When Paula Rego was invited to be an associate artist at the National Gallery in 1990, she refused: “The National Gallery is a masculine collection and, as a woman, I can find nothing there that would be of interest to me.” A week later she telephoned to change her mind: “The National Gallery is a masculine collection and, as a woman, I think I will absolutely be able to find things there for me.”
She moved into the museum’s subterranean studio and painted “Time: Past and Present”. It stars a child (Rego), fiercely engrossed in drawing, sitting under the indifferent gaze of a bulky man, modelled by her lover Rudolf Nassauer, in a pose reminiscent of Antonello da Messina’s “St Jerome in His Study” and enclosed by the challenging walls of the museum’s Old Master pictures.
Rego dazzlingly transforms Antonello’s depiction of the saint’s study into an inventory of her own mind at work. A painted angel awakens a “real” baby in its cot. An image of a sailor-suited boy refers to a childhood photograph of Rego’s husband Victor Willing, who had recently died. A door opening to a beach floods the painting with the southern light of Rego’s native Portugal. Layer by layer, Rego pierces the centuries-old hermetic masculine world of Christian Renaissance art.
As Tate Britain’s thrilling new retrospective Paula Rego proves, no artist has more powerfully and persuasively mastered then subverted the language of male painterly tradition to express modern female interior experience.
At the Slade in 1954 — Rego was 19 — the competition subject was Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Rego won: she transposed the scene to her grandmother’s Lisbon kitchen, peopled it with monumental, ungainly, fat-fingered female gossips and placed, foreground centre, a dish of two gleaming fried eggs — a reference to Velázquez’s “Old Woman Frying Eggs” (1618).
The expertly detailed milieu suggests a Portuguese student’s nostalgia in grey London. The figures herald a lifetime’s flair for sensitively rendering the unidealised female form. The ambition is towards the ruthless, exaggerated realism of Iberian painting from El Greco to Picasso; evident already is Rego’s compositional genius, serving her fascination with human relationships, for multi-figure paintings, which would develop across more than six decades.
It is there in the flat cut-out shapes and bright colours of the fragmentary 1960s collages, nodding at Pop Art but more emotionally charged. The white figure surrounded by monsters in “Manifesto (For a Lost Cause)” (1965) mourns Rego’s liberal father, dying before dictatorship ended in Portugal. “The Firemen of Alijo”, swirling animal-human hybrids with badger and seal heads, was inspired by barefooted, soot-blackened firemen huddled in the cold, encountered on a bleak winter holiday at New Year 1965-66. It expressed Rego’s “sense of the end of the world”, but against an orange-red ground, the forms, marvels of her fluid metamorphosing draughtsmanship, surge with life.
Her father died, the family business failed, and Willing was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis that year. Rego has spoken about her complex feelings for Willing, who was seven years her senior: the near-rape which began their relationship at a party when he ushered her into a room and demanded “take down your knickers”; the abortions, betrayals, competitiveness before and after they became a married couple with three children, with Willing heroically committed to Rego’s art as his own stalled. This is not just background; it is the autobiographical impetus of a career.
The pathos/revenge fantasy, driving Rego’s portrayals of men as feeble giants — the bankrupt bridegroom collapsed, Pietà-like, across his bride in “Marriage à la Mode”, after Hogarth; the corrupt priest Amaro as a big baby in a skirt curled up between nursemaids in “The Company of Women”; the sinister, oversized, slumped “The Pillowman” — goes back to the sick Willing as an emaciated, furious monkey in 1981.
Violent, cartoon-simplified, expressive, “Red Monkey Offers Bear a Poisoned Dove” (Rego is the bird, Nassauer the bear) and “Wife Cuts off Red Monkey’s Tail”, Rego cutting herself off from her ailing, vomiting husband, are, she says, her “most real” paintings, “closest to personal experience”.
Rego talks too of “wanting to harm the person you love . . . if you make them into animals, you can do anything can’t you?” So in 1987 she painted the “Girl and Dog” series which “started everything”.
In “Snare” a girl in a voluminous skirt holds down a powerless dog, his pose imitated by an upturned crab. The dog is Willing, the girl his frustrated carer Rego. Later, using her lookalike model Lila Nunes, Rego painted herself as the crouching, howling, biting “Dog Woman”, and the half-nude kicked out of bed on all fours in “Bad Dog”.
Stark, almost hyper naturalism, achieved by greater volume and shadow, combined with fairy tale elements and urgent storytelling: the dog paintings mark the beginning of Rego as we know her.
Artistically, 1987-88 was an annus mirabilis. “The Maids”, inspired by Velázquez in subject and texture but also by Jean Genet’s tale of servant-murderers, and “The Dance”, a lone stoic woman amid twirling couples on a moonlit beach, are masterpieces of late 20th-century figuration.
Rego rolled up the first to show the bed-ridden Willing — the limp coat on the door and suitcase signify his imminent departure. The second was made after he died, and justifies his generous prediction, months before, about the direction of her work: “The figures emerge from sullen paint coercing an awkward naturalism; which failure, paradoxically, leads to an uneasy success when, after all, this is not prosaic but Gothic in feeling.”
Rego was still little known; “uneasy success” came with a 1988 Serpentine show, then in the 1990s and 2000s the mature artist met the political moment with originality and defiance. Frank in its realism, the “Abortion” series (1999), including schoolgirls in uniform, was made at the time of Portugal’s abortion referendum. “War” (2003) recasts a newspaper photograph of bombing in Basra with rabbit-headed, bloodied victims, and is extraordinarily affecting.
Both are made in pastel, favoured by Rego from the 1990s; it plays to her graphic strength, and ends ideas about the medium’s ladylike delicacy: “I’m not mad about the lyrical quality of the brush. I much prefer the hardness of the stick. The stick is fiercer, much more aggressive.”
She obtains from it a tough, soft shimmer that makes her surfaces as purely memorable as their subjects: the satin gold of the avenging, sword-wielding woman “Angel”; the Velázquez frothy white costume of the huge “Cake Woman” with top-hatted paedophile priest in her shadow.
This is the best exhibition I have seen since the National Gallery’s Artemisia last autumn. The scale of achievement, fuelled by yet transcending rage through formal inventiveness, is comparable, and so is the force of revelation about women’s lives eternalised in paint.
To October 24, tate.org.uk
Kunstmuseum Den Haag, November 27-March 20
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