80 William Hogarth, Shortly after the Marriage or The Tête à Tete (panel 2 from Marriage à la Mode)
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. ... I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets from the Portuguese
History is above all a lesson in morality.
Oliveira Martins, História de Portugal
It may be asked whether the interpretation of meanings apart from satisfying our intellectual curiosity also contributed to our enjoyment of works of art. I for one am inclined to maintain that it does. Modern psychology has taught us ... that the senses have their own kind of reason. It may well be that the intellect has its own kind of joys.
Panofsky
'The work of the painter and of all other representative artists [is] far removed from the truth and associated with elements in us equally far removed from reason, in a fond liaison without health or truth. ... Representative art is an inferior child born of inferior parentś' (Plato, 1987,371). For Plato, the artist's pursuit belonged in an ignoble league because it was seen as purely mimetic: 'the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents and ... the art of representation is something that has no serious value' (Plato, 1987, 369). Furthermore, he berates the visual and dramatic arts alike for incitement to immorality, and for this reason, in Book Ten of The Republic, he banishes both from his ideal state. According to this view poetry (art) 'has a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters'. Both poetry and art do so by encouraging indulgence in excessive emotion, so that we 'let ourselves be carried away by our feelings' (Plato, 1987, 374). Both were deemed to be unworthy pursuits for the free citizen
In Plato's sanitised republic, and in the encounter between the emotive artist and the truth-loving philosopher, there prevails nonetheless an enduring feeling of disquiet on the part of the latter towards the banished yet awe-ful artist: the feeling, in fact, of the subordinate gripped by anxiety of influence vis à vis the resented precursor. In the Platonic view the apprehensiveness experienced by the philosopher towards the artist is that of 'the bitch that growls and snarls at her master' (Plato, 1987, 376). Plato's moralising dictates, therefore, also entail a subsequent reversal whereby art becomes the dethroned master turned bitch, confined in the backyard of a houseproud state, purged of unruly aesthetic representations. According to these wholesome Platonic prescriptions, Paula Rego, an artist who pertinaciously insists upon exposing excesses of emotion which even Greek tragedy coyly consigned backstage, would undoubtedly have been kicked out of the yard.
Hers is an anti-Platonic aesthetic of immoderation, in which 'the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom' (Blake, Proverbs of Hell, 1990, xviii), and she claims that she knows a painting is ready when she is ashamed of what it reveals (Marques Gastão, 1997, 39; Kent, 1998, 15; Rodrigues da Silva, 1998, 11). Her paintings abound in sex, politics and religion, much like outbursts of bad manners in the midst of polite dinner-party conversation. And it is that rudeness which transposes what I would like to argue are sui generis History paintings into the genre of Civic painting or Art for the public good as developed in the eighteenth century.
By the eighteenth century the task of refuting Plato's diatribes against the arts-which Aristotie had left only half-accomplished (Gellrich, 1988)-was well under way. John Barrell has traced a shift in the perception of painting's function in the eighteenth century from the promotion of private to public virtues. It is in the context of this shift that he locates the rise of a civic humanist theory of painting that sought to restore the belief that art performed a public function, namely the fostering of a spirit of citizenship and a passion for the 'common weal' (Barrell, 1986, 5).
In the early decades of the eighteenth century in England, the most influential attempts to provide the practice of painting with a theory were those which adopted the terms of value of the discourse we now describe as civic humanism. The republic of the fine arts was understood to be structured as a political republic; the most dignified function to which painting could aspire was the promotion of the public virtues; and the genres of painting were ranked according to their tendency to promote them. As only the free citizen members of the political republic could exhibit those virtues, the highest genre, history-painting, was primarily addressed to them, and it addressed them rhetorically, as an orator addresses an audience of citizens who are his equals, and persuades them to act in the interests of the public. (Barrell, 1986,1)
For writers like George Turnbull, James Thomson and Anthony Shaftesbury, painting was a liberal art, concerned with depicting not the material but the ideal aspect of an object. Thus, rather than mechanical mimesis which neglected the loftier regions of intellectual meditation, as deplored by Plato, painting, like the other liberal arts, guarded the mind and society against corruption by encouraging public virtue, a civic spirit and a love of the common good (Barrell, 1986,11-14).
