Paula Rego (Paperback)

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The following year, Rego went on to study painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1952–6). Here she met and later married fellow painting student Victor Willing. After graduating, Rego lived between Britain and Portugal and settled in London in 1972. Paula would say that the studio was her playroom where she could really play. In fact, it was much more than that. The studio was where she felt she belonged, where she could do anything, where she had the courage of a lion, and could truly be herself. John McEwen knew that one of the best ways to understand her work was to see what happens in the studio, so he wrote this excellent book with brilliant photographs by Gautier Deblonde.” Paula Rego (2021) edited by Elena Crippa She went on to pour her own pain into images such as the howling Dog Woman – an expression of a feral despair she would not have dreamed of putting into words. She has often talked about painting as a way of exploring – and perhaps exorcising – what might otherwise remain hidden. Fear, revenge, sorrow exist in her work in plain sight. The Family (1988) shows a woman and her daughter dressing a seated man who is apparently unable to help himself. It is an unnerving expression of roughness and care, the daughter is not, in any sense, up to the job. All the artworks displayed in this room feature characters that Rego referred to as ‘dollies’. These are sculptures in textile, papier-mâché and other basic materials that Rego has been making since the 1960s. Since the early 2000s, they have become increasingly prominent characters in her works. She carefully stages a selection of them in her studio, alongside other objects, cloths and live models. She then draws the scene in pastel. Additionally, the works in this room, in explicit or enigmatic ways, return to distant memories of Rego’s native Portugal. Key themes include the spectres of dictatorship, the displacement of refugees and experiences of war. Do you remember painting Self-portrait in red 1966 , and what was happening in your life at that time? What does it say about yourself then?

Tales from the National Gallery, Travelling Exhibition: Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery; Middlesborough Art Gallery; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Cooper Art Gallery, Barnsley; the National Gallery, London; the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle; The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon Rego made her first prints, experimenting with etching in the 1950s, at the Slade School of Art. In the 1980s she began to focus more closely on the medium and has since produced a profound body of work as a printmaker, including her coveted series The Nursery Rhymes, 1989, a group of over 30 etchings that are housed in major museum collections all over the world. From 1991 to 1996 the Arts Council of England and the British Council toured this body of work to venues in the UK, USA, Spain, Portugal and Asia. Her prints not only possess the extraordinary imaginative power of her paintings, but reflect the innovative possibilities of the medium through her experimentation with etching, lithography and aquatint, often employing hand-colouring in the process. I always need a story. Without a story, I can’t get going. Maybe the story changes in the doing of it. I might discover it isn’t what I thought or intended. But I need it to find my way. I’m always looking for new stories. Traditional Portuguese folk tales are the most useful stories… I understand their brutality and perversity In 2006 the Portuguese government commissioned a museum dedicated to Rego whichopened in 2009. The Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, located in a district outside Lisbon, permanently houses Rego's entire collection of over 200 prints alongside drawings, preparatory works and paintings loaned by the artist. R ego exhibited an extensive display of sculptural installations, pastels and prints in the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale 2022.Between 1986 and 1988, Rego completed a group of large paintings in acrylic, which are brought together in this room. In 1988, they were displayed in solo exhibitions in Lisbon and Porto, Portugal, and at the Serpentine Gallery, London. The shows cemented Rego’s reputation as a leading contemporary painter. At the time, she had not yet completed The Dance, so could not include it as she had hoped. The work features here in the way the artist intended, as the culmination of this body of work. I get the sense that family is of paramount importance and that you have an artistic inner circle – a modelling family? Picture books for children today don’t serve to heighten or punctuate the text: image and word combine and flow, like voices in a duet. Rego’s responses to a classic tale of mythical aura, like Jane Eyre, translate the novel’s character into another medium, reproducing its mood and its texture in kinetic line and moulding shadows. The benightedness of Jane’s state finds its correlative in the inkiness from which she materialises before our eyes; the dynamic nature of her resistance to her fate leaps in the vitality of her contours, and so forth: the visual technique matches narrative wordplay in reciprocal counterpoint. In a recent study of mental picturing, Dreaming by the Book, the American critic Elaine Scarry offers some highly original insights into the relationship between daydreaming, reading, and visualising, which throw light on the work of an artist like Paula Rego. She draws attention to the intrinsically dreamy properties of some phenomena, such as gauze or clouds or rain, which align them with objects of reverie which cannot be summoned up in their solid substance by the mind’s eye. ‘We might say’, she writes, ‘that in fog the physical universe approaches the condition of the imagination.’ Later, she adds, ‘It is not hard to imagine a ghost successfully. What is hard is successfully to imagine an object, any object, that does not look like a ghost.’ This is a unique opportunity to survey, in the city that Rego has lived in and called home for most of her life, the full range of her work.

