Dining with panthers.

Holloway, Memory

Paula Rego's Map of Memory: National and Sexual Politics. By Maria Manuel Lisboa. London: Ashgate, 2003. 240 pp. + 100 b & w and 20 colour illustrations. Hardback [pounds sterling]52.50.

Are love and history compatible? That is the marriage contract that Maria Manuel Lisboa makes regarding Paula Rego's work since the 1980s, and like most marriages there is gender trouble from the start.

Lisboa tackles problems of authority, power and repression by looking directly into Rego's work from the perspective of Portuguese history, with its nostalgia for a lost maritime empire, its resentment of the white retornados who secured and protected the empire and its African colonials who immigrated to Portugal in 1974 after the fall of Salazar and, ultimately, the emergence of democracy that followed. Most importantly, she looks at the ways in which Rego presents the dilemma of women under that regime and in more recent times. Although her references to history underpin all of her readings, she also consults the novels of Jane Austen, the poetry of Fernando Pessoa's Alberto Caeiro, the short stories of Raymond Carver and Karen Blixen. She also draws on the debate between the theories of the New Historicism and Post Modernism which she identifies as the debate between context and text. She identifies herself as a writer working with a history and literature background who subscribes to the methodologies of the New Historicism in which there is a return to the use of history as a backdrop to texts.

The challenge that faces New Historicist critics, she says, is a double one. They have to deal with the contempt of historians for the historical validity of literary and visual texts. Equally, they must answer the claims of Post-structuralists that interpreting any text is arbitrary. Since we are dealing with a material culture in which objects are drawn, painted, and made by hand, I will add a third area that must be addressed. In this case it is the sheer physicality of Rego's work, its visual weight, and the solid lapidary forms that the viewer registers as a bodily sensation. It is this aspect of Rego's work that draws us to her, that requires our attention and engagement: the body, spoken through the narratives of history and psychoanalysis and especially through the artist's astonishing control of form.

I suspect that the thrill of watching Rego's skill unfold in picture after picture was at least one factor that drew Maria Manuela Lisboa to the artist's work. 'Painting', Paula Rego tells us, 'is not just colours and form, but also history.' But painting before it is anything, is a material substance, put down, transformed, fashioned into an object that we can read. There are other visual arts in which making might not be the first priority, such as conceptual art, in which the idea is privileged before all else. Erwin Panofsky, in defense of interpretation used in the closing chapter of this book, writes that the investigation of meaning contributes to our enjoyment of works of art. Enjoyment issues from both the intellect and sensuous response. All three approaches to the work--history (or the social context), interpretation, and an understanding of the manipulations of form--give greater rather than lesser returns when used together.

That said, Lisboa takes us deep into the territory of meaning and history in a way that delivers a new understanding of the work. Here are several examples, chosen for the historical content on which they are based.

In The Dance, Paula Rego paints local villagers dancing under the moonlight on a summer night, the sea and cliffs just beyond behind them. But ominously looming behind them is a fortress that strongly resembles Caxias. This was one of Salazar's jails, five or so miles from Lisbon on the Estoril coast. Here political prisoners were detained, often without trial, and tortured. It is a melancholy picture whose atmosphere is that of an unpopulated summer resort in which the figures are rendered with the same chiseled line as the rocks behind them. Lisboa's alert historical reading brings into clear focus the tensions in Rego's work. What appears to be a festive occasion is overloaded with a collective map of memory.

The immediacy of those memories is the topic of Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (1960) in which an ugly biomorph aggressively scratched onto the surface of the canvas, gorges on and then disgorges the nation. When We Used to Have a House in the Country (1961) is assembled by cut up and collaged pieces that underline a condemnation of living in someone else's country. 'What could be more critical of the history of Portuguese colonialism', Ruth Rosengarten asks in an earlier publication, 'than this figuration, in visceral and depressing colors?' These are ambiguous pictures whose meaning remains unfixed, where the idealized supporter of the 'policy of the spirit', the homeland the family is replaced with a sickly figure of disgust.

