Some are artists, some are muses — Sir Grayson Perry is both, according to a new coffee table book. Photographer Richard Ansett has taken thousands of portraits of Perry over the past 10 years, including Birth, above, which was displayed as if it were religious iconography at the Fitzrovia Chapel. Ansett has now published a book of his portraits of Perry with ACC Art Books, many of them previously unseen.
Muse documents Perry’s Bowie-like range of personae, from his alter-ego Claire, to Madonna and child, to a Dolly Parton-style American country girl. “When he’s dressed in a frock, Grayson will do almost anything for the camera,” writes Ansett, who fills the book with accompanying anecdotes about his muse.
In one portrait, taken just after the Brexit referendum in 2016, Perry, dressed up in a Little Bo Peep-style frock and bonnet, stands on England’s white cliffs, waving a Union Jack towards Europe. For a change he’s wearing flats instead of the usual towering platform heels (his wife Philippa had forbidden him from tottering around in them within such close proximity to a cliff edge). “My vision was ruined,” said Ansett, before admitting that “Little Bo Peep can pull off flats”.
Despite being one of the UK’s most established living artists, the now knighted Perry shows no sign of losing the common touch, according to Ansett. He is grounded “as if he might still be living in a London squat and not just off the phone with the King of Denmark”.
Yet we’ve observed Perry looking just as comfortable quaffing champagne at many a high society art opening. He is held up as both a national treasure and one of the foremost satirists of the British national identity. Ansett seesaws between describing Perry as an “ageing tranny” and praising his “stunning, surprisingly feminine legs”. He is both an old bloke who makes ceramics and a high-camp, Weird Barbie-esque doll with blue eyebrows and technicolour dresses. These contradictory facets of Perry’s identity are what Ansett seeks to capture.
