TThe serpentine flash of a dollar sign on Andy Warhol’s black and gold canvas opens this fascinating exhibition. Harsh, abrupt; splashes of color whizzing around like speed lanes in cartoons, the subject seems to be reaching into the future. That it is now priceless and now looks so obviously handmade probably contradicts the spirit in which it was flung out of Warhol’s Factory in 1981. It represents what it shows, but now exponentially – the most recognizable symbol of wealth in the world.
Dollar sign is an ideal introduction to an exhibition that explores money through art. Representations of money abound, and there are many of them in the exhibition: Rembrandt’s etching of The Gold Weigher with its thickly bagged coins; James Gillray’s caricature of Pitt the Younger with a stomach full of sovereigns, paper money belching from his mouth; a sharp 1933 painting by the overlooked English artist Charles Spencelayh. An old man holds a ten-shilling note up to the light and discovers that it has no watermark. It is the typical fraud of the Great Depression. His eyes are already bleary with horror.
But this exhibition delves deeper into the enduring relationship between art and money. For money is itself both an image and an object. It could be an ancient scrap of paper inscribed with flowing Arabic calligraphy, or a Roman coin bearing the hard profile of an emperor (Rubens transformed eye-catching drawings based on coins acquired on trips to Italy into portraits of Nero, Vespasian and Vitellius for his house in Antwerp).
Yet even these coins, no matter how functional, are first and foremost works of art. One of the most arresting sequences shows all the many different portraits of Edward VIII that were used as models for his head on a coin; some were rejected because they showed him too young or in an expensive evening dress. Edward wanted the images on the obverse to appear more “modern” and preferred designs by John Francis Kavanagh, head of sculpture at Leeds College of Art, among others.
Kavanagh’s strictly geometric St George for the 1937 half-crown, full of inverted triangles and crossing swords, was succinctly rejected by the Royal Mint: “Mr. Kavanagh’s ‘Cubist’ designs cannot be taken seriously.” But the bigwigs never had to worry about the avant-garde intruding on established traditions anyway. For the coins, whose production was due to begin on January 1, 1937, were cancelled by the King’s abdication on December 10, 1936. Only the trial coins were ever produced, and then they were completely lost for over 30 years until someone discovered them in a sealed box in a Royal Mint safe.
However, artists keep trying to infiltrate the currency, especially in Europe. Viennese Secessionists like Koloman Moser repeatedly tried unsuccessfully in the 20th century to put their designs for glowing-eyed Art Deco beauties on all denominations of Austrian paper money. Joseph Beuys defaced banknotes with his signature and the slogan “Art = Capital” in the 1980s. Of course, his conceptual move didn’t work because sharp-eyed Germans quickly spotted the banknotes in circulation and sold them to collectors at a profit. Art = Capital has always been a truism.
It is shocking to learn that the so-called Dressed head of Elizabeth II, created by Arnold Machin RA in 1966, is the most reproduced image in history (300 billion copies to date). And here it is, the original bas-relief of the young queen with her crown, as subtle but not as characterful as Martin Jennings’ profile head of her careworn son Charles III from 2023. Curators are surely right to wonder whether the switch to virtual money will diminish the impact of this crownless portrait.
Different Commonwealth countries have strange variations on Elizabeth II. For example, Yousuf Karsh’s famous Ottawa portrait photograph is transformed into a long-nosed queen with a slightly horse-like face on Canadian banknotes. Depending on where you are in the world, she gets fatter, thinner, older, her eyes are set deeper or lower, and she changes from profile to three-quarter view, until she appears frontal on the Falkland Islands banknote. Alongside this, the curators have cleverly staged Chris Levine and Rob Munday’s equally frontal holographic queen with a distant gaze, as if she were rising above or beyond the worries of office.
What appears on the back of your banknote is a delightful subplot in this unfolding story. In Bermuda, it’s a blue swallow, a whistling frog or a red cardinal. In Japan, it’s the signature of the mint master in the Edo period. Banksy depicted Princess Diana – divorced, dethroned and dead – on a 2004 tenner.
Art loves money as a political metaphor, and sharp uses are found throughout the exhibition. Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles used banknotes to convey defiantly critical messages against the country’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Paula Stevens-Hoare stamped the likenesses of Marie Stopes, Rosalind Franklin and engineers Sarah Guppy and Beatrice Shilling over the faces of men on Bank of England banknotes to protest the removal of social reformer Elizabeth Fry from the £5 note in 2016.
The most striking is the African market stall by the Beninese artist Meschac Gaba, which sells bundles of discarded banknotes. These disappeared with colonialism and are now worthless except as flimsy souvenirs.
There is so much to learn – that the dollar sign is based on a Spanish colonial coin; that a goldfish is a symbol of wealth in China; the rice barn in Sumatra – that the art is very often overshadowed by pure knowledge. But the show is lively and insightful throughout. And it ends as dramatically as it began, with a work of art made of money: a Victorian-style dress by Susan Stockwell, literally sewn from a wealth of colonial banknotes.