Curiously, the rehabilitation of art which Plato's onslaught had arguably rendered necessary has very recently been taken up in an unlikely quarter, and moreover in the context of an argument which has unexpected echoes of both Platonism and civic humanism, namely an open letter by Pope John Paul II to artists (John Paul II, 1999). Taking Plato as his departure point, albeit in a different text (Philebus) and in a different vein (Plato, 1975), the Pope enters the fray by regarding the artist, and artistic creation, as the means by which humanity attains its closest proximity to God: 'in artistic creation, more than in any other activity, man reveals himself as "the image of God" ... by exercising creative command over the universe around him' (John Paul H, 1999, 3). While at pains to emphasise that 'the infinite distance between the Creator and His creature' remains intact, John Paul II rescues art (or at least a certain type of presumably sacral art) from the charge of immorality by means of the Platonic theory of beauty. The artist, as the conduit of beauty to humanity, becomes also the transmitter of morality, following the Platonic tenet that beauty is the physical expression of goodness, and goodness the metaphysical precondition of beauty: 'the power of Good took refuge in the essence of Beauty'.1
John Paul's exhortation to artists towards inspirational and moral creativity ('beauty will save the world', 16), presupposes, of course, a brand of art at one with the establishment he represents and heads. Such details aside, beauty (art) for the social good ('society needs artists ... in order to guarantee the growth of the individual and the progress of the community, through that sublime art form which is "the art of education'", 5) makes his argument the improbable bedfellow of that zeal for the commonweal of the eighteenthcentury civic humanists referred to above:
Society needs artists, in the same way that it needs scientists, technicians, workers, experts, witnesses to the faith, teachers, fathers and mothers, who might guarantee the growth of the individual and the progress of humanity ... .In the vast panorama of each nation, artists have their allocated place. It is precisely when they obey their artistic genius in the fulfillment of works of true validity and beauty, that they enrich not only the nation's and the whole of humanity's cultural heritage, but also render a social service directed at the common good. (John Paul II, 1999, 5)
The common good, of course, is only ever that from a limited, inevitably narrow, point of view. One man's meat is almost invariably another man's poison. I wish to conclude this book with a proposal. Paula Rego's work of the last decade, conveniently from the point of view of linking it chronologically to the civic humanist theory of art, has included some works deriving inspiration from the eighteenth-century painter Hogarth, possibly British art's best-known social commentator and moralist as well as lampooner of the status quo. Not coincidentally, the theme she selected from his work was that of marriage (à la mode, his and her versions respectively). In her rendition, as might be expected, mothers rather than fathers broker marriage and money deals, and husbands rather than wives languish or die untimely deaths (figure 80; figure 81).
The cruel satirical streak which Hogarth and Rego share, and which perhaps initially attracted her to him for inspiration, points to another trait common to both, namely the propensity for morality with wit and also very much with a twist.
80 William Hogarth, Shortly after the Marriage or The Tête à Tete (panel 2 from Marriage à la Mode)
Curiously, and not irrelevantly here, just as Genesis excluded women from morality (and therefore, Platonically, from beauty) after Eve's theft of the apple, so too the civic humanist approach to art presupposed their exclusion as producers and viewers of painting: specifically, of History Painting, the genre par excellence of civic art, due to an innate 'imbecility of the female mind' (quoted in Barrell, 1986, 66):
That theory assumes that, as Shaftesbury had put it, 'Ladies hate the great manner'; that women cannot understand history-paintings, which are public and idealised works, the comprehension of which demands an understanding of public virtue, an ability to generalise, and 'an acquaintance with the grand outline of human nature', which (whether by nature or nurture) is denied to women, who are obliged to remain 'satisfied with common nature'. If the 'ladies' cannot discuss historypaintings, that is because it has been presumed impossible for them to learn how to do so. Portraits, however, work in terms of 'personal' ideas; they aim to present particular likenesses; where they represent virtue, they favour the private virtues; and they gratify the vanity of those who sit for them, and so of women especially, who are known to be especially vain. That women are happy to discuss portraits only confirms their inability to comprehend the higher, the public genre of art. (Barrel!, 1986, 68)
