Money Talks: Art, Society and Power review – a vivid, revelatory look at two sides of the same coin

The serpentine flash of a dollar sign, in Andy Warhol’s black and gold canvas, opens this fascinating show. Brusque, abrupt; splashes of paint scattering around it like cartoon speed marks – the motif seems to drive towards the future. That it is priceless today, and now looks so very evidently handmade, probably goes against the spirit in which it was churned out of Warhol’s Factory back in 1981. It represents what it shows, but by now exponentially – the most recognisable symbol of wealth in the world.

Dollar Sign is an ideal start to an exhibition that explores money through art. Depictions of money are legion, and there are plenty on display: Rembrandt’s etching of The Goldweigher with his fatly bagged coins; James Gillray’s caricature of Pitt the Younger with a stomach full of sovereigns, belching paper money from his mouth; a sharp 1933 painting by the overlooked English artist Charles Spencelayh. An old man holds a 10 shilling note up to the light only to discover it has no watermark. It’s the standard Great Depression fraud. His eyes are already dim with dismay.

But this show goes deeper into the evergreen relationship between art and money. For money, after all, is in itself both an image and an object. It might be an ancient scrap of paper inscribed with fluid Arabic calligraphy or a Roman coin bearing an emperor’s tough profile (startling drawings by Rubens, based on coins he acquired on Italian trips, would be transformed by the Flemish master into portraits of Nero, Vespasian and Vitellius for his Antwerp house).

But even these coins, no matter how functional, start out as works of art. One of the most enthralling sequences here shows all the many different portraits of Edward VIII made to be adapted for his head on a coin; some deselected because they showed him as too young or in expensive evening dress. Edward wanted the obverse images to appear more “modern”, favouring, among others, designs by John Francis Kavanagh, head of sculpture at Leeds College of Art.

Elizabeth II grows fatter, thinner, older, eyes more sunken or lowered depending where in the world you are

Kavanagh’s fiercely geometric St George for the 1937 half-crown, all inverted triangles and crisscrossing swords, was tersely rejected by the Royal Mint: “Mr Kavanagh’s ‘Cubist’ designs cannot be taken seriously.” But the top brass never had to worry about the avant garde creeping into established traditions in any case. For the coins that were scheduled to enter production on 1 January 1937, were cancelled by the king’s abdication on 10 December 1936. Only the trial coins were ever made, and then entirely lost for more than 30 years until someone discovered them sealed in a box inside a Royal Mint safe.

Artists do keep trying to infiltrate the currency, however, especially in Europe. Viennese secessionists such as Koloman Moser repeatedly try and fail to get their designs for art deco beauties with smouldering eyes on to every denomination of Austrian paper money in the 1900s. Joseph Beuys defaced banknotes with his signature and the slogan “Kunst = Kapital” in the 1980s. Of course his conceptual gambit didn’t work because eagle-eyed Germans rapidly spotted the notes in circulation and sold them to collectors for a profit. Art = Capital has ever been a truism.

It is startling to learn that the so-called Dressed Head of Elizabeth II , as sculpted by Arnold Machin RA in 1966, is the most reproduced image in history (300bn copies to date). And here it is, the original shallow relief of the young queen in her crown, as subtle but not as characterful as Martin Jennings’s profile head of her careworn son Charles III from 2023. The curators are surely right to wonder whether the move to virtual money will lessen this crownless portrait’s impact.

Strange variations of Elizabeth II occur in different Commonwealth countries. Yousuf Karsh of Ottawa’s famous portrait photograph is traduced into a long-nosed and slightly horse-faced queen on Canadian banknotes. She grows fatter, thinner, older, eyes more sunken or lowered depending where in the world you are, shifting from profile through three-quarters view until she appears full frontal on the Falkland Islands currency. Nearby, the curators have judiciously displayed Chris Levine and Rob Munday’s equally frontal holographic queen with a faraway gaze, as if rising above or beyond the cares of office.

What appears on the back of your currency is a charming subplot in this unfolding story. In Bermuda, it is a blue martin, a whistling frog or a red cardinal. In Japan, it is the signature of the mint superintendent in the Edo period. Banksy has Princess Diana – divorced, deroyalled and dead – on a 2004 tenner.

Art loves money as political metaphor. There are tart deployments all through this show. The Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles used banknotes to transmit messages defiantly critical of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Paula Stevens-Hoare stamped the likenesses of Marie Stopes, Rosalind Franklin and the engineers Sarah Guppy and Beatrice Shilling over the faces of men on Bank of England notes as a protest against the removal of the social reformer Elizabeth Fry from the £5 in 2016.

Sharpest of all is the Beninese artist Meschac Gaba’s African market stall selling bundles of decommissioned banknotes . These went out with colonialism and are now gleefully 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 the symbol of wealth in China, in Sumatra the rice barn – that the art is very occasionally overshadowed by sheer knowledge. But this is a vivid and revelatory show throughout. And it ends as dramatically as it began, with a work of art made out of money: a Victorian-style dress by Susan Stockwell, literally stitched out of a wealth of colonial banknotes.

• Money Talks: Art, Society and Power is at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford until 5 January 2025