This London Art Installation Reveals Marie Antoinette Like Never Before

Above: Beth Katleman’s Marie Antoinette’s Folly, 2025, porcelain, wire, mirror, 208 x 112 x 11 in.

American artist Beth Katleman spotted a plastic Marie Antoinette dish scrubber in a friend’s San Francisco kitchen years ago and immediately knew she had to have it—not for washing dishes, but for casting in porcelain and incorporating into what would become an art installation celebrating the ill-fated Queen of France.

Marie Antoinette’s Folly, commissioned for the Victoria & Albert Museum‘s upcoming exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style, stretches 20 feet wide and towers 14 feet high. It’s composed of more than 4,500 hand-cast porcelain elements that bring the decorative world of Toile de Jouy wallpaper (those pastoral scenes Marie Antoinette adored) into 3-D. But where traditional toile depicts innocent pastoral scenes, Katleman’s version harbors darker secrets. As she notes in her artist statement: “At Marie Antoinette’s Hameau de la Reine, the guillotine is never far away.”

The piece centers on two mirrors that capture the twin poles of Marie Antoinette’s existence: her escapist retreat to the Petit Trianon and her violent end. The first mirror presents what Katleman calls “the light side”—a cheeky reimagining of Fragonard’s The Swing where Louis XVI pushes his wife, while her Swedish lover, Axel von Fersen, gazes up from the bushes below. But Katleman’s von Fersen isn’t your typical 18th-century aristocrat. “I got this sort of Chippendale figure of a hot hunk guy at a cake decorating place, and I cast him,” Katleman says. “He’s wearing a Speedo and the lace collar and the wig.”

The second mirror tells a darker story entirely. Here, the fall of the monarchy unfolds with figures from across time and culture clamoring for the queen’s head. “I really reached into my archives of molds and picked all the figures that I thought represented every walk of life,” Katleman explains. “I have a little sailor boy, I have the Botticelli Venus on the clamshell, I have Napoleon.” Presiding over this chaos is the executioner—none other than Curly from The Three Stooges, complete with hood and guillotine.

This collision of high and low culture is precisely what makes Katleman’s work so compelling. Her choice of porcelain as medium is equally loaded with meaning. “It epitomizes both the idea of royal porcelain and the Sèvres and Meissen porcelain factories of the 18th century,” she tells us, “but also it has the association of the tchotchke that’s in grandma’s attic and the kind of low brow association that we have with the Hummel figure.”

For Katleman, the queen has long been an obsession. “She ties in so well with my work in terms of the association that we have with her about decadence and decline and this kind of femme fatale image that she’s got,” she says. “And I really just love her ultra feminine aesthetic. And yet there’s a certain power that she wields. I think her agency in spite of her circumstances is something I really identify with.”

That sense of agency becomes crucial to understanding both Marie Antoinette’s story and Katleman’s interpretation of it. The Austrian archduchess who became Queen of France at 15 wasn’t initially destined for the role—she had two older sisters who would have been ahead in line, but smallpox killed her sister Maria Josepha and severely scarred her other sister Maria Elisabeth, making her “unmarriageable.” Thrust into a position she hadn’t been prepared for, Marie created her own escape at the Hameau de la Reine, her pastoral home where she could play shepherdess away from the suffocating protocols of court.

“She really created a retreat for herself,” Katleman says. “It was an escape from the rigors of court and all of the strictures and rules and protocols that she had to live by.” This epithet of Marie Antoinette—the woman who dressed as a peasant while wearing transparent, revealing costumes—is the figure that captivates Katleman. “It’s the unlaced version of Marie Antoinette that I love,” she says.

When Marie Antoinette Style opens to the public in London on September 20, visitors will encounter Katleman’s installation in the exhibition’s finale, staged like a grotto with dramatic lighting that will make the white porcelain seem to float against dark walls. It’s a fitting end to an exhibition that traces the queen’s enduring influence on fashion, design, and popular culture—from Sofia Coppola‘s Oscar-winning 2006 film Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst to contemporary designers like Moschino and Vivienne Westwood.

“I hope people feel invited into another world of glamour and excitement and also kind of weird darkness that really expresses what her life was,” Katleman says. “Her world was so cinematic.”

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