Grayson Perry is fascinated by outsiders – outcasts, nonconformists, the marginalised and the deviant. He has frequently assumed the outsider position, delivering commentary on class, gender and Britons’ petty snobberies. Across his career, he has pronounced on how his medium of choice (ceramics), his crossdressing, or his engagement with popular culture have excited the disapproval of cliques including the art world. Now, as a member of the Royal Academy, a knight of the realm and a ubiquitous presence on TV, that anti-establishment stance is under some strain. He shall hereafter be referred to as Sir Grayson, to keep him in his (elevated) place.
Delusions of Grandeur is a classic Graysonian bluff – a title that carries its own takedown (who does he think he is?). Though it is a bluff of a distinctly wanting-to-own-Gail’s-and-eat-the-chocolate-babkas-too variety. This exhibition coincides with his 65th birthday, and the Wallace Collection is hung with banner photographs of the artist, glamorous in sheeny tights and a vast bouffant. If nothing else, Sir Grayson is happy to play along with someone else’s belief that he is worth celebrating on a grand scale.
The exhibition’s concept is baroque – or should that be rococo? Sir Grayson has manifested a new alter ego for the occasion – an impoverished woman from the East End called Shirley Smith who has a special bond with the Wallace Collection. Shirley is a survivor of abuse and spent years in a psychiatric institution during which she discovered art. Adding a layer of complexity, Shirley herself has an alter ego – the Honourable Millicent Wallace, rightful heir to Hertford House, where the Wallace Collection is housed.
On a large, doomy pot, Shirley Smith and Millicent Wallace appear greeting Sir Grayson’s teddy bear Alan Measles, and the artist’s other alter ego Claire. All are, for some reason, in 19th century dress. Sir Grayson’s Ceramic Universe is populous indeed. And inclined to time travel.
Consciously compounding the confusion, the opening gallery displays work by Madge Gill and Aloïse Corbaz, two bona fide “outsider” artists. Gill exhibited at Hertford House during the war, supplying Sir Grayson with the inspiration for Shirley. Gill and Corbaz’s work is displayed alongside a confected newspaper clipping, and looked over by an “archival” photograph of Shirley in the Wallace Collection, both purportedly from 1970. Aping the curatorial vogue for printing snapshots of historic women artists at massive scale, it takes a beat to recognise the figure in the vintage photograph as Sir Grayson in a bad wig.
Oddly, this conceptual framework is not maintained – the pretence that this is a show by or about the forgotten “outsider” artist Shirley Smith is dropped after the first display. The exhibition disintegrates into a mishmash. Some works are purportedly by Shirley, some are by Shirley as Millicent Wallace, and some are straightforwardly by Sir Grayson. Historic paintings and armaments from the Wallace Collection are interspersed with prints, tapestries, ceramics, sculpture, textile works, drawings, furnishing items and AI-generated self-portraits by Sir Grayson, his fictional collaborators and a substantial cohort of expert artisans.
Often the strongest works here are the most straightforward, created without the distancing device of multiple characters. Sissy’s Helmet is a piece of contemporary armour, complete with curled eyelashes and tiara, declaring its wearer a “milquetoast” and “cry-baby”. There is a gun for shooting things in the past, a neat comment on conflicts both personal and geopolitical. There are delightfully pompous ceramic busts.
The tapestries are rococo by way of the Healing Field at Glastonbury, all glitchy psychedelia, frilly bodices and garish colours. For The Story of My Life, Sir Grayson assembles figures he relates to from paintings in the Wallace Collection and sets them within a fantasy Netherlandish landscape in magenta, yellow and cyan. I get the idea – that the art we’re attracted to constitutes a self-portrait in absentia – but the tapestry itself struggles to transcend the digital realm that birthed it.
A more serious sticking point comes with works “by” Shirley. Sir Grayson cites Madge Gill as inspiration, but there are elements, too, of the late Judith Scott (in a portrait of Madame de Pompadour wrapped in wool fibres). Other drawings and appliqué recall the work of living artists I shall not offend by naming. There is a striking disjunction between the art of these real women who have survived abuse and/or time in psychiatric institutions and the works here. For those artists – Gill, Corbaz, Scott and others – making art was urgent and heartfelt, a strategy for survival. This feels closer to posturing.
Shirley and Millicent are not Sir Grayson’s first fictions – previous personae include Julie Cope, the Essex “everywoman” – but in the past, his characterisation has been sharp and witty. Hogarthian. In inhabiting the world of Shirley Smith, he instead seems to be indulging in nostalgia for lost status as an underdog.
