The other day I went to see the Paula Rego show at the National Museum for Women in the Arts (NMWA). You should know I have gathered around me a group of art afficionados, labeled the "Museum Group" in my email address book, which I shamelessly use (with their happy consent) to create an obligation for myself to go and see art exhibits. Every couple of weeks I send them an email with all relevant information about a show, and the date and hour I will go. They don't need to respond if they come (I'd rather they surprise me), they don't need to feel guilty or send regrets when they don't come. That way, I have to go, even if it turns out nobody shows up, which occasionally happens, and the group members have company if they choose to come.

 

Thanks goodness for the NMWA. Without it, I would not, or to a much lesser extent, have known about feminist art, Alice Neel, Artemisia Gentileschi, Sofonisba Anguissola, Judy Chicago, to name but a few, and now Paula Rego. Can't believe I'd never heard of her despite years and years of reading art magazines - but perhaps the American ones do not sufficiently cover the European scene? Paula Rego's work is associated primarily with Britain, the National Gallery in London, the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate, where she had a show in 2004. She's very famous, and still alive.

 

Paula Rego's latest work (after painting, collage, print-making) is in pastel. Pastel as in huge, dark, intense - the total opposite of what people think of in general when they hear the word "pastel": sweet colors, small work, flowers and pretty, pretty things. Well, it doesn't have to be that way and nowhere is that more gloriously clear than in Paula Rego's works. They are pastels, but look like paintings. Apparently she came to pastel as a medium because in oil she had trouble depicting volume in the human body and it certainly seems to have done the trick. If you google her, you will find a host of interesting facts, including that her name is pronounced "raygoo", with the "r" representing a rasping sound from the back of one's throat, like only Dutch and Arabs, and apparently also the Portuguese, seem capable of producing. If you know how to pronounce the "ch" in "Scheveningen", you've got it (if you don't know what Scheveningen is, well, google it).

 

I had never realized that a work of art can splash onto the retina in such a way that the emotion it embodies is conveyed to one's entire being, body and soul, before that same retina manages to feebly transmit the actual picture to one's brain. These works seize you by the throat, punch you in the gut, drag you to them by the ear and finish by kicking you in the behind. Your mind and soul hurt for days, like your body does after a murderous workout. Is this a hallmark of art made by women? I think of Artimisia Gentileschi's "Judith Slaying Holofernes" which makes any woman ever spurned by a man grin in total, guilt-free, delight. Or of Alice Neel's selfportrait, naked at her easel at age eighty-something, which sucks you in with its force and intensity and spits you out at the other end of some digestive process that either leaves you laughing out loud and looking forward to being that age yourself, or cringing in horror at the prospect of a wrinkly and laughable old age. Or of Kiki Smith's more ephemeral but no less gut-punching depictions of what's inside a women, be it in terms of emotions or of actual bodily content. That kind of art-making makes me secretly think it is no wonder women's art is marginalized: it must be profoundly frightening to the majority of men, and to certain women. I love it.

 

Paula Rego's work bristles with references to other artists. There are the Velasquez, Goya, Miro, Picasso (a lot), De Chirico, Dali of the Iberian peninsula of her birth (Lisbon, Portugal, 1935), and there are the Lucien Freud, the Francis Bacon of her adopted island, Britain (1952-present). But there are also the Polish-French painter Balthus (a lot), the Mexican Frida Kahlo, the Frenchmen Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas. And is that Joseph Beuys' dead hare, disguised as an Iraqi war victim? Or is it Elmer Fudd's widdoe wabbit, being bwave?

 

Even the enigmatic outsider Henry Darger appears, the seemingly feeble-minded janitor who died anonymously and penniless - but amongst the obsessive-compulsive debris in his apartment his landlord found a 12 volume manuscript illustrated with hundreds of pencil and watercolour drawings, entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. Google Darger, the work will blow you over, as it did with me when I saw it in 2006 in Chicago, where Darger died in 1973. Still quite unknown to most, Darger's work has inspired several well-known and cutting-edge artists, including Jake and Dinos Chapman. You don't have to be an art expert to see that immediately.

 

Paula Rego's enormous imagination produced prodigious amounts of work using opera, fairy tales, the Iraq war, her husband's long illness and death, her childhood, the Vivian girls, the politics of her native Portugal, the life and feelings of (older) women and (young) girls, and anything in between. Is that another hallmark of women's art - the enormous scope of their imagination, as well as that of their focus?

 

I bought John McEwan's book rather than the exhibit's catalogue, not only because it's price tag is a whopping $26 less, but especially because it includes a wider selection of her work. I can't wait to pour myself a glass of white wine, sit down on my couch, and read it.

 

An afterthought: this blogging business is a wonderful way to learn things!