Paula Rego was a master storyteller using both paint and puppets. She sadly passed away on 8 June 2022, but her stories will keep talking to us as long as we choose to listen. Portuguese by birth (born 1935), she made London her home and had a special place at the Venice Biennale in 2022. It is from these works that I wish to draw out her stories – from the starkly personal La Marafona (2005) to re-interpretations of other creations, including Metamorphosing after Kafka (2002), Snow White and her Stepmother (1995), Geppetto Washing Pinocchio (1996) and The Blue Fairy Whispering to Pinocchio (1996), to the universal, such as Gluttony (2019), and Oratorio (2009), and political in Sleeper (1994).
La Marafona shows Paula Rego in the blue headscarf, sad, with a far-away, contemplative look as she leans on her father’s arm. He has a kindly but no longer fully human face and “wears” a crown of thorns, symbolising the depression from which he suffered. Behind him, his wife comforts him, her face distorted by deep concern and grief. Her parents remind us of Paula Rego’s giant dolls. The real and surreal come together and communicate empathy and pathos and the grotesque monster that is depression. This is one of many paintings where Paula Rego explores and generously shares her personal relationships and feelings. Even the cat, hiding in the shadows on the bottom left, looks downcast.
Paula Rego’s retelling of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is harrowing. Here, presumably, Gregor Samsa comes back as a naked man with his legs and arms in the air, like an insect on its back. Half-eaten fruit and salad lie next to him, momentarily ignored. His eyes are closed, suggesting sleep, but the cushions are laid out as a cross, suggesting crucifixion. It is to me more disturbing to see a naked man, limbs flailing up like a flipped-over and helpless insect, rather than showing a giant cockroach. Read Kafka’s metamorphosis and recall the horrors of Gregor Samsa transformed and transforming into a giant cockroach, his human mind initially still working, him still being himself, but gradually metamorphosing as he was submerged and overwhelmed by his appetite as he smells the rotting food outside in the alleyway. Paul Rego speaks to Franz Kafka across time, adding another dimension to his masterpiece with her masterstrokes.
Retelling fairy tales and stories was one thread of Paula Rego’s work. Snow White and Her Stepmother is a disturbing piece about intimate relationships and humiliation – a stepmother should not help her stepdaughter with her knickers. Her paintings of Pinocchio show a relationship that just feels wrong – there would be no problem with Geppetto washing a figurine and readying it for painting, but Pinocchio is depicted as a real boy, just like he is with the Blue Fairy whispering to him. In each of these, the beholder is left disturbed – the nakedness, the blue fairy’s hand touching Pinocchio’s leg, and Geppetto holding Pinocchio’s neck. Her works explore violence and betrayal, haunting and humiliating moments that talk of the ills of society. An artist can shout warnings of the injustices in the world. Here the shouting is subtle as all the faces are calm and this creates the uncomfortable tension between the visual and the message which worms its way under our skin. Art is far more than aesthetics, even if the colours attract the eye.
The role of women is also a repeated focus, as are the harsh realities of society, as seen by the grotesque giant puppet, Gluttony, where the woman is so possessed she feeds off her children, echoing the Greek myth of Chronos eating his children.
Oratorio presents us with a cabinet of horrors women face in a deeply dysfunctional society – depicting rape, seduction, solitude in pregnancy, social disgrace, unwanted births, from ambivalence to the baby to infanticide – one held upside down by the foot while the woman looks elsewhere; another two dumped in a grey bucket, another child flopped on his back, head lolling back, while one is held close, in sympathy or regret. This is not a cabinet of curiosities. This work, we are told, depicts women from eighteenth-century literature and folklore. Its angry shout reverberates to the present and will echo into the future, unfortunately resonating with reality. There is a whole novel in this dark set of paintings and puppets that would be deeply painful to read but shouldn’t be censored.
Some of Paul Rego’s work is immediately disturbing; others take time to unsettle and unnerve the viewer. Sleeper (1994) shows a woman lying on a blazer, an empty plate behind her. Is she being punished or cared for or stricken by grief?
There is, despite her building on folklore, fairy tales and literature, little joy in the works of Paula Rego. Hers is no Hollywood. But its power and unique voice should be lauded, and the messages heard and heeded. Her work makes me think of the German narrative figurative painter Max Beckmann, who lived through Hitler’s dictatorship; Neo Rauch, the modern German social critic; as well as South Africa’s William Kentridge, who lived through apartheid. Paula Rego grew up during Salazar’s dictatorship (which collapsed in 1974) until her parents sent her to the UK when she was 16. Rego, Beckman, Rauch and Kentridge painted narrative socio-political critical oeuvres replete with symbolism, each with a unique, powerful, critical voice – shouting out warnings to all who care to look.
There are, of course, many more parallels one could draw to other painters – e.g. Paula Regio’s prints with Goya’s Los Caprichos – and many more paintings (generally in pastel), engravings, puppets, and installations. I’ve only scraped the surface with these few words. See the links to Paul Rego and her work at the Venice Biennale, the online presentation of The Forgotten at Victoria Miro (following the earlier exhibition), The Tate, Cristea Roberts Gallery and Gallery Sofie Van de Velde; the exhibitions are all past, but that is one benefit of the internet. Hopefully, a major museum will soon dedicate a full retrospective in her honour.
