A woman sits with a book in her lap, her hand holds it open, a finger has stopped on a single word. She is just a small figure in Paula Rego’s vast triptych, utterly lost in thought, but from her, everything else here unfurls.
The three huge canvases of ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (produced for the National Gallery’s restaurant in 1991 and inspired by the museum’s fifteenth century Carlo Crivelli altarpiece, shown nearby) tell countless complex tales of historic, mythic, saintly women, from Mary Magdalen to figures from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The whole thing is bathed in blue and white, the colours of the tiles on Rego’s childhood home in Portugal. Some figures are tiny, others are giant, some are biblical, some are mythical. Fantasy and reality smudge into one, the past smashes into the present. It’s all one circuitous, interconnected garden.
Some figures sweep, others talk secretly or look after children, others still have been rendered as huge statues or ornaments on fountains. This is Rego taking a hallucinatory trip through the past, meeting and celebrating women throughout history, treating time as a circle rather than a straight line.
On a purely personal level, Rego’s aesthetic isn’t for me. I’ve never been a fan of her dramatic, crude, cartoony style, and seeing her work shown next to Crivelli’s masterpiece doesn’t do her any favours.
But as an idea, a vision of a past where women are not incidental but central, where their roles defined the shape of history, it’s great. Rego often twisted the world to fit her ideas, and here she’s taken all the hyper-male, phallocentric art of the National Gallery (which she described as a ‘masculine collection’) and shifted the perspective, altered the narrative. Rego tells untold stories, and show’s just how worth telling they are.
