In its small but rhetorically charged exhibition Crivelli’s Garden, the National Gallery recasts a painting that Paula Rego created for its restaurant at the start of the 1990s as a Major Masterpiece of Radical Art. I could have sworn it was a gentle, playful work, perfectly judged for its setting in a convivial dining room, full of love for the Renaissance art this museum houses.
But no. According to Rego’s son Nick Willing in the exhibition catalogue, the late Portuguese-British artist saw the National Gallery as a place whose paintings “were made almost entirely by men and reflected the male experience”. When she became its first Associate Artist in 1990, “we joked that she was … in the belly of the beast”, Willing says. But “Paula erupted out of the belly of the beast stronger … exploring themes that quietly challenged the patriarchy to examine itself”.
That one word “quietly” is a giveaway. The nine-metre-long canvas Rego painted during her residency to hang in the museum restaurant is polite, civilised and completely unthreatening. Why didn’t Rego get her just desserts in the 1990s and early 21st century? It was because she seemed a slightly tame and old-fashioned figure in an age of unmade beds and pickled sharks. And Crivelli’s Garden demonstrates why. For while at her best she was a formidable, relentless and psychologically acute artist, she could also, as in this enjoyable yet aimless work, get quite fey with her love of fairytales and enchanted beasts.
Crivelli’s Garden is like a magical realist novel that bursts with incident and imagination. But, like a magical realist novel, you can tire of all the energy. An exuberant fictive architecture of Renaissance porticoes and piazzas, a sculpture-studded fountain and blue Portuguese tiles teem with images of myths and Bible stories in which women feature powerfully. These narrative representations are witnessed by a female audience, including a mother reading to her child, a painter who might be the young Paula, and at the very end of the epic, a woman reading to herself.
The stories include Actaeon being attacked by his own dog after the goddess Diana turned him into a stag, Judith slaying Holofernes – and many more. That “many more” is the problem, though. The narrative details are more copious than in the most symbolically packed Renaissance altarpiece. Rego is so high on storytelling that she leaves you wondering where all those frogs, monks and scissors come from, and what they are supposed to mean. Well, I can guess what the scissors are for.
Apart from Rego’s mural-scale work and a handful of preparatory drawings, which show how she used staff members at the National Gallery as models, the other main exhibit is Carlo Crivelli’s late 15th-century altarpiece The Madonna of the Swallow. Crivelli was a quirky genius who was exiled from Venice for adultery, and this is no ordinary religious artwork. It bristles with wit, life and danger. A good-looking Saint Sebastian shows a fine pink-stockinged leg and the handle of a magnificent sword as he stands by the Virgin above a display of superbly executed fruits. It’s more physical than spiritual.
What patently fascinated Rego was Crivelli’s use of perspective to hold together a bewildering variety of content. Those fruits may be random, yet they inhabit real space. This rendering of deep space was the great Renaissance invention, and along the base of the altarpiece – the predella – Crivelli deploys it to create three landscapes that almost, but don’t quite, join up.
It was Crivelli’s surreal predella that gave Rego the idea for Crivelli’s Garden, which, you see by comparing them, has the same dimensions on a much bigger scale: it is long yet vertically narrow, like a massively enlarged predella. The real theme of her painting is, I think, not gender, but something far more technical. She is exploring the ways in which perspective can permit and structure visual storytelling.
Perhaps that’s why if you try to “read” the narratives in Crivelli’s Garden, they are unsatisfying. Their true purpose is to decorate a painting that’s a celebration of perspective art – and all the painters in the National Gallery who were so good at it.
Rego’s pleasure is infectious. Crivelli’s Garden is a happy painting. It doesn’t make you want to change the world so much as follow up this nice starter by gorging on all the paintings in the National Gallery, which, for all her protestations, she plainly loved.
• Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden is at the National Gallery, London, from 20 July to 29 October
