How the V&A told Marie Antoinette’s complicated tale through thousands of porcelain miniatures

Like the sweet-smelling powder with which she’d perfume her wigs, mythology has trailed Marie Antoinette for two-and-a-half centuries. 'Marie Antoinette Style,' a new exhibition now on view at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, gets up close and personal with the French monarch and examines her enduring hold on visual culture, from her own belongings (like a pair of delicate silk slippers) to be-ribboned couture confections worn on the runway, stage and screen.

One of the show’s most sumptuous moments, though, lies quite literally in the background. In the final section of 'Marie Antoinette Style,' behind a trio of Dior gowns by John Galliano and Maria Grazia Chiuri, is an elaborate, all-white toile de jouy tableau. Look closely and you’ll discover that the opulent pattern is made of thousands of three-dimensional porcelain miniatures. Peer closer still and you’ll recognise scenes from Antoinette’s life, rendered in kitschy – and often – haunting detail. Here, a diminutive porcelain model of Marie Antoinette on a swing; There, a tiny model of her shepherd’s hut at Versailles. But all is not as it seems in this fondant universe: an executioner lurks atop one of the mirrors in a Chinese Chippendale-style folly, while a bust of the queen herself has a mini guillotine tucked into her wig.

This intricate installation is the handiwork of New York-based ceramic artist Beth Katleman, who’s long been captivated by 18th-century decorative arts and Marie Antoinette’s tragic life. ‘I am just fascinated with her, it’s the same fascination I think we have with Diana,’ she explained on a summer afternoon in her studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. ‘It has all the ingredients – beauty, power, an early death.’

Katleman has been baking these ironies into her ceramics for the last 15 years. From afar, the artist’s work appears like heavily-ornamented antiques; up close, though, they reveal secret, and sometimes disquieting, narratives by mashing up the florid decorative styles of the past with kitschy 20th-century tchotchkes, often cast directly from Ebay finds and thrift store treasures.

‘I like the idea that people can construct their own narratives. They think they’re viewing a historical wall and it’s all about luxury,’ she says, ‘but then when you get in closer you have to piece it together for yourself.’

Katleman, who began her career as a painter in the mid-’90s, has gained a loyal following; her delicate creations have appeared everywhere from galleries to private collections to Dior boutiques in Hong Kong and London. She also caught the attention of V&A senior curator Sarah Grant after the duo bonded over their mutual love of toile de jouy – a charming French cotton fabric printed with pastoral scenes. What if Katleman were to create a backdrop for the Marie Antoinette show? ‘The question became, what would it look like if a toile de jouy wallpaper exploded into three dimensions?,’ the artist recalls.

Katleman was well aware that life at Versailles wasn’t all cake, ribbons and perfumed sheep for Marie Antoinette: The ill-fated queen was under constant surveillance of the court, had difficulty conceiving, was lampooned in the press, imprisoned and finally faced the guillotine in October 1793. So Katleman fired up her kiln, wanting to tell Marie Antoinette’s story her own unique way.

Katleman’s studio, located in a former can factory, is a wunderkammer of miniatures. A set of floor-to-ceiling shelves are filled entirely with chalky white molds, with labels like ‘small snails,’ ‘palm tree’ and ‘leaves and flowers,’ all of which will make their way into one creation or another. ‘This is where I go shopping,’ Katleman explains.

The molds are cast directly from found objects – often with quirky provenances. There’s a figurine representing Antoinette’s lover, Swedish count Axel von Fersen, cast from a shirtless bachelorette party figurine. Katleman sourced a mini guillotine from a company specializing in fantasy boardgames. There are antique pencil sharpeners and old dog chew toys; antique confectionery moulds and Kewpie dolls. ‘I like to find objects because they bring their own history to the piece,’ she says.

Katleman will often spend hours making a mould, sometimes doctoring them by hand to create the people or creatures she desires, like delicate Sèvres mutants. Katleman favours biscuit porcelain (pronounced bis-kwee), a fine-grained unglazed porcelain that, after being fired, has a creamy texture, like buttercream atop a cake. ‘It has a texture you don’t get with anything else,’ Katleman explains.

‘They’re all hand-made, which is such a weird anomaly in this day and age,’ she continues. ‘From a distance, people will say, “It’s probably 3D-printed,” and then when they realise it's handmade – their body reacts to it in a different way.’

The resulting backdrop for 'Marie Antoinette Style' unfolds as a two-part tale via a pair of wall-mounted mirrors. ‘I divided the piece into two halves – the two parts of her life I responded to the most,’ Katleman says.

One mirror is inspired by Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing, with a model of Antoinette gleefully aloft in front of a hunky reclining male figurine symbolising von Fersen. But the story takes a darker turn in the second mirror, where, among other symbolic figures and objects there’s a weeping doll representing Marie Antoinette’s son, Louis XVII, and petite decapitated heads dangling horrifyingly from flower-ornamented garlands.

Smaller-scale ‘islands’ protrude from the surrounding wall shelf-like and host sheep, more dolls, snails and princesses and are festooned with porcelain strawberries and garlands of roses. Taken as a whole, the installation brings to mind a sinister version of Snow White. Then again, it may bring something entirely different to mind. But that’s the point, according to the artist.

‘I take the narrative thread and literally embellish it,’ Katleman says. ‘I'm not really interested in being historically accurate so much as using the historical tidbits, the little crumbs, and seeing where they lead.’