Paula Rego (Paperback)

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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. 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. What sweet justice then that Rego is having the last laugh, literally, with her phenomenal retrospective. Willing accompanied her to Tate Britain once the work was up. "Her reaction as we went from room to room was, well, delight and laughter," he tells BBC Culture. "She laughed so much, she was so happy to see her works all together there." 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.

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 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?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. It’s part of it. Some people can feel more dominant than others, but a maid can have power over her mistress. The meekest person can manipulate. Retrospective Exhibition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington 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.

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. 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. It's all here – gutsy paintings full of rage, rebellion and pain – especially of women. And much more besides. Rego's vision of life can be red in tooth and claw to the point of being agonising to look at. The wonderful surprise here is to remember how lyrical, as well as mischievous, playful and so very human it can also be. 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.

These days, she gets her greatest pleasure from "films, cakes, poetry, and seeing the great grandchildren". And making art, naturally: "My working day isn't so different. I go to the studio with Lila [Nunes, her model and friend of more than 30 years]. We discuss what we'll do over a cup of tea. I work to opera in the morning, and Fado after lunch and a nap." At the end of the day she and Lila always have a glass of champagne, because "it makes me tipsy, in a happy way". 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. Major solo exhibitions of Rego's work have recently taken place atThe National Gallery, London (2023); Pera Museum, Istanbul; Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover; Arnolfini, Bristol (2022);Tate Britain, London, travelling to Kunstmuseum den Haag, Netherlands, Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain (2021-22); the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, which toured from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (2019-2020); Musée de L'Orangerie, Paris (2018); La Virreina Centro de la Imagen, Barcelona (2018); Jerwood Gallery, Hastings (2017); Pallant House, Chichester (2017).

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.

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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. 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. Many of Rego’s best-loved lewd monsters are on display in London through late October at Tate Britain’s ambitious and wide-ranging new show, “Paula Rego.” Curated by Elena Crippa with Zuzana Flašková, it is the U.K.’s largest retrospective of one of its most prominent and inventive artists. Rego, who, at eighty-six, remains fabulously prolific in her studio, in the North London neighborhood of Camden, offered support and occasional advice during the three years of its incubation. Organized roughly chronologically, the show unfolds over several sections that tell the story of Rego’s tumultuous life alongside her work. Headings including “A Subversive Vision,” “Fragmented Reality,” and “Love, Devotion, Lust” give visitors an inkling of what is to come. 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. 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.

Tate Britain's Manton Entrance is on Atterbury Street. It has automatic sliding doors and there is a ramp down to the entrance with central handrails. Rego’s fascination with storytelling has never faded. She has spent her life listening out for stories and turning them into pictures. The 1990s was a particularly productive period. Working in oil and acrylic paint, watercolour, and etching and aquatint, Rego took inspiration from a wide range of sources. Her series of Nursery Rhymes prints from 1989 illustrate traditional British children’s songs. Rego was delighted by the strangeness of these rhymes, which she highlights in her prints. 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.

Dame Paula Rego RA (1935 - 2022)

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. 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. 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. Rego found similarities between the images of those women diagnosed with hysteria and poses of female saints traditionally seen in Roman Catholic religious paintings. Possession represents a woman’s experience of both martyrdom and self-determination. Crucially, Rego empowers her subject through the expression of their sexuality.