RSL Remembers: Paula Rego
Examining paintings at the Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Image belongs to author.
It was a pleasure to spend the evening with the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Drawing School who co-hosted an intimate conversation and celebration of Paula Rego, the Portuguese artist and storyteller with a career spanning 70 years, who passed away in June 2022 at the age of 87.
I have to say, as a student of Spanish and Portuguese, I often find myself fixated on grammar, pronunciation and desperately attempting to not make mistakes in my spoken and written language. At Cambridge, I will be lucky enough to explore the works of Paula Rego with my course paper named: ‘Changing Stories: Paula Rego’. This is, no doubt, a fitting title as an introduction to Lusophone literature and culture. By way of the event this evening, I have learned that stories played a salient role in the burgeoning career of a young Rego.
“Paula was consciously looking for story” Anthony Rudolf (London, 1942) claimed this evening to open the discussion. Rudolf, an acclaimed autobiographer, poet, translator and literary critic in his own right, knew Rego in somewhat more intimate terms than most through his role as her male model. He describes his role as “a participant in a story sequence” where “the pose is the story”. He remarked that Rego’s house in Portugal and her apartment in London were full of books of all calibres (poetry, art history, English literature and folklore). The latter permitted Rego to draw sustenance from fairytales which unearthed the female perspective within the narrative. In her works, psychological and cultural ventures fuse with the predicaments of women, thus denaturing the perceived ‘conventional fairy tale’.
In 2021, when asked if there was a link between Portuguese fairy tales and the fascism of Salazar that she knew all too well, Rego replied, “Fascist propaganda is full of happy peasants and mothers raising babies at home [...] all of them knowing their place in the fatherland”. To put this into context, Rego was left behind by her parents in 1936 after they moved to England and was taken care of by her grandmother for a few years. Meanwhile, the Estado Novo in Portugal was in full force after having been established in 1933, one year after Salazar’s rise to his Prime Ministerial position.
The dictatorships of the 20th century are globally characterised by oppression, lowered voices and circuitous exchanges; Rego, however, was not one to follow these mandates. So much so, she truly lifts her head above the parapet in a show of anger, revenge and sarcasm in ‘Salazar Vomiting the Homeland’, 1960. Interestingly, as a complement to her October 2018-January 2019 exhibition, held at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, Rego pledged in an interview that “I always want to turn things on their heads, to upset the established order, to change heroines and idiots.” Susan Wilson, an internationally recognised artist and teacher whose exhibitions span across the UK and the world, encapsulated this sentiment during the panel discussion stating that Rego was able to escape from the “punitive world” of the dictatorship through her art.
The Policeman’s Daughter, Paula Rego Exhibition, Tate Gallery (Photo: Jenny Mackness, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 DEED via Flickr)
To some extent, it could be argued that the patriarchal, social mores that epitomised the dark history of the Portuguese dictatorship became an extension of Paula’s being, long after the dictatorship officially ended. Being a female artist working in a male environment was not something that was taken seriously - “there was a constriction of art history in the 1970s” concurs Julie Held, who admitted to combining her love of History and her art skills thanks to the impact that Paula’s work had on her. She too acknowledged that the opening decades of Paula’s career were male-centric and cited the discouraging maxim that you “must suffer” for your art in order to be successful. Wilson also acknowledged this and reminisced that a male critic in c.1985 declared that Rego’s exhibitions were like “nursery paintings”, a comment that completely underestimated the pertinent allegorical aspect of artistic license.
The final panelist at the event was Helen Quah, a British poet and doctor who captured the sentiment of allegory when she reflected upon her first encounter with Rego’s work. She confessed to being deeply disturbed and acknowledged how psychologically penetrative her paintings can be. Quah has recently published an anthology, Dog Woman (2022) which is named after Rego’s ‘Dog Women’ series. It reflects on women in society today and was inspired by the ambiguousness of ‘the real’ and ‘the fantasy’ in Rego’s works of art. The 2017 BBC documentary, ‘Paula Rego: Secrets and Stories’ (dir. Nick Willing) played a pivotal role in the genesis of Quah’s poems, specifically being able to see Paula’s studio and her use of props. Following on from this, Julie Held brings up the interesting concept of proscenium art and how Rego’s canvas is very much a stage, with the viewers taking on the role of the audience in each of her visual spectacles.
I was lucky enough to visit ‘Paula Rego: Crivelli’s Garden’ at the National Portrait Gallery (July-October 2023) just before I started university and I can very much resonate with the postulation that we are audience members witnessing a narrative transpire before our eyes . This is partly attributable to the size of the canvases used by Rego that permit layer upon layer of story to be unearthed. In the case of ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (1990-91), it is the reinterpretation of Christian and mythical narratives that collocate women, past and present, at the forefront of storytelling.
As the evening came to a close, I truly felt that I had the pleasure of meeting Paula Rego herself through the four panelists. It is evident that each of them are inspired by her, are galvanised to create art by her and each of them have an ever-changing story to tell.
Paula Rego, Crivelli’s Garden. Wall panel from the exhibition. Image belongs to author.
A special thank you to the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Drawing School for hosting the event and to the RSL’s former events manager, Lily Blacksell for her organisation of the evening.