In view of this, Paula Rego's work, seeking as it does to challenge traditional historiography by, among other things, introducing women into history, offers us a triple twist. First, simply by virtue of being the work of a woman engaged, albeit largely antagonistically, in a dialogue with the master narratives of her country or countries-Portugal and Britain-in different periods. Second, because the civic message her paintings offer, and the public service they seek to render-albeit very much out of step with certain conventional moral principles, religious or otherwise-is, nonetheless, and undeniably, the promotion of areas of ethical and political debate, in which, whatever the final position adopted, it seems likely that a series of paradigmatic shifts in the attribution of guilt, blamelessness and innocence in a variety of contexts. 'A law which reverses another law makes for a surprise' (Rego and Bessa-Luís, 2001,118). And third, because, as these images are reintroduced to the specific historical referents that underpin them, the very fabric of human freedom is revealed to be fragile. With reference to her own Triptych after Marriage à la Mode by Hogarth (figure 81) she makes the following remarks: 'this all takes place in Portugal in the 1940s during Salazar's dictatorship. The rules were very strong and people had to cheat to survive. ... The girl is doing what she feels she must do: be obedient to her husband. It's a little bit of a rape, I guess' (Gleadell, 2000, 54). The rape, startlingly, takes place within an unholy composition which sees Hogarth's six-part work truncated, into, of all things, a triptych. The genre of the triptych, as observed previously, was traditionally reserved for scenes from the birth and life of Jesus, but here it gestures instead towards secular droits de seigneur, exercised now not over semi-willing virginal handmaidens but instead over reluctant daughters under enforced marriages of parental convenience: in either case, 'a little bit of a rape'. In a typical Rego twist, however, in reply to a question as to what was inside the bag in Lessons after 'Marriage à la Mode' by Hogarth (figure 81, centre panel, an echo of the head in a bag in Crivelli's Garden, figure 39), the artist replied: 'Well, heads, maybe. To survive, women had to do a few decapitations. When the man was asleep, up she comes, and whoosh, off with his head! ... She's quite tough. She's got to clear things up. Life goes on' (Gleadell, 2000, 54). Rego and Gentileschi (figure 61), then: sisters under the skin; art both old and new.
81 Triptych after Marriage à la Mode by Hogarth
In Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, Leo Steinberg discusses what he calls 'the plight of the public' faced with the challenges and irritations of radically new art, but also the disconcertingly 'rapid domestication of the outrageous' and the way in which 'the time lapse between shock received and thanks returned gets progressively shorter', turning 'enfant terrible into elder statesmen' with ever-escalating speed (Steinberg, 1975, 5-6). Not always, perhaps. In reply to a question regarding men's reaction to her works on abortion, Rego replied that 'they don't look, or if they do, they do so with difficulty. ... [The pictures] were well received as art, but their content was not mentioned. Art can conceal many things. ... If the colours are pretty, they attract, but then you see it, and ouch! ... ' (quoted in Marques Gastão, 2002, 40). In these final pages I wish to contend that Paula Rego's work endures within a paradox, whereby her critical and popular success, and the extraordinary saleability of her pictures, coexist with the probability that a clearsighted, fully comprehending acceptance of those images by the establishment (beyond an instinctive appreciation of their visually pleasurable dimensions-'if the colours are pretty, they attract') could only be possible after a sea change in a world which her depictions would in part have helped to tame. Like a girl and her dog.
Her pictures contain much that is erotic but also frightening, sometimes frightening because erotic, and vice versa. As argued previously, in the Western sexualised tradition of the visual arts, the erogenous usually involved a pair of eyes (male) that looked and a body (female) that was looked at. But the first voyeuristic moment in iconography and literature, the paradigmatic instant that set the ball rolling, was the moment when Psyche lifted her lamp to spy out the truth about Cupid, the mysterious lover who visited her in the night and upon whom she had previously not been allowed to gaze. Curiously, then, and I would hazard threateningly, the first voyeur was a voyeuse, a situation which clearly demanded a gender reversal and was duly set to rights by ensuing traditions. Paula Rego's iconoclastic impact breaks old habits and reverses the habitual structures of power, allowing us to see and think anew, as women, men and citizens. It has been said that her works tend to elicit from women the slightly nervous complicity of those who see their most secret thoughts and wishes given scandalous but welcome exposure: 'It is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting, still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly' (Greer, 1988, 34). And Paula Rego herself, proclaiming, as quoted previously, that her work is 'always, always' about revenge, has laid down a mission statement: 'I can make it so that women are stronger than men in the pictures. I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time' (MacDonald, 1998, 7). For this relief, much thanks. Rego herself once said that the problem with art education is that it ensures that its recipients can not see things, that they can not see them, they are able to avoid seeing them, like those ostrich women she painted in the past (figure 48). Or rather, unlike those ostriches, who unnervingly tend to look things in the eye, rather than burying their heads in the sand, even when, as was the case with Psyche, looking comes at a heavy price.
