Grayson Perry Goes from Eccentric to National Treasure

Exhibition in Edinburgh shows a British artist — and self-described ‘transvestite potter’ — with a pungent, fun view of art and society.

M any readers know that my eye is a gimlet one. I might very well enjoy slipping a stiletto between bloated plutocrat ribs a wee too much. Afflicting not the comfortable but the smug, the superficial, and the conformist is a critic’s job. I can’t say that I love the English artist Grayson Perry’s work but find in it an original vision and in him a charming though odd presence. “It’s about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize.”

So began Perry’s acceptance speech after winning the 2003 prize, since 1984 Britain’s most prestigious award for a living artist. Perry (b. 1960) was a shock winner. He’d had modest exhibitions and a dealer, but he’d never been a featured story in an art magazine.

While I was in London a couple of weeks ago, Grayson Perry: Smash Hits, a retrospective of his work, was at the Royal Scottish Academy, part of the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. A few years ago, I reviewed — and liked quite a lot — the 250th Summer Exhibition he curated at the Royal Academy. Off to Scotland I went to see this unusually good and refreshing show.

Perry accepted his Turner Prize dressed as Claire, his alter ego since he was 15, indeed making him the first — and only — transvestite to win as well as the first and only potter. In the 20 or so years leading to the prize, Perry developed a niche as a potter with an edge. Then and now, his pots are decorated with irreverent quips and saucy images, some autobiographical but most aimed at social and political sacred cows. Smash Hits covers pots, and I’d seen them off and on, as well as his tapestries, large-format prints, and sculpture.

Smash Hits is roughly chronological and covers the early ’80s to now. Kinky Sex, an early work from 1983, is still juvenilia but points to where Perry is heading. It’s a plate with an image of a crucified man and titled in the plate itself. Perry learned about ceramics mostly through making them. He placed a silver coin between the man’s legs, hoping it would create what looked like an ejaculation once the plate was fired but the thing burnt to a crisp.

We get the point. Perry was 23 and now says that, back then, he was “nervous, suspicious, dazed, mean, innocent, and haughty.” I’d call him a punk artist. He was living in London in the ’80s, off and on as a squatter. Boy George is a parallel from the music world, and for a time they squatted in the same building.

Perry was a controversial choice for the Turner Prize, controversial in the world of high culture, since pots, in the hierarchy of media in the arts, have to be near the bottom. Perry said in an interview in 2004 that few artists had a problem with cross-dressing but, for the general public, this was a bustier too far. Still, since then, his down-to-earth personality, his art’s humor, and his many TV appearances have made him a national treasure, Britain’s best-known artist and, this year, a knight.

What to make of Perry? There was Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, in 1917 — shock at that has long diminished — plus Andres Serrano’s crucifix, in 1987, floating in his urine. Perry’s art often bites, but pots, he tells us, are modest things. They live happily and quietly at home. They’re not hubristic like much of contemporary art. Pots are as old as humanity, but they’re outsider art as well.

Perry is from a working-class family in Essex. It’s almost a cliché to say that one day his father left home, and the next, in moved the milkman, but that’s what happened. He went to middling schools, not Oxford and Cambridge. Living separately, his mother and father both tossed him out the door. He admits that his feelings about both are bad, bad, bad.

Perry doesn’t go to bleeding-edge commercial galleries, the Tate Modern, or the Serpentine when he’s in the mood for art. He’s more likely to go to the British Museum. The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, in Smash Hits and from 2011, was shown in an exhibition he did there. Of the 6 million objects at the museum, he learned, only a tiny fraction are attributed to an artist. The makers are lost to time. He made the sculpture, which is of a ship headed into the afterlife, from cast iron, a material rougher and less polished than bronze. Little models of art and artifacts from antiquity hang from the rigging. A model of a 250,000-year-old flint axe, the oldest object at the British Museum, is, he says, what started the art of craft.

The first work Perry made after winning the Turner Prize was a pot, A Network of Cracks. On the neck are the guests of each of the four artists nominated, their names arranged in a circle since they sat at round tables. The body conveys groupings list-style to reflect long tables where everyone else sat.

As a museum director, I did the seating for hundreds of dinners and never found it too painful, but for the Turner Prize, and in a competitive, tribal art world, it must have been excruciating. It’s an object for those in the know but also a portrait of Perry’s new world as someone famous, a world he was just getting to know.

I’d never seen Perry’s tapestries, which are about a third of the show. Perry benefitted from joining the London dealer Victoria Miro’s stable soon after his Turner Prize. Miro encouraged him to think big-format, both for the creative options it presented but also for building his visibility.

The Vanity of Small Differences is an amazing six-piece tapestry series from 2012 depicting the life of the fictional Tim Rakewell, a baby born into a working-class family who, in adulthood, navigates the English class system. He goes to a chichi university, marries an upper-middle-class woman, makes a fortune in high tech, jettisons his wife for a younger woman, grows flashy and brand-driven, and, at the end, dies in a car crash as he shows off his new Ferrari. It’s very fun and pungent.

