Paula Rego: Art, Catholicism and the Female Gaze
My feature article for the latest edition of the Art and Christianity magazine.
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The latest edition has a feature article by me on Paula Rego’s life and work. I have permission to share it with my Substack subscribers. Here is a link to download the article, and I’ve published an extract below.
Extract:
Threading through all Rego’s works is the formative influence of her early life. She filtered her experiences of living under a Catholic dictatorship through a lens that focused on the trauma, resilience, and defiant vulnerability of female bodies caught in the vice of these oppressive religious and political cultures. In an in-depth study that situates Rego’s life and art in a wider context of cultural, religious and artistic influences and resonances, Maria Manuel Lisboa observes that ‘her images are rooted in a pre-existing context whose nuances inform the resulting pictures, and are central to their meaning’.[i]
Many of these images are unsettling, often grotesque or surreal, sometimes metamorphosising between human and animal forms. They are haunted with a sense of violent eroticism, raw sexuality, and tormented flesh blurring into each other. In her vivid representations of women ranging from the Virgin Mary to women in the throes of abortion, Rego’s work subverts the reification of Woman as an essentialist ideal and unleashes female life in all its fleshy abundance and diversity. Her women are wounded and proud, undefeated by the struggles that are written into their writhing limbs and violated bodies. The mottled bodies are evocative of Lucian Freud, but where the ‘male gaze’ refers to bodies seen through an androcentric lens by both artist and intended viewer, Rego’s gynocentric focus constitutes a ‘female gaze’.
Christopher Moore likens Rego’s art to Luce Irigaray’s philosophy. Rego paints the history of art in the same way that Irigaray writes the history of philosophy, as an exposure of ‘an unaccountable and unaccounted (female) coefficient [that] was always missing.’[ii] To understand what this means, we might turn to Rego’s 1991 work commissioned by the National Gallery, Crivelli’s Garden, inspired by Carlo Crivelli’s fifteenth century altarpiece in the gallery, Predella of La Madonna della Rondine. Rego explains how, during her residency at the National Gallery, she occupied the artist’s studio in the basement where she felt like ‘a scurrying animal’:
I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to where I could munch away at them. And what I brought down here from upstairs varied a lot, but I always brought something into my den.
Rego attributes her interest in the Christian story as told through art to those years of working in the National Gallery.[iii] Her Crivellli’s Garden reimagines the stories of women biblical figures and medieval saints by situating them in Crivelli’s house and garden. As with all her art, the references are allusive and personalised, with the characters representing various people known to Rego. An exhibition at the National Gallery later this year will display the Crivelli and Rego works alongside each other and explore their relationship.[iv]
This Crivelli work, with its domesticated array of homely women, lacks the sense of trauma that haunts many of Rego’s paintings and drawings. Catholicism suffuses much of the work with a religious sensibility tensed between outright rejection and willing conformity. In the BBC documentary, she passionately asserts that she believes in God and in the Virgin Mary, but whether these occupied the same imaginative plane as the other myths and stories that inspired her is impossible to know. When questioned about her belief in God, she is reported elsewhere as saying, ‘I think it is because I am Portuguese and because I love stories, and Christianity is a very good story.’[v]
Perhaps Rego’s politicised feminist relationship to Catholicism is best explored through two of her works – the controversial Abortion Pastels (1998), and the Nossa Senhora series representing the life of the Virgin Mary (2002). The ten pictures and numerous etchings in the Abortion series represent the trauma of illegal abortion. They were Rego’s passionate response to the result of a Portuguese referendum to legalise abortion in 1998, which was strongly opposed by the Catholic hierarchy and was defeated by a narrow majority. A second referendum in 2007 resulted in a majority voting for the legalisation of abortion – a result that is believed to have been influenced by Rego’s paintings, etchings of which were widely distributed.
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Rego was commissioned by Portuguese president Jorge Sampaio to create the series about the life of Mary for the chapel in his official residence, the Palácio de Belém. The eight pastel drawings include Annunciation; Nativity; Adoration; Purification at the Temple; Flight into Egypt; Lamentation; Pietà, and Assumption. The project so delighted Rego that she did additional pastels for her own personal collection.
Discussing the commission in an interview with Richard Zimler in 2003, Rego emphasised the novelty of such works being done by a woman: ‘A woman telling the story – in fact, Mary telling the story.’[vii] The images are unsettling and disrupt expectations honed by familiarity with the story. In an interview published in this magazine (Winter 2021), Rowan Williams describes them as ‘a deliberate messing with your theological mind.’ The pictures are odd, but there is little that directly offends. Rego said they ‘were created with admiration and respect’, but some conservative Catholics wrote an open letter to the president declaring the works to be an ‘outrage done to the vast majority of the Portuguese people … and an offence to the Virgin Mary.’[viii] In the BBC documentary, Sampaio explains that he invited the local cardinal to see the series, and ‘he was really impressed, very impressed’.
The contrast between the Abortion Pastels and the Nossa Senhora series is perhaps more apparent than real. Like the girls in the Abortion pictures, Rego’s Mary is a young woman who must face the bewildering reality of pregnancy and childbearing alone, perhaps enduring a pregnancy that she never wanted, with only a strangely amorphous angel to accompany her. This is, Rego explains, Mary’s guardian angel. It appears in different scenes as a consoling maternal figure, a controlling matriarch, a male voyeur, and a young boy. Williams refers to
the queering of the angelic figure… saying something about the fact that the narrative of the Annunciation and of the Nativity is, in the widest possible sense, a queering story; it’s a story in which issues around gender and identity and power and compliance and all sorts of other things are just rolled together in a wildly anarchic way.
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The series is a defiant assertion of a woman’s reality over and against the idealised romanticism of the Catholic tradition, though as with all such subversive readings, it remains within that tradition and not outside of it. Rego’s Mary is stripped of transcendence, shorn of her divine maternity, embodying the strength and struggle of women who have born the weight of that dominant tradition but refused to let themselves be crushed by it – like Rego herself perhaps. As Williams says, ‘It’s as if the artist is saying: what you’re seeing is, let’s be clear, what I’m seeing. This is my world; these are my figures.’