It is one of classical art’s most familiar scenes: Angel Gabriel informing the Virgin Mary she is going to have a baby. In Paula Rego’s “Annunciation”, however, there are unsettling changes. Mary is no impassive innocent, but a vulnerable adolescent dressed in her school uniform, shocked at the revelation.
This is one of the pictures on display in Religious Art in the Feminine, an exhibition showing Rego’s religiously inspired works — alongside those of another Portuguese woman, 17th-century artist Josefa de Óbidos — at the Casa das Histórias (House of Stories), a museum dedicated to Rego in the seaside town of Cascais, outside Lisbon. Though the artists are connected in their unique representations of Christian heroines, the show is largely dedicated to Rego.
“Annunciation” is part of a dazzling pastel series Rego created in 2002 when she was invited by Portugal’s then president Jorge Sampaio to create eight images reflecting the life of the Virgin Mary for the chapel of the Belém Palace, the head of state’s official residence. Rego insisted these works could never leave the palace, so they are presented here in slides.
From three centuries apart, Rego and Óbidos perform an inversion of the traditionally male perspective on Christian themes in art. Little known outside the Iberian peninsula, Óbidos’s unconventional works were an extraordinary accomplishment in an age of male-dominated paintings. But her works still epitomise qualities that are often reflected in traditional religious art: purity and devotion. In “Child Jesus, Saviour of the World”, the infant Christ gazes at us serenely, surrounded by flowers. In “The Virgin, Child and St John the Baptist”, Mary squirts milk from her breast into the mouth of baby Jesus. In “St Mary Magdalene”, the young repentant woman is dramatically portrayed under a Caravaggio-esque light, delicately yet desperately reaching out with her hands.
Rego, by contrast, turns religious art’s traditional male gaze on its head, placing a contemporary girl’s experience at the centre of her work. Motherhood, conventionally depicted as saintly, receives a darker treatment in Rego’s hands: “Pietá” shows a youthful Mary cradling the dead body of Christ, both mother and child portrayed as very young. The fiery red backdrop draws us into the depths of Mary’s nightmarish experience.
Rego’s deeply personal and often tragic experiences are interwoven with religious and social themes. The show features pictures from the “Life Cycle of the Virgin Mary” series which Rego kept for herself rather than giving to the presidential chapel, including the emotionally intense “Descent from the Cross”. Usually hanging in the artist’s bedroom in London, it was inspired by the death of Rego’s husband, British artist Victor Willing, from multiple sclerosis in 1988, and shows a woman taking Christ down from the cross. In “Agony in the Garden”, the Virgin, wearing a golden-toned silk dress, is curled over in anguish atop a green mountain.
Compassion is abundant in every room of the Casa das Histórias show. Rego’s empathy humanises Mary, breaking with the usual serene and ethereal characterisations. This is a Virgin we can relate to. She also chooses scenes rarely shown in religious art. In “Nativity”, Mary is lying on the lap of an angel as she suffers the pain of childbirth. “Can you imagine that happening to a young girl?” Rego asked in the documentary film Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories, made by her film-maker son, Nick Willing. To look at Rego’s work is to see women take centre stage; she has been described by art critic Robert Hughes as the “best painter of women’s experience alive today”.
Ahead of her time and known for defying social conventions, Rego grew up in a deeply Catholic Portugal under the ultra-conservative dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. She moved to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1950s when her father told her that Portugal was no country for women. In 1998, after a referendum in Portugal narrowly failed to legalise abortion, Rego created the powerful Abortion Series, depicting women crouched over buckets and lying on beds undergoing backstreet abortions. These were not pictures of victims but of brave, defiant women. The paintings’ impact has been credited with helping to change opinion ahead of a second referendum in 2007, which approved legalisation.
Novels and folk tales serve as the basis for many of Rego’s works, some of which feature in the exhibition, including “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt”, from her 1998 “Crime of Father Amaro” series. Rather than the Holy Family, it features a young woman, Amélia, kneeling next to the priest Amaro, who is holding their baby. It is inspired by the anti-clerical 19th-century novel by Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de Queirós, which tells the story of Amaro’s seduction of Amélia, his landlady’s daughter, whom he abandons when she falls pregnant and arranges for the murder of their newborn son.
Rego doesn’t hesitate to modernise the stories she adapts, empowering her female characters. This is among several works in which she explores power structures and gives women greater agency: “Angel”, the final work of this series, is not on display in the exhibition but depicts a victorious Amélia holding a sword in one hand and a sponge in the other as symbols of her revenge.
Rego renews images of Old Masters with a fierce feminist slant. Rather than victimising her subjects, she celebrates their defiance. In 1989, the National Gallery in London invited Rego to become its first associate artist and asked her to produce a series of works related to the gallery’s collection. Realising that there were so few female artists in the collection (only 21 of 2,300 of its paintings from the 13th to early 20th century were by women), she created “Crivelli’s Garden”, which is shown in reproduction in the Casa das Histórias show, alongside Rego’s studies. Set in a Portuguese-style garden with blue and white tiles, it is filled with images of mythical and folk stories of women saints. In one, St Catherine of Alexandria, a virgin martyr tortured and beheaded by Emperor Maxentius, is holding a dagger, her torturer lying before her on the floor. As in every story Rego tells, women are at the forefront, breaking free from misogynistic and patriarchal narratives.
To May 23, casadashistoriaspaularego.com
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Paula Rego’s dazzling and radical visions - Financial Times
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