Animals, like the dollies I make or collect, stand in for people. You can do things with them that would be mawkish if I used a person. Or illegal.

There are questions of domination in many of your paintings. The question about who is mastering – or mistressing – whom feels particularly key in Snare (1987) and some of the Jane Eyre pieces. How far do you see relationships as a power struggle? To help plan your visit to Tate Britain, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information of what you can expect from a visit to the gallery. PR: The pictures have changed many times. They have to change, or they feel dead and I feel flat. You get interested in other things as you get older. I’m more interested in the Virgin Mary than in boyfriends. It features over 100 works, including collage, paintings, large-scale pastels, ink and pencil drawings and etchings. These include early works from the 1950s in which Rego first explored personal as well as social struggle, her large pastels of single figures from the acclaimed Dog Women and Abortion series and her richly layered, staged scenes from the 2000-10s. When I asked Rego to sketch Vic in words, she replied: “Very intelligent, strong-minded, a marvellous dancer. He laughed easily. He could be fierce and tender. He took my work seriously, didn’t put me down. He knew so much about painting. He gave me good advice.”

Rego explored themes of power, rebellion, sexuality and gender, grief and poverty, often through female protagonists. One of the most important figurative artists of her generation, her work ranges from painting, pastel, and prints to sculptural installations.Such an emphasis on the fire in the mind and the dark outside might perhaps reveal, without saying much more, how Paula Rego of all artists would respond to Jane Eyre. Paula Rego has been making images out of stories since she was a child, and if anything can be said to offer a consistent thread through her fertile and multi-faceted production it is this: she has been a narrative artist all along, and one whose stories are not reproduced from life as observed or remembered, but from goings-on in the camera lucida of the mind’s eye. Rego hasn’t lost in adulthood the energy of the child’s make-believe world: ‘It all comes out of my head,’ she says. ‘All little girls improvise, and it’s not just illustration: I make it my own.’ Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Rego mainly produced collage-based works. She began this process by making drawings. She would cut these up, glue fragments on paper and add layers of paint and other drawings. Rather than using an easel, she worked on a table or on the floor. She relished this more tactile and intuitive way of working. In these works, Rego bears witness to injustice. She expresses her feelings of rage and anguish connected with world politics and events, from the cruelty of Portugal’s authoritarian regime to poor conditions for workers. For now she has put away the folk tales that informed her work, and finds herself "drawing the Virgin Mary over and over", a theme she explored at length for Life Cycle of the Virgin Mary, including Descent from the Cross, another work said to have been inspired by Vic's death. Which of her works is she proudest of? I would not describe her like that. She is my main model and very good at it. She understands what I need from a story. At the Slade, everyone had abortions. In Ericeira, many women in the village had abortions, sometimes because they weren’t married but more often because they couldn’t feed another child. Sometimes, they would ask for money. I knew what they were going through and tried to help. I sent a woman who was haemorrhaging to my gynaecologist in Lisbon. If I had money, I would give it. It’s appalling that there was so much pain and suffering.

But I don’t like doing self-portraits. It’s very boring to look at one’s own face, it’s almost as impossible to do as still lives. What’s the story? I prefer to use Lila [Rego’s model/muse]. A few years ago, I fell down the steps at my daughter’s house in Ventnor, and my face was all bruised like I’d been in a punch-up. Much more interesting. I drew myself then. Fiona Bradley curated Paula’s retrospective at Tate Liverpool [in 1997] and the two became very close. Paula often said that Fiona understood her work better than anyone, and although it doesn’t cover the later work, it gives the reader a very good understanding of how and why the pictures are made.” Paula Rego exhibition catalogue (2007), edited by Marco Livingstone Notable exhibitions include: CalousteGulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (1988); Serpentine Gallery, London (1988); Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (1997); Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (1998); Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (2001); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2004); Tate Britain, London (2005); MuseoNacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2007); National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. (2008); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2010); Tate Britain, London, (2021). Profile You are not to look at her art and be lost in the way it is made. Rego bypassed aesthetic niceties long ago with her direct and urgent brushwork. Oil pastel gradually became her main medium, allowing for even more force, and in the 90s she began working with studio models.It was her father who sent her to England (to finishing school, at 16), insisting Portugal was, as she once put it, a “killer society for women”. Her mother was less of a kindred spirit: “She loved interior decorating. I hate it. She was spikier. But she was talented. She could do a person’s likeness just like that, and cut clothes without a pattern.” Rego has inherited her mother’s skills and subverted them. In her hands, traditionally feminine crafts turn militant. Homemade dolls – potentially docile and lifeless – come defiantly alive. She knows the needle – and the brush – can be mightier than the sword.