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Spectator
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
Grayson Perry has pulled off another coup at the Wallace Collection
This show was largely panned in the papers when it opened in April, with critics calling it 'awkward and snarky', applying that sturdy English put-down 'arch', and generally carping at 'rich insider' Sir Grayson Perry for posing as an outsider artist. Word-of-mouth reviews were completely different, however, almost as if gallery-goers, free from the necessity of taking an art-historical position, had just really enjoyed the whole bonkers experience. To get to the exhibition, which is down in the former cellars of Hertford House, you first walk through the Wallace Collection, past its gleaming ormolu and onyx treasures. The place is a portal into the ancien régime, yet still carries a feeling – imprinted into the small-scale neoclassical architecture – that this is a home. A fantasy home. A home for a fantasist. 'A poor person's idea of how a rich person's home should look,' as Perry puts it. The sort of place one might think one lived in, if one were having a mental-health crisis. Which brings us to Perry's invented persona Shirley Smith, formerly in the care of Claybury Mental Hospital, Essex, now living in a council flat in Islington, and suffering – or enjoying – delusions of grandeur. The audio guide begins with her voicing a letter to the 9th Marquess announcing she has recently discovered she is his heir and asking when she can move into her rightful home. A tragicomic conceit, and a rich vein for Perry, who makes many of the works in the exhibition in her persona – intense, repetitive line drawings of herself in fine clothes, and a truly hideous handcrafted version of Boucher's 'Madame de Pompadour' made by Shirley Smith out of wool and bobbins during art-therapy sessions. Because this is the Wallace Collection, the original 'Pompadour' by Boucher is hanging here, too, completely upstaged by Shirley Smith's garish stitching; when I finally noticed the familiar masterpiece, I burst out laughing, and saw it afresh – an achievement of the show. Perry has created Shirley Smith in the image of Madge Gill (1882-1961), the outsider artist, scribbler, weaver and mystic. Several of her drawings and textiles are displayed, illuminating but tangential. In fact, the whole show is a constellation of clever tangents and compelling ideas, volleying from AI to the rococo, from 'craftivism' to – in a virtue-signalling tapestry by Perry that is unappealing to look at, but makes another synaptic spark – the problems of patronage. Delusions of Grandeur digs into the feelings that the Wallace Collection evokes; Perry himself has a kinky engagement with the armour, hates the shiny Sèvres and can't keep a straight face when he looks at the miniatures, which he arranges into a family tree of psychiatric disorders. He has a lot of fun with it all, believing an artist's job is to 'bite the hand that feeds him, but not too hard'. The mood is mildly subversive, the social-warrior sting removed by the fact that Hertford House is bequeathed to the nation, and you can stroll in at any time, for free. 'I Know Who I Am', 2024, by Grayson Perry. © GRAYSON PERRY. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND VICTORIA MIRO Perry puts his spin on the weaponry here, creating 'A Gun For Shooting the Past', a gaudy neon fake blunderbuss that sits beside a real silver-enamelled flintlock. 'This gun is a talisman of power over our history,' he riffs. 'It has no power in the here-and-now, it cannot kill anyone. It is for settling scores with the past, it kills memories… For those of us who are still controlled by painful experiences at the hands of people in the past, perhaps several generations ago, this gun can deliver cleansing fire.' The woman next to me beamed at it, in on the psychotherapeutic language, or simply enjoying the conceit. This work will live on, I think, but there is no new masterpiece here, nothing you want to buy a postcard of. In fact, as noted, many of the works are ugly, failures of one sort or another. But it's a very stimulating show, the most cerebral fun I've had in a gallery for a long time. I was hoping for a more complete engagement with Shirley Smith's style, but the glimpse of the numinous power of outsider art dwindles like a candle next to Perry's electric light. The promise that we will see the interior of Shirley Smith's home does not come off, and instead we get more and more Grayson Perry showing through the patina of Smith. But Perry is, I suppose, what people have come for, and he has pulled off another coup here.