Rego's pictures tell of her disappointment in what she refers to as a pseudo-democracy that has never grown to maturity. Her work is sharpened by a deep-rooted skepticism, and quickened by a rhetoric that questions the authority of fathers, husbands and dictators. She explicitly reveals the dark secrets of the family, of sex, and of love, and tells of the suffocating oppression experienced widely, but in particular by women under the Estado Novo. Rego has not forgotten growing up under a regime that placed its values in the trilogy of God, Country and Family. For forty years she has spoken the unspeakable by painting pictures that throw light on incest, rape, masturbation and abortion.

Between July 1998 and February 1999, Paula Rego did a series of ten pastels on the theme of abortion. She began working on them not long after the failure of the referendum of 28 June 1998 to provide abortion on demand. Lisboa, in the most developed chapter of the book, observes that commentators attributed the failure of the vote to fear and the intervention of the Catholic church. Only 31.94% of the electorate voted, explained perhaps by the threat of excommunication. Rego set to work within a month, and I remember the secrecy that prevailed when she was at work on them when she would not say much about what she was doing in the studio at the time. They are untitled works, silenced and without speech, as Lisboa points out. Not long after the referendum, I spoke to women who had gone to the Algarve to campaign for the vote. They were tired and discouraged at its failure. Rego's response was one of anger and compassion, and these are among the most powerful works that she has done. 'I know about those things', she said at the time. 'I saw the women of Ericeira.'

The complications of working on the theme of abortion goes against the grain of tradition in painting in the West. Birth is celebrated. But abortion is the antithesis of the Annunciation, of the Virgin birth, of all that has been deemed good and sanctified. It is by some accounts an act against love and is so disturbing a topic that it is rarely taken up as a subject for visual representation. Instead of leading from God the Father to the divine but human son, abortion culminates in a dead fetus in a bucketful of blood. In a chain of associations, Lisboa links abortion to theological debate, to representation, gendered looking and scopophilia and the long tradition in Western painting of seduction and its results.

Rego's abortion pictures present adolescents hardly equipped to be mothers. They are teenagers, granddaughters, girls in their school uniforms doubled up and grimacing in pain. These images avoid the sensational; there are no moments in which we are shown the fetus or the bloody aftermath. They are discreet but contextualized by a punitive Catholicism that Rego brings to this work. She and we are haunted by the equal measure of suffering and guilt played out in rooms with shiny black sofas and rich reds that substitute for the internal workings of the body. There is no moral posturing, rather a record of what it feels like to be frightened or waiting and ready for the scalpel. Love and history are uneasy companions here; they awkwardly traverse a terrain littered with the bodies of young girls marked by their desire, too inexperienced to know their own powers to resist.

Paula Rego's Map of Memory ends on a redemptive note so finely matched to the artist's work that it bears repeating here. Rego, the writer says, turns the world upside down in her attention to birth, love, marriage and death. Not much has changed since Rego began her searing comments on Portuguese politics and the failure of democracy. Rego is really an anarchist in painting, a Dog Woman, a Bad Dog who snarls and occasionally bites her masters. 'Feasting on these paintings', says Lisboa, 'is like dining with panthers. There may be a price to pay, which here entails seeing laid plain what previously we hadn't dared to think.' In the final pages, Lisboa touchingly recites Karen Blixen's story of Babette's Feast, in which the protagonist spends all the money she has won in the French lottery on a meal for twelve puritans who are not initially given to enjoy the pleasure of the meal. The exception is two spinster sisters for whom the meal opens up worlds they have never imagined possible. That is the claim that Lisboa makes for Paula Rego's work, a claim made credible in her reference to narratives, histories and contexts that are impressively knit together. Rego's is not a pamphleteering art. It is much more than that in its angry but compassionate address to those who still labour under the oppressive forces of history and gender bias.

Some time ago, in one of the Dia Art Foundation publications, Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani observed that the new historical writing at its best allows a chorus of voices to speak. It focuses on the process and not just the historical moment, on the scene and not just the individual, on the body of historical discourse, and not just the figure. (1) The new history, they write, is about the pain of the past as well as the struggles of the present.

In the drawings and paintings of Paula Rego and all that they contain, Maria Manuel Lisboa has found an appropriate figure through which to interrogate the future possibilities for a democratic Portugal. The struggle of the present is not only that of a collective will towards autonomy; it is also marked by the individual working in the quiet of the studio. As the brush moves across the canvas, thinking about the past the present is measured in each stroke.

(1) 'Introduction', in Remaking History, ed. by Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), p. xi.

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS DARTMOUTH