Paula Rego: Carrying forward the spark
A requiem for Paula Rego —one of the most distinctive and acclaimed artists of our time.
It is often recommended to a student of drawing to study the work of a master in order to decode the basic principles of composition and utilisation of value. In my case, I chose to study Paula Rego.
The reason I chose Paula Rego (after her retrospective at the Tate Britain, 7 July to 24th October 2021) was because the academic rigour in her painting. Her work was not just masterful but literally: state-of-the-art. It wasn’t just what formal theory was capable of. It was about what was possible.
As an academy painter, Rego is spoken of in the same category as David Hockey and Frank Auerbach. In 1990, in recognition of her brilliance, Rego was appointed the first artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, London. Her work and philosophy is too complex for me to comprehend, let alone summarise. A good start can be made, however, by watching the BBC documentary Secrets and Stories by her son, Nick Willing.
In my estimation, Paula Rego’s work and style carries forward the spark ignited by Vincent van Gogh, Matisse and Cezanne in European painting. Her body of work not just codifies these technical innovations, it builds upon and improvises on them. What distinguishes her paintings, apart from the absolute mastery of the fundamentals and raw emotional theatre, are these wonderful, strange characters (often inspired by hand-made dolls that live in her studio) that make the paintings possess an uncanny power. They are horrifying, playful, imaginative, funny and spontaneous, and visually compelling and satisfying in a way that is seen in too few painters.
Despite the playfulness, as the retrospective showcases, her paintings were meticulously planned via ink studies. One of Rego’s most iconic works is The Dance (1988) — a magical painting that was planned as a showstopper. Rego worked out the painting through eleven ink sketches. It is really interesting to see in these studies how she has calculated the tonal scale, and what changes she makes in the final painting.
In my study of her painting (I should hastily add far from accurate), I learned a lot more than grisaille. The use of cabbages at the bottom creatures a wonderful area of leafy shapes, textures and shadows, to contrast all the figures and characters in the other quarters of the composition. Paula Rego is not only a painter who flexes by putting her self-portraiture’s head at a tilt angle that is one of the hardest to draw. She, additionally, puts the focus of the frame’s armature near her crotch.
What a superb riposte to the toxic masculinity that academic painting is awash in. Absolute. Legend.
Painting as rhetoric: Rego’s Salazar Vomiting The Homeland
Paula Rego, who was London-based for most of her life, was of Portugese origin. She died, not much after this huge retrospective, on the 8th of June 2022. Within the same month of Rego’s passing away, the United States Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. This was exactly the kind of misogynistic, rigid-minded orthodox authoritarianism that Rego’s art had fought against all her life. It is impossible to understand Paula Rego without António de Oliveira Salazar — the dictator who ruled Portugal with an increasing absolute patriarchal authority between 1932 to 1968.
This dictatorship was called the Estado Novo (New State). The regime suppressed political freedom at home, clung desperately to its colonial possessions abroad to maintain its imperial delusions, and was particularly notorious for drastically limiting the freedom of women. Salazar often had his critics executed by secret police. One of the telling, sordid details of this monster’s term in office was that even after being incapacitated by old age, multiple strokes and dotardry, Salazar’s acolytes did not have the stomach or courage to tell the old man that he had been deposed while unconsciousness and was no longer in power. So, they kept him in a presidential villa and, whenever he revived a bit, they play-acted that the dictator was still in-charge of things. This state of affairs went on for two years till his death.
In the opinion of Maria Manuel Lisboa, (a specialist in Portuguese history, art and culture ) the shadowy structure in the top right-hand corner of The Dance resembles a military fort on the Estoril coast in Caxias, situated five miles west of Lisbon. It was located not far from where Rego was born. This fort was used as a prison and torture site during the Estado Novo. In her interpretation, the structure looms malevolently behind the dancers as they enjoy the magical moonlight.
It takes a special kind of cujones to make a painting like Rego’s Salazar Vomiting the Homeland. It is one of Rego’s earliest paintings, when she was experimenting more with abstract forms and made in 1960, and when the dictator was at the height of his power. Just the title of the painting serves as a defining reminder of what the man was and what he represented.
There are, of course, as the memory of the dictatorship’s reality fades, those who are eager to rehabilitate the image of Salazar as the greatest Portugese man who ever lived (“Was he really that bad?”, “You have to see things in the context of their times”, “dictatorship was common then,”, “he was better than Hitler”, “he helped found some good international organisations”, etc.). But the record, especially the length of his term in office, speaks for itself. Even today, a testament to the deeply scarring way in which Salazar’s maladministration scarred his fiefdom, women in Portugal have the second-to-last highest chances of dying during child-birth amongst OECD countries.
The dubious honour of being the worst in the developed world, of course, goes to the USA.
In 1998, Portugal held a referendum on abortion.
The vote went against women’s access to safe healthcare. The result prompted Rego to create some of her most powerful art. Rego made a series of etchings that captured the emotional consequences and suffering of women who had obviously undergone the procedure. There is no blood, no gore. The viewer is left to draw their own conclusions. The conversation that these paintings sparked are credited with helping nudge public opinion the other way. When another referendum was held in 2007, this time, the vote was for legalisation.
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the US Supreme Court abdicated its responsibility in protecting the political rights of American citizens. If history of Portugal is any guide, nothing can save the court from the humiliation and ignominy that is coming its way. First, slowly and surely, data will prove, beyond reasonable doubt, the direct hand of this judgement in causing the death of women from sepsis in complicated pregnancies. Deaths that could easily be avoided.
The bad news resulting from such judicial murder will only grow. It will grow from a trickle to a flood. Already, cases of a 10-year old child rape victim being denied abortion and mothers being forced to carry unviable and deformed foetuses to term are starting to make the news in the USA. Soon, entirely foreseeably, there will be some sort of macabre, horrific death that will cause public hysterua. A 10 Rillington Place or Savita Halappanavar. A growing, ugly public mood will have the politicians and judges running to find some kind of face-saving compromise.
Rego’s life and work shows us that no matter how smug and confident patriarchs like Salazar or Samuel Alito are, sitting at the apex of government with the whole might of social convention and an army keeping them in authority, toasted and fawned upon by their acolytes and cronies, believing they can do anything they want — they can and will be held to account through art.
Paula Rego’s work will always remind us what patriarchal religious nationalism is — vomit.