In The Female Eunuch Germaine Greer-who has both written about Paula Rego and been portrayed by her-notoriously argued that 'women have very little idea of how much men hate them' (Greer, 1985, 249). Two years later, Blake Morrison, who has also written about Paula Rego and whose poem, 'Moth', she illustrated, wrote 'The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper'. The subtext within this account in Yorkshire dialect about Peter Sutcliffe, the real-life serial killer of the 1970s and 1980s, sees him as quantitatively but not qualitatively different from many respectable men, pillars of the community. These, according to one writer, included some of the policemen who interviewed him on several occasions, but failed to charge him because they laboured under the misapprehension that they were looking for someone instantly recognizable, someone absolutely different in his misogyny, rather than someone in fact disturbingly like so many of them in theirs (Smith, 1989):
It's then I think on t'Ripper
an what e did an why,
an ow mi mates ate women,
an ow Pete med em die.
(Morrison, 1987, 24)
Morrison's exploration of the darker outreaches of male sexuality and sexual violence ('this curt fuck was how I paid her back', Morrison, 1987, 37) lays bare various unpalatable possibilities (misogyny, paedophilia, murder). And it is to these forces that Paula Rego has responded all her working life, with a contrary gender sign, proportional insolence and a hijacked scalpel that manifestly cuts both ways. As a young woman in Portugal, and for years as a much-patronised painter's wife in Britain, she stumbled upon the appallingly smug script of an ideological project from which both women and their stories had been written out.2 Or painted out of 'a visual field for art in which feminine inscriptions [were] not only rendered invisible through exclusion or neglect but made illegible because of the phallocentric logic which allows only one sex' (Pollock, 1999, 102). Her reaction has been a continual sybylline twisting of that masculinist prescription, for purposes that ought to warn us and to frighten us. What underwrites her gallery of ruminative and savage heroines is the problem of heterodoxy pitted against brutal conformity. Rego's strategy faced with the multifarious corporate and institutional facades of that conformity has always been to respond with an equal forcefulness, an approach whose other name is tit for tat. Following a parallel agenda to the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century reformist zeal which has variously inspired her (Hogarth, Eça de Queirós), but with recourse to the metaphors of her opponents, and like certain of the angels in her pictures, she is cruel, sometimes though not necessarily, in order to be kind. The difference, of course, is that the recipients of her cruelty and her kindness are never one and the same.
The relationship between artist and model, whether it is acknowledged or not, has been hyperdetermined by a struggle for power or against powerlessness, with aggressiveness and defensiveness as common components. Through more than four decades of creative activity Paula Rego has produced pictures whose model is the motherland. And in echo of some of Portugal's most renowned writers and creative artists down the centuries, her relationship to that motherland like theirs has not been devoid of ambivalence. Let us count the ways they loved it.
This is my well-loved country of content,
To which if Heaven grant me safe return,
And of my venture the accomplishment,
Why then for me may this light cease to burn.
(Camoes, Canto III, 21,1950, 150)
Luis de Camões, sixteenth-century Portugal's own bard, was inspired by the first European sea voyage to India in 1497 by the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama. His epic poem, The Lusiads ('The Portuguese', from the old term for Portugal, Lusitania), was published in 1572, not long before the military disaster at Alcacer Quibir in 1578, and his own death the year after. Even at the time of publication, the nation's imperial growing pains had begun to change, almost without transition, into arthritic over-expansion, and its territorial holdings in the East Indies were already beginning to break away Against the weight of scholarly opinion, this critic remains unpersuaded that the net balance of jingoistic patriotism versus doubt about the imperial project in The Lasiads is weighted in favour of the motherland in her empire-building capacity.
