Paula Rego’s wife sleeps like a dog on a coat – food bowl next to it

Corona is driving us back into the inner room, at least after five o’clock in the afternoon. My chagrin is over. I will gladly bear this. I like theater and concert and I like cinema. They are rarely active in the afternoon – so that will be streaming again. Fine, then I’ll do that – and Isabelle Huppert immediately sits on her lip as raging southern diva, superior by Ivo van Hove directed in the classic Glass toys by Tennessee Williams. Enough to make you happy and it feels very live.

What does succeed before five is escaping to a museum, if necessary with a work & laptop in the bag. For example, I race to the retrospective exhibition of the Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego. Her work has been shown in many foreign countries over the years, but not here. Now it is, in the Kunstmuseum The Hague. And rightly so, she makes crushing art. And she fills a void, too, because she captures aspects of life that the visual arts often skipped, even though they are essential.

I’ll just call it the birth. A primeval subject, but where is it? We do see the road to childbirth: sensuality and sexuality are eagerly depicted. The sequel too: mothers-with-child until it makes you nauseous. In the stable and manger and baby Jesus alone, art has been enjoying itself for centuries, under the collective name ‘Nativity’. Does that mean “birth”? Excuse me? You are all late!

Not Paula Rego, she’s on time. Her Nativity (2002) shows Mary in labor on the lap of a tense angel cum midwife who helps her to cope with the contractions. A very strong image that is unfortunately missing in The Hague. But we can take comfort, there is also a lot.

Rego’s grandiose pastel Target for example: a woman on her knees on a pillow. She is busy taking off her dress. She provokes. Or no, she surrenders. Or both. I do not know. Each time, Rego mixes fear and provocation, work after work. She made a series with women like dogs, growling, touching, sleeping on an old coat (food bowl next to it). A friend e-mails me a photo of her stretched out sleeping dog – and I see how mercilessly Rego entwines dog and woman. Now the Italian writer Elena Ferrante comes to mind, I recognize in Rego her characters, women who join and then break out and shock everyone, book after book.

Just like Ferrante, Rego is not an activist. They are artists who make substantial work, fearless with a view to a universal abyss. Look at Regos Abortion Series, about the misery of illegal abortion. She does not indulge in the accompanying violence. She mourns it through sturdy women who see their misery in the mouth. She shows everyone who dares her work that woman excludes his weakness. Women have the name, but they can’t afford it.