Marie Antoinette's Folly, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2025-2026
Commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of "Marie Antoinette Style" 2025, porcelain, mirror, wire
From a distance, "Marie Antoinette’s Folly" looks familiar, like a world we’ve always known, an enchanting place a million light years from reality. The installation evokes opulence of Versailles, and the discrete charm of Toile de Jouy wallpaper brought to three-dimensional life. We think of garden swings, Fragonard, dancing shepherds, and trysts in a perfumed garden. But up close, the story shifts.
The inhabitants of this strange arcadia stare back at us with blank, otherworldly gazes. A giant doll looms over a miniature Eiffel Tower, and a parade of maidens ends unexpectedly in a pond. From outside the gates, whispers of discontent and foreboding interrupt the genteel pleasures of the garden. At Marie Antoinette’s Hameau de la Reine, the guillotine is never far away.
The two mirrors evoke the twin poles of Marie Antoinette’s life. The first portrays her escape into her private pleasure garden at Versailles, tending her flock of perfumed sheep at the Hameau de la Reine. In a parody of Fragonard’s painting, “The Swing,” Louis XVI pushes Marie Antoinette on the swing, while her Swedish lover, Axel von Fersen, gazes up at her. The second mirror draws on her final chapter. The palace of Versailles is overrun by a mob of bewigged commoners brandishing swords and automatic weapons, the dauphin languishes in prison with his pet rat, and a masked executioner (Curly from the 1950’s comedy team The Three Stooges) has his guillotine ready.
“Marie Antoinette’s Folly” is composed of more than 4,500 cast and handmade porcelain elements. Katleman begins by collecting toys, dolls, and other knick-knacks. Then she creates molds, transforms them into white porcelain, and combines them into tableaus. For this piece, her sources include a Versailles refrigerator magnet, a beefcake figure from a bachelorette party, a 3D printed guillotine from a fantasy website, and a Marie Antoinette dish scrubber spotted years ago at a friend’s house. The aesthetic is an unlikely blend of rococo opulence, dark humor, and good old-fashioned kitsch. Marie Antoinette’s Folly is a parable of decadence and decline that resonates today more than ever.
