Paula Rego (Paperback)

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While working on a large-scale painting at home one day, in 1965, the artist Paula Rego went downstairs to find her husband kissing another woman. The painting, in oil and collage, was about a government policy to poison stray dogs in Barcelona, and there was a glaring blank spot at the top. After watching her husband kiss the other woman, Rego, as she tells it, went running to her neighbor and best friend. Crying, she recounted what had happened, only to find her friend dissolve into tears as well. She, too, was sleeping with Rego’s husband. I’d have had different stories to tell if he hadn’t been ill. Work helped me cope. I worked my way through it. I still miss him. There were no ready-made clothes... we had a seamstress who came to the house. Making things out of fabric seems natural Were you ever afraid with your bold abortion pictures that the Portuguese authorities would try to suppress your work? When she illuminates the scene, at that moment when the drop of oil falls from the lamp onto Cupid’s shoulder and he wakes, everything around her vanishes – the gorgeous castle, her fairy attendants and magical banquets and apparel and diversions and visual enchantments. Her previous blindness to her beloved’s identity had opened another eye, the interior eye of fantasy, and, in every respect of her existence with Cupid, she was living in a dream world. 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 think it is. You discover things in the making of a painting. It can reveal things that you didn’t expect. Things you keep secret from yourself. Since the 1950s, Paula Rego has played a key role in redefining figurative art in the UK and internationally. An uncompromising artist of extraordinary imaginative power, she has revolutionised the way in which women are represented.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. In Paula Rego’s work, in her ‘artist’s dreamland’, the peculiar and the elfish twist and turn with a similar rebellious vitality. And they do so for reasons that Jane Eyre’s did, mirroring Charlotte Brontë’s, over a hundred and fifty years ago. Rego has explored, in a myriad different sequences of pictures, the conditions of her own upbringing in Portugal, her formation as a girl and a woman, and the oscillation between stifling social expectations and liberating female stratagems. In 1998 a referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal failed. Paula Rego, who spoke openly about her own abortions in the past and had seen people suffer after undergoing illegal terminations, was angry with the outcome. In response, she created a body of work, including paintings, pastels and etchings. Born in Lisbon, Portugal, Dame Paula Rego (b. 1935) was one of Europe’s most influential contemporary figurative artists. A painter of “stories”, her characters enact a variety of roles and depict disquieting tensions below the surface. Her large pastel paintings and sharply drawn etchings are psychologically charged depictions of human dramas and narratives. It is this weakness of imaginative projection, for most of us, that lends such power to technical media that simulate the stuff that dreams are made on: daguerreotypes, phantasmagoria, lantern slides, and film replicate the thinness, spectrality, and fugitive aspects of conscious, mental acts of visualisation. These comments on cognitive capacity offer a context for thinking about Rego and about the distinctive principles of book illustration, for what she achieves is precisely that solidity, that density of presence, that stable durability that usually elude the mind’s eye of the reader. But – and this but is a most important modifier – her images do not realise Jane Eyre or other figures as in the literal enactments of contemporary full-colour cinema: they retain dreamlike qualities. In the typical realist television adaptation, there are so many historic locations and vehicles, props and costumes, such heaps of furniture and whole archives of ornaments, but drawing out of the mind straight on to the plate or the stone doesn’t need the half of all that paraphernalia: in its grasp of mood and atmosphere, of the dream feeling, just a minimum of external detail is necessary.

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 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. Featuring over 100 illustrations, including collage, paintings, largescale pastels, ink and pencil drawings, etchings and sculpture, the catalogue reflects the richness of Rego’s work, from the socio-political context to the biographical, from her many literary references to her vast knowledge and referencing of key historical paintings from the Western tradition. This includes early work from the 1950s in which Rego first explored personal as well as social struggles, with her large pastels of single figures from the acclaimed Dog Women and Abortion series and her richly layered, staged scenes from the 2000-10s.Paula Rego was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1935. At the time, the country was under a dictatorship, the Estado Novo (New State), which lasted until 1974. The authoritarian regime suppressed political freedom, forcefully maintained its colonies and drastically limited the rights of women. Rego’s parents, who were fiercely anti-fascist and Anglophile, wanted their daughter to live in a liberal country. At the age of 16, she was enrolled in a finishing school in Kent, England.

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. Girlhood and its appetites have inspired Paula Rego’s picture-making for over 30 years, and her works in this vein include the brilliantly fluent and mischievous sequence of paintings The Vivian Girls, inspired by Henry Darger’s extraordinary, epic scroll novel, populated by heroines, part Enid Blyton schoolgirls, part Surrealist femmes-enfants. Furiously intent young women, capricious, cruel, wilful in their confined domesticity, attend to one another or to animals or to daily, banal tasks; the scenes Paula Rego summons up dramatise the limits on female expectation imposed on Rego in her youth. For although she comes from a liberal family, she was steeped in the culture of Salazar’s dictatorship, founded on the Catholic church, the army, and the idealisation of Woman as wife and mother. The perverted uses of female power, when squeezed behind the scenes, or into the sewing room and the kitchen, erupt in Rego’s imagery with seemingly irrepressible force; she brims over with the same keen, impassioned sense of its malignity as Charlotte Brontë does in her creation of Bertha Mason.Under Milk Wood, which I did at the Slade. Because I did it from my imagination and it won the summer prize. 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. Play seems equally important. I sometimes have the feeling, looking at your work, that a real person might revert to becoming a straw doll, or vice versa… Is play intrinsically dangerous? It seems to me that what you are often drawn to are the half-hidden stories – the stories that we can, as we look at your work, continue to unriddle in our heads. Is it possible to paint a secret?