If gender studies have any meaning in art history, it is in cases like that of the Anglo-Portuguese artist Paula Rego (1935-2022). We can only understand his work in the more than macho framework of Portugal and England from the 1950s to the 1970s. The catalog of the exhibition devoted to him by the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland, gives ample space to this grid of analysis, most relevant in this case: what Paula Rego painted, no man could have done.
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This reading, mixed with other more classic ones, makes it possible to conceive one of the most remarkable exhibitions, in 108 works, that we have seen by the artist. Long invisible, and even though she was, for a large part of her life, supported by the Lisbon Calouste Gulbenkian foundation, she only had her first major retrospective at the Tate Gallery – although it was at the one in Liverpool, not of London – only in 1997. The following year, his native country rejected by a vote the first text attempting to legalize abortion.
In reaction, Paula Rego, who, as an outlaw, had had to endure several of them, began a series of paintings among the strongest painted in her generation. They represent, life size or almost, single women (the “knitter” must have finished her work), lying on the makeshift furniture used for the operation. Sometimes a nearby bucket adds to the tragedy of the scene. It is said that the exhibition of this series was not for nothing in the final adoption of the law finally authorizing abortion in Portugal in 2007.
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