The series is a 21st-century version of William Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, a set of eight paintings and, later, prints from the mid 1730s exploring the decline and fall of a Tom Rakewell, heir to a business, not aristocratic, fortune who squanders his money on prostitutes and easy living and lands in debtors’ prison as a broke syphilitic and, at the end, in Bedlam. Perry has a sharp eye for how class differences are branded by businesses, and he’s a satirist as good as Hogarth, James Gillray (1756–1815), and Mary Rowlandson (1637–1711).

Perry is as pungent when it comes to politics. Selfie with Political Causes, from 2018, is one of his large-format color woodcuts. In the heavens is a banner reading Global Warming. On terra firma, a woman drives an unwieldy motorcycle, the front tire labeled with things she’s against — racism, homophobia, sexism, and poverty — while the back tire is labeled with “democracy,” “free speech,” and “tolerance.” These are things, Perry believes, that “social-justice warriors struggle with the most.” He calls social-media users “a community of cults untroubled by the give-and-take of personal interaction.”

Luxury Brands for Social Justice is an amphora from 2017. Perry despises affluent London liberals, what I call Champagne socialists, and jolly and gentle as he is, I bet he does indeed despise them, and who in his right mind wouldn’t? The pot’s palette is soothing green, pastel terra-cotta, and butter yellow. Small banners pop out. “I read all the academic research about empathy,” one tells us, and then there’s “remind me what is it that we are protesting about” and “all my ideas are recycled” and “the rich deserve equal rights, too.” Figures are part cartoons, part anorexic.

Perry first wore dresses, he says, because “risk is a great aphrodisiac.” He likes the rush of dressing in something frilly and flouncy. It’s escapism. He’s married to a woman he met in the late ’80s in a creative-writing class. She’s now a psychotherapist and best-selling author of a manual on child-rearing. These days, his Claire wears over-the-top clothes to look like Raggedy Ann or Baby Jane. “I like my c***,” he says, never having any wish to be a woman. “I also like being in a dress.”

To each his own, I say, even if it means a little black dress from Chanel. Perry will need his in a plus size.

As he gets older, playing Claire is more fun than anything else and mostly happens when he goes to big art events. He wore a puffy, burgundy taffeta dress when he was knighted by Prince William earlier this year. “We’re in a new Carolingian age,” he said, “so I wore something that evokes the pair of Charleses in the 1600s.”

Perry’s a TV star for his documentaries on culture. I watched a couple of episodes of Grayson Perry’s Full English, his travelogue through England searching for what it means to be English, not British but English. He interviewed dozens of people, from the owner of a small boat in Dover who patrols the port for illegals trying to land, to a man whose avocation is going to the England team’s soccer matches — all of them. He interviewed Druids. Perry’s a thoughtful, kind interviewer as well as a bloke who relates to blokes. Tolerance and love of liberty figure, as do love of nature, an obsession with class, fair play, love of words, and a nostalgic feeling for the England of yore.

These aren’t the heaviest of subjects, but that’s fine. I’ve rarely walked through an exhibition with a vibe so warm but so electric. Perry’s art lets everyone in, so I’m not surprised he bashes snobs so much. Snoots hate nothing more than accessibility. Though he tackles trauma and admits it took years of psychotherapy to make him what he is, his art — and Smash Hits — is playful, not gloomy.

Good art, the chattering class believes, has to be about important issues. “Adults and good art,” Perry believes, “can be silly, fun, and inconsequential.” I can’t argue with that.

Our Town, from 2022, is a good example of the prints Perry is making as Smash Hits was about to open. It’s both a map of a small town, cozy and English, and what he calls “the emotional geography of people hooked on social media.” Districts are identified with tags such as ph.d. and smug. You can go to pubs named Selfie or Style Over Substance. He calls the town “fantasy” and adds, “This map might not help you in real life.”

One of the many pleasures of Smash Hits is the artist’s voice. Perry wrote almost all the labels himself as well as a very good catalogue essay. In his essay, he tells young artists to chart three features in their work in circles. One group are the things the artist likes to look at. Another are the things he or she cares about the most. Then there’s what he calls “what the hipsters haven’t noticed yet.” Artists should aim at the spot where the three circles overlap. That’s good advice. “Sometimes,” he says, “I just feel like making something red and shiny.”

The exhibition is beautifully presented. In 2018 I reviewed Rembrandt: Britain’s Discovery of the Master at the Royal Scottish Academy. It’s still one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen. It had great art, a new storyline, a succinct book, and a lovely presentation. I think these are all part of the museum’s way of doing things. Off and on over the next month, I’ll write about exhibitions in Glasgow and Dundee as well. Scotland is a fantastic place for art.