The prime motive for today's trip to London was to see the Grayson Perry tapestries at the RA Summer Exhibition. It's years since I bothered going to that. I find it a weird format, a strange jumble of tasteful oil paintings by academicians of safe subjects (pot plants, sunlit pavement cafes, the artist's studio), truly terrible daubs by non-academicians (what were the rejected submissions like?) and small etchings and lithographs that gain nothing from being stacked ten high up the walls, so that you can't even see the ones at the top without getting a crick in your neck (that worries me nowadays, I keep remembering the story of the woman who ripped her carotid artery sitting back to rest her head on the washbasin at the hairdressers).
However, I am a huge fan of Grayson Perry, as are two of my friends, making him the most popular living artist among people I know. One of them had watched the Channel 4 series on how the tapestries were made, in which Grayson Perry met people from different social classes, spent time with them, and used their lives and faces in six linked works, which he previewed to them at a party. I think that's how it went, anyway, having not seen the series myself. We start with a baby on his mother's knee in Sunderland, two heavily tattooed men kneeling before them, offering up a miner's lamp and a football shirt. This is the Adoration of the Cage Fighters. Two tapestries on, the geeky youth is leaving his northern, lower class roots behind to be embraced by the family of his middle class girlfriend. And so on, via his successful computer empire, purchase of a grand country house, and remarriage to a younger model, to his sad end. It is based on The Rakes Progress, and Perry himself is explicit that it is about the class system, the elephant in the English room.
The tapestries are very visually arresting, brightly coloured and richly textured, and contain a massive amount of closely observed detail. Grayson Perry is a master of detail. The more you look, the more you see. We made them the first thing we looked at when we arrived, or rather, the first thing we concentrated on, since they are in the last room so you have to tramp through most of the rest of the exhibition to get there. Then we went at looked at the other rooms for a while, before coming back for a second feast on the tapestries. As well as the carefully chosen class signifiers (the pigeons, the golf clubs, the Aga, the Cath Kidson bag, the Birkenstocks kicked off at the end of the sofa) there are clever bits of narrative woven in (the numerous To Let signs on the commercial buildings of the northern town, the tattered flag, the news of the hero's second marriage on the cover of Hello magazine) and references to classical art (the photographer reflected in a mirror straight out of the Arnolfini portrait, the final pieta). I'm sure I missed loads of references, but I enjoyed the ones I got.
The rest of the Summer Exhibition was much as I remembered it, a bizarre mixture of the innocuous, the covetable, and things that made me think someone must be having a laugh. Top prize in the latter category goes to the small crude painting of the Gherkin against a grey sky with glitter on it, yours for fifteen hundred pounds. If you were prepared to forego the Gherkin and the glitter, you could have a small rectangle of grey paint for a thousand. Neither had sold. My friend was justifiably suspicious of how you would keep some of the perspex and cardboard three dimensional constructions clean of dust, and she was right, once they started filling with fluff and thunderflies they would never look as good.
After the RA we went to see Laura Knight's portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. She was born a Victorian, brought up in financially straitened circumstances, and died at a ripe old age as recently as 1970, a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy in over 160 years. You don't hear so much about her nowadays. The current show isn't large, but illustrates how her technique shifted between loose Impressionism and something more polished and formal. One of the reviews I read commented favourably on her vivid use of colour. I loved her paintings, from the large canvas of a father and his two young daughters, begun in the middle of the Great War though not finished until nearly twenty years later, to a small, smooth portrait of a professional female strong woman, made when Dame Laura was nearly eighty. No late fading of eyesight and unsteadiness of hand for her. The reviews have made much of her wartime portraits of factory workers and air force personnel, and they are great. Catchy. OK, they were done as propaganda, but that's part of the history of the time, and the Systems Administrator could have had some fun comparing them to Soviet portrayals of the heroic workers. Laura Knight's uniformed female NCOs are not quite heroic, vermilion lipstick defiantly in place, looking exasperated, tense, and as though they might be afraid if they let themselves be, only they had a job to do.
The RA Summer Exhibition runs until 18 August, and is worth it for the Grayson Perry tapestries. Laura Knight runs until 13 October, and I liked it so much that if I'm in the area again with an hour to spare before it finishes, I'd happily go and see it again.
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