I’m stomping through the mean streets of north London with my phone map beeping, searching for a nondescript door with a nondescript number. Behind that door is Grayson Perry. Unfortunately, the phone map is lost, so there’s time to blunder and fret about the confrontation ahead: Grayson Perry. Who the hell is he?
On the surface, of course, he’s an artist, the notorious “transvestite potter” who won the Turner prize in 2003 and has since had scores of prestigious shows in important British galleries. But where does that fit with the tweeting bird I was watching a couple of weekends ago on ITV’s The Masked Singer, on which he beat two professional warblers, Macy Gray and Carol Decker of T’Pau? Kingfisher turned out to be Grayson too.
He has played the Royal Albert Hall. He’s been on Have I Got News for You. He designs Britain’s most beautiful headscarves and bedspreads. During Covid he kept our spirits perked with a televised art club that had the entire nation gratefully drawing. This autumn he will tour a one-man show on the theme of virtue and morality titled Are You Good? And I’ve just heard that he has written a musical and hopes to put it on in the West End. I repeat: who is Grayson Perry?
The unshaven urban scruff in the sloppy Crocs who opens the door when I finally locate his elusive studio door is surely not the answer. Hair dank, shirt stained, teeth the colour of Cornish butter: is this really the newly ennobled Sir Grayson whom the Prince of Wales has been tapping on the shoulder at Buckingham Palace, and who turned up for the ceremony in a taffeta dress of deep and sexy burgundy that sent the nation’s fashion press into a pleasing tizzy? Yup, that’s him.
Perry in his civvies, free of the flouncy feminine get-ups, is strikingly dressed down. If you saw him in a doorway, you’d toss him a couple of quid. There’s clearly no bath in the studio because it looks as if it’s been several weeks since he took one. Nothing about him sparkles — except his mind, which spends the next hour impressing me with its dinks, feints and darts.
The fox has let me into his lair because he has a show opening at the Wallace Collection in London, and it’s a big one. The gallery, in case you’ve never been there — in which case hurry over: it’s one of London’s most pleasing museums — has a lively collection of frilly old master art. If French rococo loucheness is your thing, then the Wallace Collection is your ideal destination.
Apart from the famous paintings here — Frans Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier and Fragonard’s The Swing — there’s Sèvres porcelain, boudoir furniture, silk wallpaper and even a room full of sexy medieval armour. Ooooh. The Wallace has it all. And it is going to get a whole lot more because Perry assures me this show is his most varied yet.
Called Delusions of Grandeur, it will include pots, prints, carpets, tapestries, bedspreads and even — hush my beating heart — some newly designed armour. The Perry and Wallace Collection collaboration is clearly a marriage made in heaven, right? Wrong. It turns out there were issues. First, though, what was he doing on The Masked Singer?
“It was a fun thing to do. I didn’t hesitate. A, because I like singing and B, because I’m interested in the various snobberies that float around culture. Some people would probably regard The Masked Singer as a guilty pleasure. But what does that mean? Does it mean you’re not allowed to like it? It’s a brilliant show.”
The art world would certainly not expect you to go on it.
“That’s why I did it.”
To annoy people?
“To ‘annoy’ might be a strong word. But the art world claims to be unshockable. So it’s interesting what does shock it. I said it in my speech when I won the Turner prize — they’re perfectly accepting of me being dressed up in a dress … but the pottery?!” Not for the last time, he collapses into throaty conspiratorial laughter.
He’s always been interested, he wriggles on, in approaching the art world from angles where it’s still vulnerable, “still tender in its own snobbery”. Another of his gripes is with identity politics and the emotional mess it has caused. Perry is not the champion of sexual me-ism we might have imagined.
When I call him a “gender pioneer” he tells me not to go there and the big laugh roars again. “It’s when my PR person winces. There are minefields out there now, and I just don’t go into them,” he weaves, before going into them.
“Everything’s become about language and shorthand rather than the nuanced, real experience of being with people. You can be the most horrible person in the world, but if you don’t say the bad word it’s fine. But if you say the bad word, and actually you’re a nice person, then it’s terrible.”
Aren’t we here to talk about the show, though? Yes we are. It turns out that the marriage made in heaven between the transvestite potter and the frilly Wallace Collection was something of a test. When the director of the gallery asked Perry to do the show he visited full of enthusiasm, but as he walked around “looking and looking and looking” he could not find much that he loved.
The Sèvres porcelain did not ring his bell. The paintings left him unmoved. What he saw was not what he’d “put on his Pinterest page”. He wasn’t sure what to do. But then, in his research, he discovered that during the Second World War, when London was being blitzed, the art collection was moved out of the Wallace to a safer location and the gallery opened a temporary show, featuring the work of Madge Gill.
Now Gill (1882-1961) was what the art world calls an “outsider artist”, which is to say someone who is self-taught and makes art for personal rather than commercial reasons. An aesthetic amateur. Perry has long been one of her champions. When he found out that she had a big show at the Wallace, it opened an avenue for him to explore. Gill was the key.
So he began searching for another female persona, someone who could adore the Wallace and feel comfortable in it, and arrived at Shirley Smith. Shirley will be Grayson in another guise. Obsessed with the collection, she will imagine she is its rightful heir and stalk the gallery with her flouncy female presence. Exactly how she will do this remains deeply unclear to me. It’s a knotty approach. But it seems I’ll have to wait till the opening for the answer.
Speaking of the opening, Perry has also ensured that it will take place on March 24, his 65th birthday. Wow. That’s a serious age. He certainly doesn’t look it. Nor does his creative energy show any sign of abating. Is the twisty approach that characterises his Wallace show a sign of what artists call their “late style”?
Further guffaws. “Your body starts to go a bit and you also start saying, ‘Yeah, I have been around the block and I have seen a lot and done a lot. And maybe I do know best.’ But you’re not allowed to say that nowadays. Our generation grew up thinking [that] one of these days we’ll be the respected elders. But by the time we got here, we were the f***ing boomers. Who f***ed everything up. And got all the houses.”
To prepare for the Wallace extravaganza, Perry worked harder last year than he has ever worked. This year he has stepped back a bit and enjoyed the moment. During that busy year he learnt, once again, how much he enjoyed making things. It would be his advice to any artist starting out.
“Make sure you enjoy the day to day. Don’t worry about the great big accolades and exhibitions. Make sure that you enjoy curling up at the studio. When I open the door to the studio, you know I’m going, ‘Yippee, another day of making art. Great.’”
To emphasise his fertility, he plays me a track from his musical, a Hogarthian retelling of his own rakish progress, filled with smart-arse wordplay that leaps about like an angry mackerel. I’m impressed.
When I potter out of his studio and the question “Who the hell is Grayson Perry?” looms up again in my thoughts, I count the many things he is good at and decide that what we have here is a belated Renaissance man. Grayson Perry, f*** it, is the new Leonardo da Vinci!
Delusions of Grandeur is at the Wallace Collection, London, Mar 24-Oct 26, wallacecollection.org.