When François Boucher created a series of paintings known as The Four Seasons in 1755, agriculture in France was highly seasonal, just as it had been for millennia — since humans started cultivating crops, in fact. In good years, autumn would have seen a bounty of grapes and apples and pears; spring would have brought tender greens, asparagus, and peas; summer, its abundance of berries, grains, and vegetables.
Agricultural seasons still exist in 2025, of course. But in a globalized food system that relies heavily on refrigeration, freezing, canning, and other processing technologies, it can be easier to notice seasonal change by the appearance of Starbucks’ annual pumpkin spice offerings than by the sight of a pumpkin in a field.
Flora Yukhnovich, “Four Seasons: Summer,” detail (2025)
This year, on the cusp of pumpkin spice season, the Frick Collection has unveiled a site-specific installation by Flora Yukhnovich that responds to Boucher’s The Four Seasons with a Rococo exuberance that honors its source material while asserting its place in our current moment. Housed in the museum’s Cabinet Gallery, the four-paneled mural covers the room the way wallpaper might, accommodating windows, doorframes, and the wood paneling ensconced along the perimeter. A crimson ribbon on top of the painting, about an inch thick, traces the outlines of the gallery’s architecture, adding to the installation’s domestic and decorative sensibility.
Though each panel represents a particular season, the palette and forms share enough similarities from one wall to the next to engender a continuous sensation, much like an endless Instagram scroll or looping video reel. Yukhnovich lavishes the cloth with a profusion of color: the greens and blues of earth and sky, but also a heady burst of pink, purple, lavender, and turquoise that seem drawn not from the natural world but from the fantasy universe of Disney cartoons. This princess-y palette adds intensity within the panorama of the small room, and its synthetic quality is even more pronounced after spending time with the Bouchers and Fragonards that hang elsewhere in the collection. Its effect is both dazzling and vulgar, like a saccharine pastry consumed to excess.
Flora Yukhnovich, “Four Seasons: Winter” (2025), oil on mural cloth
Within this fecundity of color, floral and plant-like shapes unfurl and cascade in a bucolic landscape with the vague suggestion of a mountainous background. Yukhnovich favors emphatic brushwork and energetic movement across the mural, ornamenting thick patchworks of abstraction with delicate flutters of sinuous line. Occasionally, gestures coalesce into more defined figuration, such as a doe and buck in “Autumn” or a hare, perhaps, in “Winter.” Curiously, I could find no evidence of humans, though Boucher’s original depicts amorous encounters within each of his seasonal vignettes. Maybe Yukhnovich’s landscapes are actually futuristic, postcards from a post-human era in which nature, liberated from the unbridled consumption of the Anthropocene, can once again flourish.
I visited the installation with an artist friend a few days after it opened, who pointed out a series of faint horizontal lines, whispers of white paint that occur in regular increments in the upper portions of the “Summer” and “Fall” panels. Trying to discern their function amid the otherwise organic and undulating forms, we finally traced their appearance to the thin wooden muntins that divide the windows on the east-facing wall. Our hypothesis is unconfirmed, but I like the idea that, in the midst of translating Boucher to a digital-age fantasia, Yukhnovich still points to the original abundance just outside the mansion’s walls, the green of the trees and the effulgence of light.
Flora Yukhnovich, “Four Seasons: Spring,” detail (2025), oil on mural cloth
Installation view of Flora Yukhnovich: Four Seasons at The Frick Collection. Pictured: “Spring” and “Summer” (photo Joseph Coscia Jr.)
Flora Yukhnovich, “Four Seasons: Autumn,” detail (2025), oil on mural cloth
Installation view of Flora Yukhnovich: Four Seasons at The Frick Collection. Pictured: “Autumn” and “Winter” (photo Joseph Coscia Jr.)
Flora Yukhnovich, “Four Seasons: Winter,” detail (2025)
Flora Yukhnovich: The Four Seasons continues at The Frick Collection (1 East 70th Street, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through March 9, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Xavier F. Salomon.
Editor’s Note: Hyperallergic’s standard image policy is to run photographs taken by our reviewers to authentically represent their experience. An exception was made in this review due to the venue’s restrictions on photography.
