Multiply

…and Multiply Commentary by Johann Hinrich Claussen Cite Share Show Bible Passage Paula Rego (1935–2022) was ahead of her time among twentieth-century artists in the extent and intensity of her critical engagement with the history of colonial guilt. She grew up in Portugal during the Salazar dictatorship. Her homeland had colonies overseas for longer than any other European nation. Her indignation at colonialist exploitation and violence is already evident in the titles of two wild, angry early works: Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (1960) and When We Had a House in the Country We’d Throw Marvellous Parties and Then We’d Go Out and Shoot Black People (1961). More than thirty years later, Rego created something rather more quiet, but deeply sad. A woman lies on a bed, heavily pregnant. Behind her on the wall hangs a reproduction of a painting that used to be extremely popular in Brazil: The First Mass in Brazil (1859–61) by Victor Mereilles. It depicts the moment when the Brazilian nation is believed to have been born, that is, when the Portuguese invaders celebrated the first Catholic mass on the beach. The propagandistic intention is clear: the indigenous people together with the ‘untouched’ natural landscape form a dark frame, while in the bright centre fully clothed white men bring Christian civilization to the country by celebrating their faith. Both groups of people are clearly differentiated from each other, but the atmosphere is peaceful. Mission and colonization—so the painting claims—were non-violent. Rego has reproduced Mereilles’s painting very freely, and in mirrored inversion. She has left out some details and added others, such as the sea and the two ships. In the room there are several symbolically charged objects—a doll covered in blood, a turkey, lilies, two dead fish. But much more important is the contrast between the woman's burdened body in the centre and the male propaganda in the background. The woman is lying with her back to the painting. Her gaze is directed in the other direction, into the distance, into a void. How are we to read her? As a woman abandoned, or sacrificed, or herself colonized (Holloway 2000: 700)? In her juxtaposition with the image of missionary expansion on the wall behind her, she invites us to interrogate the complex legacies of the enterprise of making disciples of all nations. What happens when Christians ‘multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:28)? References Crippa, Elena (ed.). 2022. Paula Rego (Museo Picasso: Málaga) Holloway, Memory. 2000. ‘Praying in the Sand: Paula Rego and Visual Representations of the First Mass in Brazil’, in Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 4/5: 697–705 Lisboa, Maria Manuel. 2019. Essays on Paula Rego: Smile When You Think about Hell (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers)