It is a lucky artist whose doings are chronicled by his very own Vasari, the sixteenth century Italian who acted as a biographer to Renaissance masters including Raphael and Michelangelo. In the case of Sir Grayson Perry, the country’s best-known cross dressing potter, his activities are documented by a self-styled “burnt-out celebrity photographer”, Richard Ansett.
As Perry’s new exhibition, Delusions of Grandeur, opens at the Wallace Collection in London, a portfolio of the artist by Ansett, his shutterbug amanuensis, will go on display just a sequin’s throw away at Sotheby’s. A Portrait of Grayson Perry includes “decadent” pictures of Perry to promote the Wallace Collection show, including one he’s chosen as his “official” 65th birthday portrait.
Ansett, 59, was once commissioned to shoot famous names including film directors David Lynch and David Cronenberg. He first met Perry when the latter was giving the Reith lectures in 2013. He says: “I had researched pictures of Grayson before I met him and they were very frivolous: very jolly, very smiley. But my impression of him was that this was a very serious artist in a dress. I really wanted to capture that.
“I took a picture of him clutching his handbag like he’s about to be mugged at a cashpoint.” That study of Perry is now in the National Portrait Gallery.
Affable in repose, Ansett claims he turns into a ruthless “monster” once a camera is in his hands. But this clearly doesn’t faze Perry because the pair have been collaborating for more than a dozen years, on unique portraits of the artist in his studio as well as the images in glamorous frocks for which he’s better known.
“When our relationship began, there was a sense of me being the help,” laughs Ansett. “And I’ve worked very hard to try to convince Grayson that there’s more to me than someone who’s just going to do a couple of shots. He is very disciplined as an artist and a person, and for my part, I think he knows that when I’ve got a camera, I will burn your house down to get a great photograph!”
Richard Ansett, Grayson Perry - Death II, 2018
© Richard Ansett
Ansett had very rare access to Perry at work, at the invitation of the artist’s gallery. One photograph is of Perry’s arm on a bench surrounded by his tools. “It was super-interesting because he’d been out on the lash the night before and the shot of his hand shows his chipped nails,” Ansett says. “It connects to his cross-dressing, but it also shows him as this filthy potter.”
Another picture which has never been shown before is Death, a miniature in a dark frame which finds the artist in a veil—“taffeta from Brixton Market,” according to Ansett—and what looks like the black crepe of a Victorian widow’s mourning attire. It is twinned with Birth: Perry as an earth mother cradling an infant, surrounded by blooms and wearing a dress with pink satin sleeves. Ansett says: “He invited me to go through all of his dresses online. He has thousands and thousands of them, scattered in all sorts of different warehouses.”
One of the photographer’s favourite shots recreates a celebrated image of Dolly Parton taken by Annie Leibovitz. Perry, in a blonde wig, straddles a motorbike with the Stars and Stripes on the handlebars.
“We had the wind-machine going for the hair, the flags were flapping and to make myself heard I was crying out, ‘you’re beautiful! Yes, yes! Give me more!’. There were complaints about the noise from the studios next door. So yes, if necessary, I will shout at Grayson Perry!”
- A Portrait of Grayson Perry, Sotheby's London, 28 March-17 April
