When Paula Rego (1935-2022) was commissioned to paint a mural for the dining room of the new Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in 1990, it seemed a thoughtless insult. There were precedents, to be sure, from Leonardo’s The Last Supper to Mark Rothko’s mural for the Four Seasons in Manhattan, though Rothko cancelled the contract after dining in the restaurant: “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.”
But Rego had allegorised the plight of women as cooks, cleaners, waitresses and all-round aproned slaves for so long she surely deserved better than a costly canteen. And yet here she was, among the cakes and the coffees, with a huge mural in sackcloth brown and the blue and white of the Portuguese tiles her figures sometimes have to wash. Why, half a dozen women in Crivelli’s Garden (1990-91) are actually working with brushes, and only one of them is an artist.
To some (including me), the mural seemed sporadically coarse, the title oddly subservient. What did Rego really get from Carlo Crivelli (c1430-95), an Italian master quite mad about architecture and perspective, weird critters and peculiar fruit? Now that her nine-metre mural is on display opposite Crivelli’s The Madonna of the Swallow, in a special exhibition, it is possible to see both what inspired her and just how far she got away.
Rego’s mural is a dense anthology of stories from the Bible, Aesop and Ovid, among others, sources of so many paintings in the museum’s collection. But unlike the male painters (though not Crivelli, whose altarpiece centres on Mary, after all), Rego is picturing women. Some are vast: a towering Martha mutinously sweeping the myths away while an enormous Mary sits listening. Others, like the Europa and Leda fending off the rapacious bull and swan respectively, are Lilliputian.
This is because Rego is fascinated by the pictorial possibilities of painting a mural. Images of women appear on pillars, fountains, alcoves, tapestries and tiles. There are two presiding spirits here: the first a young woman reading stories, stage right; the second a girl drawing a snake on the ground. Both are based on Ailsa Bhattacharya, a member of the gallery’s education team at the time, but each is a self-portrait by other means.
Indeed, Rego, in her time, plays many parts. Actual depictions appear throughout – the artist as a child, and as a mother with her own child – but she imagines herself into every role. Here is Mary Magdalene, a blue rose in her hair, wonderfully robust but thinking hard about the numinous; and Diana turning Actaeon into a tame pet stag. Catherine of Alexandria brandishes a sword (or is it a paintbrush?) over the severed head of the Roman Emperor Maxentius, who ordered her torture. The head is modelled on Rego’s then lover.
Just as reality enters into everything (witness the many dynamic drawings of sitters that accompany the main mural in this show), so time runs forward and back. There are togas and crinolines, midi skirts and barrettes, and at least one pair of what look like patent leather boots.
Nor does the work derive much from Crivelli, apart from his sequence of five architecturally divided panels below the main altarpiece, depicting the lives of various saints. Nothing in Rego is quite as strange as Crivelli’s spiny and fastidious St Catherine, with her sidelong glance, or his St George, face entirely obscured by the startled head of his horse. What Rego takes is the idea of contiguity, of narratives spooling imaginatively side by side.
Her mural was meant to be seen from afar, across dining crowds, which explains the broad brushwork of the larger figures. But the smallest details are often the strongest, most particularly St Margaret subjugating the devil in the form of a gigantic frog on a lead. (Margaret is the patron saint of women in labour.)
Most powerful of all is the whispered conversation between two women, just off-centre. The wall text identifies them as the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, newly pregnant, but the painting presents a vignette of solidarity, one woman confiding in the other, perhaps even offering a warning. It is a dramatically qualified Annunciation. Crivelli’s Garden is a lasting testimony to Rego’s mind and art, destined to return to a permanent spot in the Sainsbury Wing when it reopens in 2024 following refurbishment.
Ungardening is a temporary show of the late Jean Cooke (1927-2008), some of whose paintings were destroyed in a fire and most of which are rarely shown. Cooke was a trenchant self-portraitist, once portraying herself with a black eye after an assault by her husband and fellow painter, John Bratby. Their violent art-life relationship haunts the first half of this show. Cooke paints herself crammed into their bedroom, knees tightly pressed to one side to glimpse herself in the mirror (Bratby only allowed her to paint for three hours a day, and once locked her into the house to prevent her escape).
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris, c1972 shows her level-eyed and astoundingly candid against a wintry Blackheath window, nose reddened from the cold. She takes her title from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, and flowers turn out to be her commonest (most comforting?) theme.
She paints buttercups as dabs of yellow light, loves the acidity of orange nasturtiums, the chalk-white and dusty grey structures of perished plants in late autumn. In later life, post-Bratby, she is fascinated by the fringes of wind-burnt plants along the cliffs near her Sussex cottage. The Sussex landscapes are beautifully spare, divided between earth and clouds, figuration and abstraction.
Springtime Through the Window – white blossom beginning to froth in a benignly neglected garden – is poignant for its sense of indoor constraint. (There is a surprising image here of window snibs, frames, and a cat outside on the sill.)
Most affecting is a mantelpiece of hothouse irises and potted pansies, so carefully praised in all their different forms and variations of petal, tangled stem and hues of yellow and maroon, in slow strokes on a modest piece of canvas. Among them is a tiny self-portrait of Cooke, apparently incidental but of course the head gardener, as it were, as an incidental reflection in the mirror.
Star ratings (out of five)
Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden ★★★★
Jean Cooke: Ungardening ★★★
Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden is at the National Gallery, London, until 29 October
Jean Cooke: Ungardening is at the Garden Museum, London, until 10 September
