Three quotations sum up Paula Rego’s approach to her monumental work Crivelli’s Garden, a free, one-painting exhibition at the National Gallery in London.
First: “If the story is ‘given’, I take liberties with it to make it conform to my own experiences, and to be outrageous.” You step into Room 46 and you are confronted with a huge stretch of work containing dozens of figures, large and small, taking up the whole wall. It is outrageous – but in the most splendid way.
When Dame Paula Rego (1935-2022) was appointed the first associate artist – effectively artist-in-residence – at the National Gallery in 1990-92, she was commissioned to create a mural for the new Sainsbury Wing dining room. Working in a studio in the gallery’s basement, the result was the 31-foot-long Crivelli’s Garden, not actually a mural, because it’s painted on canvas, not directly on the wall.
It was inspired by a late-15th-century altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli, La Madonna della Rondine (The Madonna of the Swallow) – or, more accurately, by its predella, the five small panels supporting the main painting. One panel shows St Catherine; the other four are outdoor scenes in different views of the same garden, with the landscape continuing into the distance: Ss Jerome, Sebastian and George, and in the centre the Holy Family.
Rego would wander the National Gallery with Colin Wiggins from the gallery’s education department. Together they would imagine themselves into paintings, wondering what might be just around a corner in the background of a scene. Sometimes they would enter, in their imagination, one painting, such as Crivelli’s Annunciation, also in the gallery, and emerge in another, the linked landscapes of the predella panels in La Madonna della Rondine. The “liberties” Rego took were to create her own startling version from the glimpses of garden seen in Crivelli’s work, and fill it with her own vision.
Her “garden” itself is a series of courtyards on different levels, with steps between; a fountain, pillars, archways and niches, with murals on the walls and towers and the sea in the distance. It’s a glorious architectural confusion – and full of Rego’s trademark slightly heavyset women, ignoring the conventions of perspective, some almost stepping out of the frame, others of differing sizes in differing spaces.
“I preferred to paint women, and it was also a homage to them, their steadfastness and courage – the way they never gave up their faith,” she said – and Crivelli’s Garden is exactly that: a huge montage of strong women from both ancient and medieval mythology, from the Bible, from the Golden Legend. There isn’t any chronological storyline in the painting; in her third quotation, she says her interpretations of the stories “have no past or future. Everything happens in the present.”
Within Crivelli’s Garden, the saints and mythical figures that Crivelli and other artists have painted over the centuries all exist together, in her vibrant reimagining of his garden.
And so we have the story of Zeus and Europa, with Europa sitting on a bull (representing Zeus), grasping its horns and clearly in control; Leda and the Swan; Diana, goddess of the hunt; tales from Aesop’s Fables; and more, all observed by St Mary Magdalene sitting in an alcove, supported by angels. A young mother holding her baby is modelled on Rego’s daughter, Victoria, and her granddaughter. We have Delilah leaning over a slumbering Samson, and a young Judith and her maid holding a bag; does it contain the skull of the Assyrian general Holofernes, or are they perhaps rehearsing her beheading him?
The next panel again has a mixture of powerful women. It’s dominated by Mary and Martha, the latter diligently sweeping the floor while her sister sits in quiet contemplation. Behind them, St Catherine of Alexandria wields a sword over the decapitated head of the Roman Emperor Maxentius as vengeance for his ordering her torture. Behind them stands St Cecilia, surrounded by scenes of her torments.
Throughout, the painting is full of smaller figures. In this panel are the hermit St Mary of Egypt, shrouded in the long hair that covered her nakedness, and with a lion sprawled at her feet; in the background is St Margaret, with a giant frog on a lead, a transformation of the dragon which swallowed and then expelled her in the image on the wall behind; St Margaret is the patron saint of childbirth.
In the foreground, two nuns are gazing with awe on a girl who will one day become a saint; here, time has been subverted.
In the final panel, Our Lady and St Elizabeth are deep in private conversation, Elizabeth’s hand shielding her mouth as the cousins no doubt discuss their surprising pregnancies. Next to them, again disrupting any sense of linear time (“Everything happens in the present”), St John the Baptist, as a young boy, holds a lamb; and behind them, on the wall, Mary is holding the Christ Child. The remainder of the panel is a mural depicting scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary: her marriage, the Nativity, the end of her earthly life.
The painting is nearly all in blues and browns; the almost Wedgwood blue recalling the typical blue-and-white azulejo tiles of Rego’s childhood home in Ericeira near Lisbon, where she grew up under Portugal’s hardline right-wing Salazar dictatorship. The figures were modelled on Rego’s family and friends (a young mother and daughter sitting on steps is based on an old photograph of Rego and her daughter Cassie), but many of them feature National Gallery staff of the time. It was a delight, at the press preview, to meet Ailsa Bhattacharya, who modelled for several figures, including a girl painting a snake and the young woman at the right-hand side of the painting, sitting with a book – perhaps the storyteller narrating the whole painting; Rego described her as “the reader; she is certainly the start of it all, really; the anchor figure”.
Crivelli’s Garden is an astonishing painting; there’s a wealth of detail in addition to these scenes. And there are animals everywhere, not just the lion, the lamb and the giant frog, but a cat, an owl, a hawk, ducks or geese, pelicans, even salamanders.
Opposite the painting itself, and somewhat dwarfed by it, is Crivelli’s beautiful 15th-century altarpiece La Madonna della Rondine, whose predella sparked it all off. There is also a handful of pencil sketches of the gallery staff who would become characters in the painting, and small ink and watercolour preparatory studies for their scenes.
Before Dame Paula died in June last year, aged 87, she was thrilled to know that Crivelli’s Garden would have its own exhibition. For 30 years, this amazing and complex painting has covered a wall in the restaurant, until being removed recently for the Sainsbury Wing’s renovations. It bursts with life. It’s deeply spiritual; it’s irreverent; it’s fun; and it’s endlessly fascinating, always with more to discover. I’ve already been back to see it again with a friend, and will do so again. I’m sure I’m not the only person hoping Crivelli’s Garden will be given a new permanent home in the National Gallery.
Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden is at the National Gallery, London, until October 29
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