The art of sexual innuendo

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Paula Rego’s 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain demonstrated that, among art critics, ambiguity is still highly prized as a measure of merit. Martin Gayford: ‘No one, including its creator, can be aware of everything that’s going on.’

Laura Cumming at least gave examples. Of ‘The Cadet and his Sister’ (1988), she commented: ‘Bondage – physical, emotional, familial – is always in the air.’ The adjectives in that nervous parenthesis are insurance, the critic spreading her bets. The picture shows an older, bigger sister, formally dressed, with her cadet brother in uniform, wearing white ceremonial gloves. Behind them, a careful vista of trees. The painting depicts a milieu of public formality. Except that she has removed her gloves to tie his shoe laces. The gloves are off, laid on the ground, the nearest disclosing its red inner lining. Her handbag, also open, hints at its interior. We are glimpsing… something. In the left foreground is a small cockerel, a symbolic pullet. The sister and brother are avoiding eye contact. She is looking down at the shoe. He is looking away. It is a painting of denial, even as the deed is done. Obviously, this is a depiction of the induction of a trainee, a cadet, by an older person – a suggestion, an innuendo, all the more potent because of the poker-faced public front and the private message which is casting its shadow, like the handbag and gloves. That particular charged piquancy found on the border of respectability and the furtive excitement of sexual repression. It isn’t taking place as it actually takes place.

‘The Policeman’s Daughter’ (1987) is a reversal of power, according to Cumming, because her left arm is in the policeman’s boot.