The Art of Paula Rego

 

I recently bought a book for two small children entitled The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy; it is a book I first met about eighteen months ago and it is a delight. I bought my copy in January 2020 without the excuse of having a child around to read it to, though in the introduction, the author does declare, “This book is for everyone whether you are eighty or eight.” It is idiosyncratic in its ‘handwritten’ scrawl with enchanting drawings and Charlie, the author, manages to create a wonderful, universal world where love, friendship, honesty and kindness are held dear. The sort of world one would want any small child to inhabit or indeed, would prefer for oneself instead of the real world which seems to grow ever more nasty.

Cut from this dreamy, ideal, charming universe to the world of Paula Rego. A friend recently spent a day with his family in Antwerp and while there bought a book from the Museum De Reede at a Paula Rego exhibition entitled Power Games. The text describes, with many illustrations, her 1989 exhibition on Nursery Rhymes; her Peter Pan in 1992; her Abortion Series in 1999; her After Hogarth in 2000; her Work on Mylar in 2000; her Jane Eyre in 2002; her Prince Pig in 2006; her Wine in 2007; her Beyond Abortion in 2009 and other Out of Series drawings.

I have borrowed the copy and the copious illustrations show a very different world to that of Charlie Mackesy but it was the first section [of Paula] on nursery rhymes that jogged my mind to remember the story of the boy and his three animal friends in their search for understanding and friendship. Paula’s nursery world for instance, begun as a pictorial narrative for her grand-daughter, with drawings and watercolours and eventually worked up into etchings, uses distortions, comedy and dream-like effects to create a claustrophobic, often sinister, effect, inspired by both 18^th and 19^th cartoonists and artists like Daumier and Goya while her childhood in the Portugal under the strict regime of the Roman Catholic Church and the conservative autocracy of Salazar, plays a seminal role in her creations. She seized on

In The Comfort of The Bonnet.  Jane Eyre.

the figure of Jane Eyre, using that character in many etchings and lithographs, as a way of exploring her own transition from girl to woman to represent her growing up in a dark and threatening Portugal.

Three Blind Mice 1.

From a totally different literary background, she encountered [and loved] the traditional, often absurd, English nursery rhymes at the English School she attended in Lisbon and eventually learned more from the iconic Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes by the famous Iona and Peter Opie. She followed the English oral tradition of adapting the rhymes for contemporary social comment, reinterpreting apparently innocent stories [often founded in historical fact unknown to the children who sang] to give erotic or ominous existential undertones.

Frankly the result is often terrifying. For instance, her first version of Three Blind Mice has three leaping enormous ferocious mice, their severed tails held in the triumphant hands of a peasant woman, with blood on the walls and fire in the background. I learned that the farmer’s wife represented Queen Mary, known as Bloody Mary [1516-1558] and the blind mice are Protestant clergy and noblemen who rebelled against her and were subsequently executed by her for their trouble [and their faith!]. This one detail of one rhyme has to stand for mention of all the other etchings and drawings executed by Paula Rego over a long life. [Get the book!] Her depictions of abortions which are stunning in their detailed social comment; the Victorian world of Jane Eyre and the psychological drama of the Wide Sargasso Sea [based on Jane Eyre]; plus the inner turmoil and anguish of other characters in other stories, all merge into a strong image of a woman artist who observes, but who also lives, these micro-dramas from literature and from life.

Witches' Sabbath by Francisco de Goya

She abhorred conservative morality which she attacked, exposing and exploiting its ambiguity and was drawn to artists like William Hogarth, the satirical/realist English painter; Honore Daumier and his grotesque exaggerations satirising society and politics; and James Ensor in his subversive and eccentric world. In particular, her kindred spirit was Francisco de Goya, master etcher who confronted social hypocrisy and human cruelty.

A typical James Ensor.

The role of literature is hugely important in Rego’s work, not as illustrations to the stories or rhymes but as translations; explanations; often as an embodiment, used by her to chart and illustrate her own life course. In all of her complex work, there is often a strong chiaroscuro which underlines the strange and eerie happenings she has re-created, in direct contrast to the centuries-old chanting of innocent entertainment. Her mastery of drawing, pastel and graphic techniques is undisputed and she is now considered to be on the same artistic level as Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and Soutine.

Honore Daumier's Drunken Man.

Paula Rego. Born 1935.

Little Miss Muppet.