Pain, violence and the voices of women: Paula Rego at Tate Britain
Paula Rego, London 2004 (Alamy)
The Paula Rego retrospective at Tate Britain, which has just closed last weekend, is not only one of the great exhibitions of the year. It is arguably one of the great exhibitions of our time. It is no surprise that it has been sold out for most of its run since it opened on 2 July.
Born in Portugal in 1935 and still working at her studio in North London today, Rego’s artistic development stretches back over 70 years. Her early work was fiercely political, opposed to Salazar’s military dictatorship and the misogyny of the Catholic ancient regime. Violence against women was widespread. In a recent interview, Rego said, “Beating your wife was taken completely for granted. Women were the property of their fathers and then their husbands. No one came to help them.” When she was just 15, Rego painted Interrogation (1950), a picture of a woman, head bowed, seated between two men, visible only from the waist down, both sexually aroused, one holding a screwdriver, the other a drill. Rego’s father was a passionate anti-fascist and was happy for her to go to Britain to study at the Slade in the early and mid-1950s, where she met her future husband Victor Willing (1928-1988).
But the great turning point in her career came in the 1980s, just before Willing’s death, after a long illness suffering from multiple sclerosis. By then she was in her early fifties, the mother of three children. At first, I thought this might be related to her husband’s death. But it is worth thinking about how many major female creative figures have experienced a creative surge once their children have grown up. More time, fewer distractions, certainly more sleep and energy. In the Girl and Dog series from 1986, very different from her earlier collages, disturbing and perverse. Two moves were decisive: from abstract to figurative and to a dark vision of female desire and the violence between men and women. “They are sexually charged figures,” writes the curator, Elena Crippa, but their sexual power “emanates from their attributes – their strong bodies, their firm flesh, and the folds and materials of their clothes.”
These paintings featured a disturbing sense of female violence which only grew during the late 1980s, with works like The Little Murderess (1987) and, above all, The Maids (1987), inspired by Genet’s play. There were also images of authority, submission and control, paintings like The Policeman’s Daughter (1987), in which a young woman polishes her father’s boot, with her arm thrust deep inside it, and The Cadet and His Sister (1988), in which a young woman does up a military man’s shoe, submissively kneeling at his feet, and, most disturbing of all, The Family (1988), in which a woman and her daughter assault the father, watched by another young girl.
These works announce Rego’s greatest theme: women’s bodies and what men do to women. In later years, there is a series of works about the terrible suffering of women who have endured abortions (Untitled, 1998), and another, later series about female genital mutilation and girl trafficking, works about depression and mental illness (Possession I-VII, 2004), many of these drawing on her own experiences of depression and abortions in 1950s London. Her powerful pastels about women who have had abortions played an important part in the referendum which led to the legalisation of abortion in Portugal.
Another of her great subjects is the oppression of women in traditional societies and how women’s identities are shaped in girlhood and their teens. This later fed into an extraordinarily dark, even grotesque, body of work in the 1990s exploring Disney films like Snow White, nursery rhymes and children’s stories, especially Peter Pan and Pinocchio. As well as literature, she was fascinated by the work of other artists and in 1990 became the first artist-in-residence at the National Gallery, subverting the work of the mostly male canon, including great artists like Hogarth and Velazquez, offering a female version of such famous works as The Rake’s Progress.
What is perhaps most striking about her images of girls and women is how original they are. There is nothing idealised about them. They are large and physically powerful, often violent, even murderous. The famous Dog Women series depicts overwhelming primal bodily needs and emotions. Target shows a woman both submissive and a victim of murderous male violence.
What is fascinating about this huge exhibition of Rego’s work, the largest ever shown in Britain, is that unlike the recent major Hockney shows, it never tails away. The artistic and political energy never flags. Some of her best work has come in her sixties, seventies and eighties: violent and increasingly topical works about war, refugees, genital mutilation, using puppets and masks to enhance the inhumanity of her subjects.
There is also a fine catalogue, edited by Elena Crippa, the Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at the Tate, with six essays and a well-researched chronology. Arguably it does not do justice to the role of the Marlborough Gallery, Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota, or to critics like Germaine Greer and Marina Warner (a contributor to the catalogue), all important champions at crucial moments in Rego’s career. For this, readers should turn to her son’s BBC documentary, Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories (92 mins), still available on YouTube. But the catalogue is well illustrated and some of the essays are superb, especially Marina Warner’s reflections on Rego’s interest in folklore, children’s literature and “the sleep of reason”.
The exhibition at Tate Britain confirms Paula Rego’s reputation as one of the great artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. The sheer size of the exhibition and the catalogue both do justice to the range of her preoccupations, from Portuguese fascism to war and refugees today, from Hogarth to Snow White and Peter Pan. But at the heart of the exhibition is Rego’s lifelong preoccupation with women’s bodies and experiences: as children, as lovers and as mothers. The darkness of her vision, the anger at what men do to girls and women, and the suffering of both, are extraordinary. In her essay, Marina Warner quotes Medea by Euripides, “But if we had that voice, what songs/We’d sing of men’s failings, and their blame.” Rego has that voice. There is no artist like her alive today.
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