Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden review – the scissors I get, but what’s with the frog?

National Gallery, London
Rego’s huge mural, painted 30 years ago for the Gallery’s restaurant, sits alongside the altarpiece that inspired it. Hers is less a feminist revolt than a celebration of perspective itself

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”.

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