Talleyrand's wistful epitaph on the ancien regime -- that no one who did not live before the Revolution can know the sweetness of life.

.Robert Hughes

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