Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur

Wallace Collection, London

Until October 26

 

 

One of the many joys of Grayson Perry’s inspired collaboration with the Wallace Collection, marking his 65th birthday and the museum’s largest contemporary exhibition to date, is that it is the artist who provides the highly articulate explanatory notes.

The critic is left with almost too much guidance, but a standout peg is a quote from video art pioneer Nam June Paik that Perry has drawn on before.  “An artist’s job is to bite the hand that feeds him, but not too hard”.

The tension between the déclassé artist and his well-to-do patron has long been the force that drives Perry’s work and is central to his interplay with the Wallace Collection that feels like the natural home of his witty, flamboyant style that at once rejoices in and sends up frippery and fine living.

While his wealthy benefactors mean he has entered the ranks of those with the luxury of not having to worry about money, Perry never forgets those forced to care.

Now ranked as a knight of the realm, he has his roots in working class Essex, and for him, the Wallace Collection’s very location is significant as marking the border between the half of London associated with industry and hardship and the entitled West that lives off other people’s labour.

The exhibition’s narrative thread is provided by the creation of Shirley Smith, who came into being after Perry learnt Madge Gill, an artist he had long admired, had shown work at the Wallace Collection during World War Two.

She was regarded as an outsider artist whose taste in dresses was very similar to Perry’s own, as he quips in the note next to the “Spirit of Shirley Dress” in Perry-designed fabric printed by Liberty.

Another outsider, a permanent part of the Wallace Collection, is “Polichinelle”, or Punch in English, painted by 19th-century French artist (Jean-Louis-) Ernest Meisonnier.

Again, Perry makes a playful illusion, suggesting the mischievous mocker of society is nothing like him – and yet.  His work “Man of Stories, one of the first works Perry made before he had fully evolved his approach to this exhibition, stands nearby, provoking comparison.

The word that defines it is “Rococo”, epitomised by one of the Wallace’s most famous, exuberant and fun-filled paintings “The Swing” by Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Rococo is derived from the French word “rocaille”, which denoted the shell-covered rock used to decorate the artificial grottoes in vogue in the height of eighteenth-century.

For Perry that is the spur for his riotously decorated story-telling man, whose coat is studded not just with beads and shells, but with a Blue Peter Badge.

The wit and never-too-biting satire bubbles on in his tapestry “Modern Beautiful and Good” that captures one of the central issues of patronage: the benefactor benefits as much as the artist from the enhanced status of being seeing to do good; there is no such thing as pure altruism.

Moving on to “Magical Thinking”, the impact of many people’s action is more ambiguous.  Inspired by Russian Lubok art, it explores the idea thoughts and feelings can have an effect on the world, positive or negative.

The word narcissism, for instance, is grouped with belief, laziness and vanity – an association as true in Rococo times as it is now.

Another of the tensions explored by Perry is that between idle hours and the battlefield, reflecting the collection of armour and weapons as well as glorious miniatures and sumptuous porcelain housed by the Wallace.

“Sissy’s Helmet”, complete with a retroussé nose, was designed by Perry and executed by renowned armourer Bill Radford.

Perry also takes a shot at the folly of war and misguided causes with his completely unusable, funfair-coloured “Gun for shooting into the Past” grouped with elegant but far more serious historic rifles from the Wallace collection.

Back in the 21st-century, Perry turns the AI that terrifies the average artist to his advantage.  The AI-generated image “Totally unique thing” shows up what AI cannot do with a Perry portrait that absolutely fails to move us in the way it seems so far only real art can accomplish.

A vase entitled “Computer Sick” also bridles at the absurd, meaningless quantities spewed out by technology and places an infant “digital native” on top of it, already equipped with a mobile device.

It’s the antithesis of the world that produced Perry, Shirley Smith and the Wallaces.

We explore the idea that Shirley Smith became thoroughly at home in the Wallace Collection in the exhibition’s final room that masquerades as  her bedroom.

It is papered with Grayson Perry wallpaper, in his hallmark green and pink, and furnished with “The Great Beauty” — a gloriously kitsch dressing table in the style of Madame de Pompadour.  Beside it, a sumptuous bed has a quilt emblazoned with the family motto “I Know Who I Am”.

The layers of irony are brought home by “Hospital Queen”, which we’re told is one of the few surviving pieces from Shirley Smith’s time in Claybury mental hospital, Essex.  The tangle of bobbins and cotton, almost Picasso-esque, is at once surprisingly believable and moving.

If this glorious eruption of activity from an artist at the height of his powers seems effortless, Perry reminds us of the hard slog involved.

He describes his “Vase, eighteenth-century, French” as “a grumpy outburst in pottery form” when he was struggling with his ambitious project.  It’s a down-to-earth, chunky, common-touch reaction to the hyper-refined eighteenth-century Sèvres porcelain that features prominently in the Wallace Collection.

In another insight into artistic labour, he throws out six plates, gently mocking centrepieces of the Wallace Collection, such as “The Laughing Cavalier”.  It’s a final flourish, just for fun, as he tells us he tends to save plates for the last because they are relatively easy.  Maybe they are for him.

Barbara Lewis © 2025.