In Out of Africa, Karen Blixen, bleached Scandinavian in an African context which nonetheless bewitched her beyond all possibility of recovery-the ultimate act of terrorism on the part of an empire which does after all strike back, in mysterious ways-wrote poignantly of the postcolonial uncertainty facing the erstwhile coloniser:
If I know a song of Africa ... of the giraffe, and the African new moon lying on her back, of the ploughs in the fields, and the sweaty faces of the coffee-pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Would the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I had had on, or the children invent a game in which my name was, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or would the eagles of Ngong look out for me? ... But these communications from Africa come to me in a strange, unreal way, and are more like shadows, or mirages, than like news of a reality. (Blixen, 1988, 75-6)
Elsewhere the answer to the destructive nostalgia, the immobilisation of flickering meaning, is attempted, perhaps successfully, although, curiously, in the best tradition of a European lyrical lament:
You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my 'life has been wasted' here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know. ... She may be more gentle to others, but I hold to the belief that I am one of Africa's favourite children. A great world of poetry has revealed itself to me and taken me to itself here, and I have loved it. I have looked into the eyes of lions and slept under the Southern Cross, I have seen the grass of the great plains ablaze and covered with delicate green after the rains, 1 have been the friend of Somali, Kikuyu, and Masai, I have flown over the Ngong Hills,-'I plucked the best rose of life ... ' (Blixen, 1981, 416)
Blixen was arguably whistling in the dark. Her enduring post-colonial doubt shares a species similarity with Camões's imperial ambivalence. The latter, as argued previously, has echoed down generations of Portuguese creative life, and never more emphatically than in the work of this artist. In Portuguese, tellingly perhaps, the standard reply to the question 'how are you?' is not the automatic 'fine' expected and produced elsewhere, but, more often than not, a gloomier menos mal ('less bad' rather than 'not bad'). This very Portuguese 'less bad' may convey a grudging admission that things could be worse, but paradoxically, and equally revealingly, it conveys also both cloying pessimism and the realistic assessment of only relative improvement, both individually and collectively. Post-imperial Portugal is a nation in the grip of continuing contradictions: Mariological reverence for maternity side by side with chauvinistic denigration of women; pro-European modernity hand in hand with nostalgia for Atlantic expansionism; nouveau-democracy opposed to a society based on patronage, cronyism and ingrained civic discrimination. The last allegation requires some elaboration. The Portuguese ongoing obsession with its lost empire has coexisted with an ongoing resentment against the last generation of empire-builders, who in 1975 returned to the European motherland to a cold reception from those who had stayed at home. The economic difficulties resulting from the loss of colonial revenue were compounded by the arrival in the space of less than two years of one million Portuguese citizens from the erstwhile colonies, as well as a few black holders of Portuguese passports. The longing for its lost empire which endures to this day in Portugal, accompanied by a considerable lack of historical self-analysis and a proportionate degree of political incorrectness regarding the moral implications of imperialism-goes hand in hand with two social phenomena: institutional racism against the small numbers of black migrants from those former Portuguese 'provinces'; and a persistent resentment against the white so-called retornados or returnees, who had been the keepers of the imperial goose with the golden eggs. To a greater or lesser degree-largely depending on skin colour and ease of identification-a quarter of a century later both groups continue to suffer from ostracism in their land of origin or post-colonial adoption. The irony inherent in a serious want of self-knowledge, evinced by a longing for empire in parallel with a hatred of empire-builders (white colonials) and empire-fodder (colonised blacks) alike, is aggravated in a country such as Portugal, whose dominant religion trumpets the merits of self-knowledge. The self-examination which Paula Rego seeks to impose upon her fellow countrymen through her art, therefore, may be interpreted as a case of administering to the nation a taste of its own medicine, or, to put it another way, forcing it to practise what it preaches: 'to thine own self be true'. Arguably the most remarkable aspect of Rego's work is the way in which, echoing a previous remark, she compels her viewers, whether as individuals, groups or nations, to self-examination, and makes it at the very least difficult not to see.
Picasso stated in relation to Cézanne, and Steinberg discussed in connection with them both, the possibility that modern art is always born of anxiety and that its function is to transmit that anxiety to the spectator, creating in him or her 'a genuine existential predicament'. Such pictures, like 'God, who demands a sacrifice of Abraham in violation of every moral standard ... are arbitrary, cruel, irrational, demanding your faith, while [making] no promise of future rewards' (Steinberg, 1975, 15). So too, Paula Rego's paintings and pastels render alien previously familiar ways of looking at the world, violate barriers and turn that world upside down, thereby transforming History into stories, and vice versa. In what are, in an idiosyncratic sense of the term, life paintings, she addresses births, loves, marriages and deaths that don't necessarily or even very often come to fruition. Much time has passed between the early and the recent political paintings, but after all, it would seem, or at least in this artist's semi-apocalyptic vision, little has altered in significant areas of men's and women's lives, as signalled perhaps by the redundant watch, discarded on the floor of a timeless room of universal significance (n. 3, plate 19), which could be located at any point in time, in a country or countries in some respects much unchanged. How are we doing, then, as a nation? At best, less bad.
