Paula Rego

When exhibited four years ago at the Saatchi Gallery in London, Paula Rego’s paintings seemed all but consumed by their market appeal. They had everything it takes to make a canvas sell: size, a trademark facture, expressionist angst, some mild surrealism, elusive narrative. They felt of a piece with the showy wooden frames the gallery had put them in. In her current retrospective at the distinctly nonprofit National Museum of Women in the Arts, Rego, who was born in Portugal in 1934 but has lived in England since 1976, fares better. The context boosts her paintings’ feminist edge: Their angst stops feeling generic and market-driven; it relates to the real challenges of contemporary female life. Her narratives, often built around the strangeness typical of fairy tales, still have a vagueness that verges on the poetic, in the worst sense of the word. But taken en masse, her storytelling constructs a coherent imaginative universe that is worth entering. Here, Rego’s signature facture feels less like style for its own sake than like an almost accidental byproduct of the things the artist wants to say. It is facture as handwriting—you can’t write without it—rather than calligraphic display. Rego’s work still seems firmly lodged in the neo-expressionism of the 1980s, when she had her first successes. But her retrospective makes that moment look as though it’s worth revisiting. The pictures on loan from Saatchi are still in their absurd frames. But now it’s possible to look beyond them.