Paula Rego

Across her entire career, Paula Rego created only a few self-portraits. Most of them resemble a picture puzzle: one renders her striking a pointedly masculine pose; another features a mirror showing not Rego but her model; in a third, the figure with mutilated eyes is swept up in a vortex of fragmentary forms. Rare are the instances in which the artist directly presents herself. On a stylistic level, Rego’s self-portraits reflect an uncommon versatility, which time and again enabled her to take her art in new directions.

Family—for Paula Rego, the earliest memory associated with the word was her separation from her father and mother, who temporarily lived in the United Kingdom while she stayed behind in Lisbon with her grandparents. Years later, her parents supported her in her study at the renowned Slade School of Art in London. Rego always kept her work on her art separate from her life as a wife and mother to three children. Still, members of her family repeatedly appear as models in her works. In The Family, Rego lent the constellation of figures an eerie and psychological dimension. The Dance, meanwhile, reveals the alternation between solitude and relationships to be a rhythm of life.

The history of Paula Rego’s country of origin and the mentality of its people profoundly informed her work; that is especially evident in her treatment of historical themes, including a regicide and the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, which had been supported by the church and the military. A giant tapestry interweaves Portugal’s traumatic experiences from the distant past with present-day ills: created in the 1960s, when the country was waging a war against independence movements in its last remaining colonies on the African continent, the artwork recalls a battle against Moroccan troops in which a crushing defeat put an end to Portuguese expansionism in 1578.

The relationships between women and men in Paula Rego’s art offer more illustration that her creative universe is not a happy place. Power and violence shape the dynamic between the sexes, even in the intimate sphere of eroticism. Animal figures stand in for antagonists or represent drives and physical needs. In grappling with infidelity or the strains of caring for her ailing husband, Rego drew on her own experiences. At the same time, the pursuit of dominance, vulnerability, and selfassertion appear in her art as integral to the human condition.

In the 1970s, Paula Rego immersed herself in the study of fairy tales, which became seminal for her art. Fabric dolls like the titular character of The Princess and the Pea and the pictures illustrating the Portuguese legend of the modest heroine Brancaflor mark the beginning of her lifelong search for inspiration in captivating stories. Rego was fascinated by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung’s insight that tales told all over the world dramatize similar elemental psychological patterns in the adventures of heroes, magicians, or sages. Yet she subjected these patterns to radical reinterpretation, focusing on women who confront visible and invisible adversaries. In her late magnum opus, Oratório, and
elsewhere, the lives of these complex heroines are shaped by the repressed and dark aspects of the collective unconscious.

The memorable and vivid stories we encounter as children implant ideals and role models in our heads that are hard to dislodge. Formats with a playful air, like fairy tales or Disney films, have all the more power over us. Paula Rego exposes those stereotypes with wit and irony, but her deep affection for the stories she adapts is also palpable throughout. Her Snow White sits alone on a pile of furs instead of riding off into the sunset on a white horse with the perfect prince. The Blue Fairy, far from kindly advising Pinocchio, approaches the child with a menacing mien. And she breaks the charm over the ballerinas whom Disney had mocked as twee ostriches, turning them into middleaged women with both feet firmly on the ground.

Undergoing psychoanalysis, Paula Rego engaged in a rigorous examination of her own inner life. She explored domains of the irrational and repressed that many people only glimpse in their dreams. Her works compellingly articulate the shadowy mental processes that underlie narratives like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). Peter Pan intrigued her with his refusal to grow up, while the triptych The Pillowman represents the psychological horrors and excesses of a grotesque literary interrogation scene.

At times, Paula Rego used her art as a tool of political resistance. She denounced the practice of female genital mutilation, which still remains widespread, and produced series of haunting pastels and prints that depict the dangers that illegal abortions pose for women. Created after more liberal abortion legislation had been rejected by a popular vote in Portugal in the late 1990s, those works helped shift public opinion ahead of a second referendum. When, in 2003, British participation in the Iraq War sparked the largest anti-war demonstrations London had seen in decades, Rego expressed her own protest in a work filled with activist intensity.

In a series of seven pastels, Paula Rego illustrates how the battle against oneself, against forces within and without, can paralyze the spirit and weigh down the body. The protagonist seems to lack the energy to draw herself up. The color contrast between golden ochre and purple, meanwhile, is anything but feeble.

This battle for body, spirit, and soul stands in contrast within Rego’s œuvre with an emblem of female strength. Angel is her most celebrated work. The figure of a woman in a wide skirt, her blouse suffused with a metal sheen, embodies complex and contradictory emotions. Benevolent and resolute, prepared to forgive as well as to fight, she symbolizes aspiration, determination, and combativeness.