I will attempt a less disillusioned conclusion. In Karen Blixen's novella, Babette's Feast, the eponymous protagonist is a French woman who in the past had been Head Chef in the Café Royal, cooking for the rich and beautiful of Paris, and who now lives in Jutland, in exile from the restored royalists, after the fall of the Paris Commune. She leads a life of obscurity in a grey, puritanical Danish village. After twelve years of cooking boiled split-cod and bread-and-ale soup for the two spinster sisters who took her in, Babette wins ten thousand francs in the French lottery, and persuades her two mistresses to allow her to cook a special meal for the annual celebration of the birth of the community's spiritual father. At the end of a dinner for twelve of indescribable splendour, the two sisters discover with horror and gratitude that Babette has spent all her windfall on the meal. A meal, moreover whose repercussions will turn out to extend well beyond that evening, by, albeit briefly, introducing this ascetic community to sensual and emotional indulgence. As the radical shift takes place from pain to pleasure and from puritanism to pulchritudinous self-abandon, Babette's culinary feat, or feast, is acknowledged by the two sisters for what it is: food as art, and art as the universal solvent that changes lives. Babette, an unorthodox ministering Christ to twelve bemused puritans stranded at the crossroads between body and soul, trades the cost of a return ticket to her old life for this Last Supper. The latter, like its biblical precursor, stands as a final but also foundational moment of creativity. Her gesture does not go to waste. It finds an improbable audience but absolute understanding in the two spinster sisters, for whom the meal, with the utmost literalness, opened up worlds without end:
'Yet this is not the end! I feel, Babette, that this is not the end. In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah!' she added, the tears streaming down her cheeks. 'Ah, how you will enchant the angels!' (Blixen, 1986, 68)
82 Bad Dog
Babette, alleged revolutionary and petroleuse with a murky past, is the artistcook who formerly had sent occasional shudders of apprehension down her mistresses' spines, but who for the duration of one evening brings them shivers of delight. The sweet and sour perils of pleasure she discloses to them are not unlike the experience that Rego's work offers to our delighted and appalled eyes. Feasting on these paintings 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. Paula Rego is the graphic creator of Dog Women, bitches who snarl at the heels of their masters and piss on the bed of aesthetic, ethical and political conventions (Bad Dog, figure 82).
In Portuguese navigational charts of the fourteenth century the warning 'from here onward there be dragons' indicated the places where the world was thought to end. In this artist's case, a lifetime of painting families and other animals can be summed up as a career devoted to crossing into forbidden territories where, very likely, there be dragons. Needless to say, the female of the species.
I see this artist as an anarchist in painting, a Bluebeard in drag, in whose bloody studio artifacts are made from dismembered and reassembled bodies and attitudes. Literally so, when one thinks of her early work, made of paintings cut up and collaged back together to gruesome but pedagogical effect (When We Used to Have a House in the Country, figure 3; Iberian Dawn, figure 4; Centaur, figure 33). This dreamer of serene demons would undoubtedly have been kicked out of Plato's dull backyard. But in an alternative paradise populated by scary cherubs, how she will enchant the angels.
1. Whether through an error of reference or as the result of rather free interpretation, John Paul II's text, P-4/gives as the reference for this quotation Plato's Philebus, 65a. This passage in fact reads as follows: 'Then if we cannot use just one category to catch the good let's take this trio, fineness, commensurability, truth (aletheia), and treating them as a single unit say that this is the element in the mixture that we should most correctly hold responsible, that it is because of this as something good that such a mixture becomes good.' The connection between Beauty and Good appears to be more fully developed in the dialogue between Socrates and Diotima in the Symposium, 79-95.
2.See for example Nicholas Willing's comments to John McEwen on the chauvinism encountered by Paula Rego as the wife of a great painter who was seen as dabbling in painting. McEwen (1997), 242.