Summer Exhibition/The Great Spectacle review – a Grayson revolution — theguardian.com

There’s an orgy going on at the Royal Academy. People are tumbling over each other, cavorting in ecstasy, revealing all. Who knew the summer show could be so subversive? This riotous assembly appears in a deliriously funny and rude satire on the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition drawn by Thomas Rowlandson in about 1800. It’s included in The Great Spectacle, a survey of the (nearly) 250-year history of what is now called the Summer Exhibition that runs parallel to this year’s show. What a quarter-millennium it has been. Rowlandson’s watercolour, called The Exhibition Stare Case, portrays fashionable society fighting its way up the spiral staircase in the Academy’s old home in Somerset House. In their excitement, they’ve lost their footing. The dirty-minded Rowlandson imagines the crush turning into a mass ogle and grope.

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