Date: 07-01-1992
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   20th Century  Now      

THE SURREALISTS started it quite some time ago, but it is still going strong. These days, the unfa-thomable narrative painting - the picture that first looks as though it is telling a straightforward story but is, in fact, so extensively furnished with enigmatic details, with mysterious addenda to its main subject, that it does nothing of the kind - has become an independent genre. Its products are fairly easy to recognise. They usually have the air of illustrations to lost, missing or unknown texts. The situations that they depict have a mythical, archetypal character, but their iconography can never quite be pinned down. The people in them have a folklorish aura, like the subjects of fables or fairytales, but again they always elude precise identification. Acting as prompts to the imagination such paintings are, too, cryptic challenges, tests for the visual codebreaker.

The genre (pioneered by the likes of Paul Delvaux in the 1930s and 1940s) has many practitioners in this country, who could be said to include artists as diverse as Ken Kiff and Steven Campbell. The best known of them, however, may be Paula Rego. She has recently finished a one-year spell as artist-in- residence at the National Gallery, the permanent legacy of which is a somewhat indigestible three-part mural for the Sainsbury Wing's restaurant, loosely (very loosely) based on Crivelli's Annunciation: a clutch of Regoids - heavy, vaguely threatening women, or strange little girls reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland - engage in indecipherable activities in vaguely sacred settings. The rest of the paintings and studies to have resulted from her residency, grouped under the title ''Tales From the National Gallery'', are temporarily on show in the museum's Sunley Room. They demonstrate Rego's undoubted talent for dreaming up the odd, disconcerting scenario.

Initiation is a theme common to the two most striking works here, although in neither does it seem any-thing like a cause for celebration. In The Bullfighter's Godmother, a typical domineering Rego maenad gets her godson the matador ready for the arena. She may be preparing him for his death, but she does not seem too worried about it, and neither does the succubus-like little girl who sits nearby in an armchair with his red cloak on her lap. He, by contrast, seems like a shrunken figure out of Manet, a timid, mother figure-fixated sort of fellow: a weak hero who does what he's told or else (most of the heroes in Rego's art have this hen-pecked air, the feeble creatures of the women who control them). Like many of Rego's paintings, The Bullfighter's Godmother seems to illustrate some parable of love and power, affection and domination.

In The Fitting, a heavy-limbed, bovine debutante stands patiently while her mother oversees the last-minute alterations to her dress being performed by a dark and stocky seamstress. Rego's chief talent is her ability to make the mundane seem freighted with menace, and she puts it to work here. The painting reads as an allegory of the transition from girlhood to womanhood, envisioned as a sinister and threatening event, pregnant with unhappy portents. A wardrobe in the background adds a Hogarthian element of com-mentary to the scene, decorated as it is with an image of a young woman and baby threatened by a horned demon. The ballgown that encases Rego's debutante is stony and mineral, more like a shell than an article of clothing: the trappings of womanly seduction with which she is being supplied also amount, it is clear, to a kind of trap, hard and confining.

The debutante's mother (you assume it is her mother), a diminutive creature half her size, presides over events like a circus ringmaster. Her small scale - a device influenced by the early Italian Renaissance paint-ings in the National Gallery? - can be assumed to be symbolically charged: a literalisation, perhaps, of the mother's replacement, in the cycle of sexual maturation, by her daughter. There is something malicious about her. It is as if she is taking her revenge on her daughter for being younger than her - as if she is enjoy-ing her daughter's ordeal by couture, her imprisonment in the role of man-bait.

These may well be gross misrepresentations of the artist's actual intentions - but then maybe that is as the artist intends. Rego goes out of her way to provoke metaphorical or symbolical or allegorical embroider-ings of her work. Her pictures invite you to spin stories around them, to tease out their meanings with fan-tasy.

In the catalogue to this show, Rego admits to feeling ''daunted and scared'' by the prospect of a year in the National Gallery, although you would not necessarily guess this from her pictures. Her brief was ''to pro-duce work directly related to paintings in the collection''. Substitute ''obliquely'' for ''directly'' and you would be closer to what she has actually done. The National Gallery is full of paintings that tell stories, that illustrate known biblical legends or myths in a readily comprehensible manner. Borrowing from them, however, Rego muddies their clarity, translates their narrative language into her own obfuscatory terms.

The angel from Philippe de Champaigne's The Vision of St Joseph pays a flying visit in Rego's own St Joseph (pictured, inset and above). He appears on the canvas-within- the-canvas daubed by the young girl busy at work painting a portrait of the slumbering, ordinary old man in an armchair who plays the part of Rego's saint. This may be intended as an image of the power inherent in the act of representation, and its proud usurpation by a woman. Such copied fragments from the museum's paintings - the dress in The Fitting is loosely based on one in Jan Steen's The Effects of Intemperance - emerge in Rego's art as denatured symbols, images that have been robbed of their prior significance by their removal to new contexts. Rego says she saw herself as ''a poacher'' in the National Gallery, a trespasser on the territory of others - although what she has really done is to invent her own territory and carry the source material of the Old Masters to it, adapting and reinventing at will.

 Rego's attitude to old art seems analogous to that of the modern non-figurative painter who argues that his art is traditional because it merely emphasises the abstract qualities that have always been there (Titian, Velazquez) in painting. Only analogous, because Rego practises her transformations primarily on the narratives rather than the forms of art. Her studies after paintings in the National Gallery demonstrate her interest in strange and ambiguous details, those elements - like the lion who enters, right, in Antonello da Messina's Saint Jerome in His Study - that introduce a sense of enigma into the image. In Rego's art this effect of incidental complication is enhanced because everything is open to interpretation. There is no primary text, only a multitude of suggested sub-texts: a kind of abstracted version of narrative painting.

What Rego's show at the National Gallery also and less happily exposes is the dullness of her technique. This is not entirely surprising since the competition, after all, is pretty stiff. Leaving The Rokeby Venus behind you and walking through to the Regos in the Sunley Room is, inevitably, something of a let- down. After Velazquez, Rego looks almost amazingly cack-handed: her drawing seems stiff and terrible, her painting crude, a dutiful filling-in with colour. But maybe this doesn't damage her as much as it might other kinds of modern artists. Rego's rough handling has a kind of low-art, folksy robustness which forces you to read her pictures for their stories - to see them as illustrations.

To call a fine artist an illustrator has long been one of the worst insults imaginable yet Rego, unusually, almost insists on it. What counts is the imagery, not the handling, and the kinds of speculation which it may provoke. Looking at Rego's paintings, you are meant to look into yourself, to write their absent stories in your head and concoct your own notions of what they mean. They seem designed to make you think about your own life and personal relationships and to measure them against the fictional ones suggested on the canvas. Pictorial analysis, here, is really a form of self- analysis, and the notion of art as a form of psychological therapy - which, like Rego's adopted genre, has its roots in Surrealism - is never far away. Virtuosity, here, would seem to be beside the point.