So what does it all mean – Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection in London?
On one hand, it proclaims that we have a licence to produce beautiful, bright things again. Art can be childish, it can be colourful and flamboyant, joyful and fantastic.
On the other hand, we confront the original, highly artificial and sexually-stereotyped images of Rococo art. Behind its fetes galantes and scenes of gentlefolk playing at being shepherds and shepherdesses, there are undertones of hierarchy and domination. A new exhibition about Marie Antoinette at the V&A makes a similar point about the political importance of her power dressing and hugely extravagant lifestyle.
How can we define Rococo? It’s over-the-top flamboyant, decorative, curvy eye-candy from 18th century France, accompanied by lavish and luxurious furnishings. It’s pretty, elaborate, charmant – but is it beautiful or merely sentimental?
This maybe links to a theme of our Just Beauty site: art expressing emotional truth triggers our sense of beauty and connects to our feelings for human justice. But art that simply repeats happy cliches to make us feel good can seem like shallow deception.
Grayson Perry shows his attraction to the lacy profusion and grace of the portraits of female fashion icons – and at the same time a distaste and even fear of them. The exhibition is half made up of genuine Rococo objects in the Wallace Collection – and half from Grayson’s own hugely imaginative pastiches and projections. We realise it is partly a satire on the museum, plus the original collectors and us the visitors as well!
The Collection has many genuinely beautiful objects, notably its Dutch paintings representing everyday life and human moral quirks. But it’s mostly famous for its elaborately decorated, historical weapons and armour – and for its depictions of fluttering female beauties.
This exhibition highlights the way that the immensely privileged life of the French courtiers before the Revolution, and the Victorian collectors who amassed hoards of this art for their stately homes, were founded on a cruel tyranny over the poorer classes and servants who supported them.
By turns the new artworks convey comic satire, angry commentaries and heartbreaking sadness for the social victims who are never shown in the high fashion world of Rococo art.
Through photos, images and a riveting sound-guide, Grayson Perry creates a character and story to represent his tangle of emotions in this setting. His heroine Shirley Smith was an orphan who survived with tramps on the bombsites of postwar London. Half-starving, she gained entry to the Wallace Collection and then collapsed. When she was revived by kindly staff, she thought she must be in heaven.
She became a regular visitor to this palace of feminised beauty and decorum. She made simple paintings of the objects that made her happy and sad. She came to believe that she was the rightful heir to the grand mansion and its collection. She told people her true name was Lady Millicent Wallace.
Shirley was taken away to a mental asylum in Essex, and after ten years was rehoused to a lonely life in a small council flat in Islington. There she continued to make art that expressed her delusion that all the grandiose finery and comfort of the big house belonged to her.
As the story unfolds, it creates a stark re-appraisal of the world of wealth and high fashion. There’s a devastating picture called The Tree of Mental Health Conditions, populated by the affluent characters who pose in the miniature portraits in the Collection. It conveys what is rotten and sinister in such a hierarchical and sexually-rigid society.
The exhibition becomes an expression of the artist’s own highly traumatised childhood, which led him to seek safety in the world of fantasy and the persona created by his cross-dressing avatar, Claire. We experience the bitter dilemma of a man who loves the aura of female fashion and craft and beauty – and at the same time is repelled by the hidden social messages.
At one point a satirical vase berates the plethora of cheap imitations. It says the mass of later English pottery reflected poor people’s idea of what the rich would find beautiful.
A fantastic pastiche of an ornamental gun echoes the violence and cruelty which kept the lower orders in place and which Grayson Perry experienced at the hands of his step-father. Perhaps the highly decorated weapons make a connection between male sexual swagger and aggression. Some images show that the female fashion icons, or aristocratic trophy wives, could be almost as powerful and dominant as their husbands.
One of the iconic portraits shows the elegant Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV. (Sometimes described as the King who never grew up, a huntsman and womaniser.) There’s also a tragic copy of this portrait, supposedly crafted by Shirley Smith out of fragments of string and thread, which evokes a famished body and its skeleton.
A dramatic bedcover for Shirley conveys her final sense of peace and acceptance, with its motto “I know who I am.” As a visitor, we know this is a tragic delusion, and we have become extremely uncertain who the hell we are!
We too are attracted to the beautiful, fluttery and flirty feminine. But does it contain a hidden poison sting?