PAULA REGO at the TATE BRITAIN, MILLBANK, PIMLICO on the 5th of July 2021

 PAULA REGO at the TATE BRITAIN, MILLBANK, PIMLICO on the 5th of July 2021

 

Paula Rego was born in Portugal in 1935 and grew up in the era of Prime Minister (or dictator) Antonio de Oliviera Salazar and his Estudo Novo (New State) in 1933.  Salazar had been swept to power by a military coup in 1924, he established a fascist and imperialist regime that resisted the rise of nascent liberation movements in Portugal’s colonies such as Angola.  Rego’s father was middle-class and opposed the fascists whose main appeal was to recalcitrant members of the working classes and their imperialist and colonialist aspirations.  He also happened to be an Anglophile since Portugal’s educated classes had often looked to Britain for aid, for instance in the Napoleonic period and, thus Britain was looked upon as a liberal and sympathetic state.  For this reason. Paula Rego was sent to England to be educated and, eventually, to study art.  Salazar was to be the last European imperialist, as France, Spain, Italy, Germany and even Britain relinquished their colonies in the aftermath of the second world war. 

Rego’s early work is strongly figurative and works such as Interrogation (1960, oil on canvas) depict torture and imprisonment under the Estado Novo regime.  Photographic realism is thus seen to be a way of depicting political truths.  At the same time Rego was clearly experimenting with abstract forms such as Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (oil on canvas).  Without the title or the accompanying blurb, it is hard to make any sense of this painting but certainly the word ‘vomit’ comes to mind but hardly the word ‘Salazar’.  The work is surrounded by an unspoken criticism of photographic realism, that form must be challenged to depict the new preoccupations and concerns of the artist, but, if so, how can political truths also be articulated?  Rego’s ensuing work seems to attempt to forge a response to this kind of question.

Throughout the 60s and 70s Rego began to use collage to create surreal images which sought to estrange the everyday but also to comment on Portugal’s vicious authoritarian regime.  Her father’s death and failed republican ideals are depicted in her work Manifesto (for a Lost Cause), (1965, acrylic paint, crayon, graphite, and paper on canvas).  As well as political themes Rego includes pop culture references to street events, children’s songs, newspaper articles contrasted with her fine art preoccupations.  Rego is now committedly abstract as in works like Julieta (1964, oil paint, crayon, graphite, and paper on canvas).  Rego is now using disparate materials, mediums, and big canvases. 

The exhibition constantly depicts Rego as a hero/saint in contrast to the autocracy she opposed.

As Rego’s work evolved, fairy tale elements, story-telling and religious iconography interweave to create more indirect and subtly allusive images.  Political commentary regarding the Salazar regime is now pushed to the background as Rego’s rebellious young female characters or personae intimate repressive or oppressive contexts, as in Snare (1987, acrylic paint on canvas) and The Little Murderess (1987, acrylic paint on canvas).  These paintings are increasingly sophisticated and include more attention to perspective, volume and use of light to convey psychological nuances.  Tiny images such as a miniature horse and trap, a dead crab, a pelican, and a gaudily painted chair impinge on these scenes becoming suggestive and symbolic. 

Works like The Soldiers Daughter and The Policeman’s Daughter (both 1987, acrylic paint on paper on canvas) imply duty, obedience, conformity but also rebellion against norms.  Literature is also important to Rego as in her painting The Maids based on the play by Jean Genet where scenes of murder are underlined by Rego’s brutal, bloated figures that are at once theatrical or artificial and grotesquely familiar.  Rego’s work The Dance (1988, acrylic paint on paper on canvas) assembles a surreal scene, figures dance bathed in moonlight, in the background a fort on a hill which is a notorious Portuguese prison.  This is one of Rego’s most successful images, joyful and unrepressed encounters in the most expressive physical art form contrasted with the fear and terror of the Salazar regime. 

 Cinematic images such as Cast of Characters from Snow White (1988, oil paint on paper on aluminium) are entertaining and very expressive yet possibly fail to subvert the traditional meanings of fairy tales in terms of their politics and sexual innuendoes.  Instead, cosily familiar images fail to alarm.  Rego’s work can sometimes have the same banality, images seemingly created for the covers of boxes of chocolates, that afflicted the work of Edgar Degas.  More successful images which include intensely mysterious assemblies of characters telling obliques stories that indicate truths.  Other narratives appear at the margins, just as mysterious figures appear at the edges of Rego’s canvases.

Rego’s work is worth investigating and since its origins are European fused with an Anglo-Saxon sensibility that somehow insists on the oblique, darkly imagined world of politics mixed with fairy tales, intrusions of cinematic bluntness combined with a precise and unfailing technique.  Although there seem to be limitations of cosy banality when a more ironic investigation might have been necessary, Rego’s technique is always interesting, vital, and deserving of our attention.

PM, Tate Britain, 2021