Paula Rego’s provocative images, whether pastels, paintings or
etchings, have long been intriguing viewers with their intuitive and
original interpretation of women’s lives. And yet the work of which
Rego remains most proud is the one that won her the coveted Summer
Prize at the Slade in 1954. Aged 19, she had taken Dylan Thomas’
Under Milk Wood and reimagined its domesticity in a painting set in
the childhood kitchen of her native Portugal, beautifully composed
with the strong female figures that would come to epitomise her art.
Now 84, Rego still paints every day in her Camden Town
studio, surrounded by the theatrical costumes and props that
serve as inspiration. Tackling taboo subjects has never frightened
her, be it on canvas or in conversation, and she has no hesitation
in talking openly about her feelings. ‘I’ve found it more useful to
dig them up and paint them than to bury them,’ she says.
Growing up in a Catholic country under the Salazar dictator-
ship, where ‘the middle-class women were stifled and the poor ones
did all the bloody work’, Rego remembers listening to her cultured,
liberal father read from Dante’s Inferno, with its terrifying Gustave
Doré illustrations. From her childhood came a love of stories, she
says. ‘They’ve survived a long time, so they have a psychological
truth to them.’
As a young woman, that drive to conjure up compelling narra-
tives through art took her all the way to London to study at the
Slade, where she met Victor Willing, a fellow painter and the father
of her three children. She became a member of the London Group,
alongside Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and
Celia Paul, but it wasn’t until 1981 that she had her first solo Lon-
don show at the Air Gallery. A major exhibition at the Serpentine
Gallery in 1988, then a nomination for the Turner Prize in 1989
and an appointment as the first associate artist at the National
Gallery in 1990, deservedly brought greater recognition to her work.
Rego describes her art as a ‘conversation’ with herself and her
anxieties. ‘I had a Jungian therapist who helped me a lot,’ she says.
‘I was able to paint my fears and then they felt more normal.’ Her
ideas come from tales as diverse as Jean Genet’s The Maids, Char-
lotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, or
even Disney’s Fantasia cartoons (these inspired her ‘Dancing
Ostriches’ series, a witty depiction of the physical reality of women’s
bodies). ‘The picture has to be about something,’ she says. ‘It helps
me to have a story I can dive into – one I can identify with in some
way, so that I can use it to tell my own experience.’
Simone de Beauvoir is another key influence. ‘I read The Second
Sex, and that was an eye-opener,’ says Rego. ‘I like to turn things
on their head, to see things from the underdog’s perspective.’ One
such challenge to the establishment came in the form of her abor-
tion pastels, which she calls ‘the best thing I have ever done – they
are totally true’. Made in response to Portugal’s 1998 referendum
on liberalising abortion, when hardly anyone voted, her images
helped rally public opinion, and a second vote in 2007 was success-
ful. Rego again confronted female subjugation in her powerful ‘Dog
Woman’ series, designed to show that women are capable of def-
iance and aggression even if trained for obedience and submission.
Today, Rego’s art can be found in collections around the
world, from the National Gallery in London to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York and the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego
in Portugal; she also has a major retrospective at Tate Modern
scheduled for 2021. ‘I’ve used my life to make my work,’ she says
simply. ‘What else could I use? It’s what I know.’HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY AMY BRANDON