Putting the art in artifice

In Delusions of Grandeur’ Grayson Perry’s fictional heir to the Wallace Collection comes to claim her throne in a show that doesn’t pander to sophistication, writes Mark Hudson

- Mark Hudson

A curious figure haunts the Wallace Collection’s largest contemporary art exhibition to date: Shirley Smith, an eccentric spinster who was regularly seen in these galleries in the late 1960s, brandishing a drawing pad and pens, and claiming to be the illegitimate great-great-granddaughter of the gallery’s founder Sir Richard Wallace.

Drawings and textile pieces purported to be by Smith appear alongside 40 new works by Sir Grayson Perry in the new exhibition Delusions of Grandeur, in which everyone’s favourite emotionally empowered Essex man sets out to “interrogate the very nature of craft-making and our drive for perfectionism”. This isn’t the first time Perry has pitted so-called “outsider art” – produced by untutored, often severely challenged people on the margins of society – against the most exalted high culture, in this instance, the Wallace’s spectacular holdings of 18th century Rococo art and design. And it’s certainly not the first time he’s riffed on the themes of authenticity and artifice, establishment art and street imagery. From Hogarth-inspired tapestries to a British Museum exhibition invaded by Perry’s childhood teddy bear Alan Measles on a motorbike, these preoccupations have helped make the 65-year-old one of Britain’s most popular artists.