Telegraph
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur: An awkward, snarky venture devoid of class and wit
What an awkward, snarky venture Grayson Perry 's new exhibition proves to be. The root cause of the problem? His disdain for the Wallace Collection to which he was invited to respond. Bagging a show by Perry – who has worked successfully with other museums in the past – must have seemed like a coup. Surely, his indestructible popularity would attract new audiences to this national museum just north of London's Oxford Street, which deserves improved footfall? Recently, Perry, a brilliant media personality, popped up dressed as a kingfisher on The Masked Singer on ITV. Yet, when he engaged with, as he puts it, 'all the gold and sprawling nudes, the curlicues, cartouches and cherubs' at Hertford House, he was left cold. ('I found it cloying,' he says.) So, he came up with a character who, he explains, could 'love' the Wallace 'for me': working-class Shirley Smith, a self-taught artist from Barking, who believed herself to be the 'rightful heir' of its founder, Sir Richard Wallace. Drawings supposedly by Smith appear in Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur, along with black-and-white photographs of Perry, in drag, pretending to be her within the museum's interiors. It's all very arch and over-elaborate, and fails to mask the fact that working on this show seemingly never got Perry's creative juices flowing. At points, his irritation with the project is palpable. In a label, he describes Vase, Eighteenth Century, French, one of several new pots he's produced for the exhibition (alongside tapestries and works on paper), as 'a grumpy outburst in pottery form', a self-consciously 'chunky, crude and earthy' rebuke to 'hyper-refined and crafted 18th-century Sèvres porcelain', which, he continues, 'I have come to loathe'. Okay, so he hates French Rococo style – but, given that this is a speciality of the Wallace Collection, why take this exhibition on? Uninspired, he resorts to addressing themes concerning class, money, and taste that he's tackled umpteen times before, while mimicking, even ripping off, what used to be called 'outsider art', such as Russian 'lubok' prints or the drawings of Madge Gill. It's annoying: Perry's magpie-like, imitative art is so much cleaner and more marketable than its sources. Why is this rich insider (who was knighted a couple of years ago) still masquerading as an outsider when it comes to the visual conventions he adopts? In another label, he confesses, randomly, to a 'persistent prejudice' regarding 'West London': whenever he passes Oxford Circus, he writes, 'I imagine I can smell a great sense of entitlement emanating from people who live in a cossetted bubble of beige international wealth.' While the (centrally located) Wallace Collection may be a sort of palace of historical privilege, it is anything but 'beige'. Perry likes to tease and provoke, but, here, while thumbing his nose, he just comes across as sullen. Where's his famous wit? It's possible, I suppose, he's articulating what some people may feel: that the Wallace Collection is a bastion of elitism, and a turn-off for ordinary gallery-goers. Even if this were true (and I'm unconvinced), I fail to see how the Wallace Collection is served by such a stroppy show.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Earl to auction 450 family artefacts in ultimate attic sale at Holkham Hall in Norfolk
For most people an attic is a place to dump tatty Christmas decorations, unused sports kit, and general junk. For the aristocratic Coke family, custodians of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, things are a little different. From antique furniture to oil paintings, royal mementoes to rugs, its attics, cellars, and storerooms are stuffed almost to the rafters with items collected by ancestors over the past 400 years. Now the current incumbent, Lord Leicester, has decided to have a clear out and will auction off some 450 pieces, many of which have not seen the light of day for decades. 'Some of these things have not been used for three generations, which is 100 years,' says Lord Leicester, 59, whose full name is Thomas Edward Coke, the 8th Earl of Leicester. 'An Etruscan head has just been taken out of my office, which I might miss, but some of the furniture was just cluttering the place up.' Stand out items include an ornate Sèvres porcelain dessert service which has a guide price of £20,000 to £30,000. For that you get almost 80 pieces of fine antique porcelain, including ice cream cups, dessert plates, and a punch bowl. Before Lord Leicester took over the estate in 2007 his father and stepmother had displayed the service, but he and his wife, Polly, were less enthusiastic about the idea. 'Porcelain hanging on the wall did not really do it for me,' he says. Other lots include a Victorian tub armchair in a condition which could politely be described as distressed, with a guide price of £1,000 to £1,500. Alternatively, for £800 to £1,200, you could opt for a pair of cherubs set on a porcelain and ormolu-mounted mantel clock. Fancy a pair of elk antlers for the wall? A 197cm-wide set is on sale priced at £600 to £800. Royal fans might like to bid on an oak chair used at Queen Elizabeth's coronation (estimate £300 to £500). The chair was used by Anne Tennant, Baroness Glenconner, the daughter of the 5th Earl of Leicester, who had been one of the late Queen's maids of honour. Not all of the lots will break the bank. Many come with estimates starting at £100 or less including a pair of silver sugar nips, used to cut dainty pieces of sugar from a block, a baby-weighing scale with a wicker basket to hold the infant plus a push along toy dog, and two sets of pre-war golf clubs. In the run up to the sale the estate's collections coordinator and art advisor spent years rifling through the hall cataloguing its contents. Lord and Lady Leicester then went through each item, deciding what to keep and what to sell. 'It took a couple of years,' says Lord Leicester. 'Anything with really, really close historic links to the hall we are keeping. I have got no regrets doing it. I think we have been through a fairly stringent process of what we are keeping.' Holkham Hall was built between 1734 and 1764, and is surrounded by 25,000 acres of land in Wells-next-the-Sea, on the north Norfolk coast. It has been in the Coke family since it was built by the first earl. Today, to keep the estate running, parts of the house are regularly open to the public, and it hosts regular events including a Christmas market and Bear Grylls' Gone Wild Festival. The Palladian stately home has, naturally, appeared in many period dramas, including The Duchess, starring Keira Knightly and Ralph Fiennes, The auction will be held by fine art auction house Sworders at the hall on February 11. Auctioneers expect it to raise a total of between £300,000 and £400,000 and Lord Leicester said he intends to spend the money on cleaning and restoring some of its vast collection of paintings, as well as general repairs and maintenance. And he does not rule out making his own additions to the Holkham Hall collection. 'I might buy one or two pieces of art which are integral to the history of the house,' he says. 'The money will go to good use.'
