Making up the Rococo Francois Boucher and His Critics

It seems quaint to a viewer in 2012 to consider that Franà §ois Bouchers paintings were, by some of the artists contemporary critics, viewed as pornographic. For those of us who live in the era of internet pornography, nothing could seem more quaintly innocent than Bouchers eroticized rococo. The twenty-first century viewer faces Boucher quizzically: we are left wondering how Bouchers work could have defined an artistic school and moment so completely, and also earned such opprobrium not only from his contemporaries but from subsequent generations. The simple answer although it would hardly appear obvious from Bouchers work is politics. Contemporary and subsequent response to Bouchers work is defined by a response to his powerful patrons. Melissa Hyde sees Bouchers work almost as a collaboration with that of his powerful patroness, and notes that Boucher would serve as tutor to Madame de Pompadour, and eventually received the highest honors that a painter could attain in his time, b y becoming officially premier peintre du roi (the kings first painter) and the director of the French Academy. This paper suggests that we may look in Bouchers use of classical motifs through his repeated depictions of the goddess Venus and understand an implicitly political ideology even in so unlikely a place as the eroticized frippery of the rococo. What may seem like vaguely classical decorative art in Boucher may be understood as implicitly offering an ideological stance: in some