While working on a large-scale painting at home one day, in 1965, the artist Paula Rego went downstairs to find her husband kissing another woman. The painting, in oil and collage, was about a government policy to poison stray dogs in Barcelona, and there was a glaring blank spot at the top. After watching her husband kiss the other woman, Rego, as she tells it, went running to her neighbor and best friend. Crying, she recounted what had happened, only to find her friend dissolve into tears as well. She, too, was sleeping with Rego’s husband.
Rego tells this story, mostly unflinchingly, to her son, the filmmaker Nick Willing, in a documentary he made about her life in 2017, “Paula Rego: Secrets & Stories.” In the film, they huddle over a reproduction of the finished painting, “The Dogs of Barcelona,” and Rego is in her eighties. She has smile lines, and is wearing pearls and a mischievous look. “I was very surprised, and afterwards I knew that she’d been shagging Dad and wanted him to leave me to go and live with her,” she tells Nick. “She was in love with Dad. But I”—she stabs at the painting triumphantly—“had something to put on here!” In the canvas’s formerly blank space, overseeing the writhing figures of the poisoned dogs, she had drawn a creature with exaggerated features, all red lips and oversized tongue. “The figure of the woman that he was snogging,” she says. “She becomes the lewd monster with her tongue hanging out.”
Many of Rego’s best-loved lewd monsters are on display in London through late October at Tate Britain’s ambitious and wide-ranging new show, “Paula Rego.” Curated by Elena Crippa with Zuzana Flašková, it is the U.K.’s largest retrospective of one of its most prominent and inventive artists. Rego, who, at eighty-six, remains fabulously prolific in her studio, in the North London neighborhood of Camden, offered support and occasional advice during the three years of its incubation. Organized roughly chronologically, the show unfolds over several sections that tell the story of Rego’s tumultuous life alongside her work. Headings including “A Subversive Vision,” “Fragmented Reality,” and “Love, Devotion, Lust” give visitors an inkling of what is to come.
Born in Lisbon, in 1935, Rego grew up during the repressive dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, known as the Estado Novo. Her father, an electronics engineer, was an antifascist and an anglophile, who sent Rego to a finishing school near London when she was sixteen. She hated it, dropping out and enrolling in the Slade School of Fine Art instead. There, she won the prestigious Slade Summer Composition prize for her painting “Under Milk Wood,” from 1954, which drew on her memories of gossiping women in the Portuguese kitchens of her childhood. At the Slade, she also met her future husband, the painter Victor Willing, who was then married to another woman. Victor asked if he could paint Rego nude, and she agreed.
In interviews, Rego talks about her time at the Slade with a mixture of pride and muted outrage. In “Secrets & Stories,” she is asked what in her career she is most proud of; she says winning the Summer prize at the Slade, “because there were so many good artists there, and I got the prize.” The male students wanted to sleep with her; the female students were getting abortions. Rego herself had “lots of abortions,” she says in the documentary. “Not just me, but every girl at the Slade had them.” These were backstreet abortions, procured through friends of friends, anything to avoid being sent home. “I didn’t dare come home with a baby. My mother would kill me. If she knew I was having an affair with a married man, can you imagine?” Rego says. “They would have kept me in Portugal. And I couldn’t have done that, because that would be the end of me. I wouldn’t have been an artist, you see?”
Rego’s mother was also artistic—a talented painter in her spare time—but the two were not close and fought often. In her mother, Rego seems to see a fate she narrowly avoided, calling her, in an interview, “a casualty of the society she lived in.” “That society was a deadly killer society for women. And I despised it for that,” she said. “You see, they encouraged women to do nothing. And the less they did, the more they were admired for it.” (“That is, women of a certain class,” she added. “The poor women had to do bloody everything.”) The sprawling exhibition makes clear that Rego’s life has taken another route. She told Nick when he was young that work was the most important thing in life. “I’m glad I told you that,” she says, when he brings it up in the documentary. “It’s true. It is for me.”
In the first rooms of the show, Rego’s early, vibrant collages, which dominated her practice in the sixties, are a sensory overload, almost too much to absorb in one viewing. In “Turkish Bath,” from 1960, she has layered newspaper clippings and eroticized images—a woman’s torso, the fold of a knee, an advertisement for breast-enlargement medication—over a blue-and-yellow background. In “Manifesto (For a Lost Cause),” from 1965, a figure representing Rego’s father, who suffered from depression, is surrounded by menacing forces. These works share an exuberance, and a contained fury, like a windup toy about to implode. Looking at them, I thought of a clip from the start of Rego’s career, included in “Secrets & Stories.” She is casually glamorous—tousle-haired and doe-eyed—and speaks with the utmost sincerity. “If you don’t like something you can cut it up, scratch it,” she says calmly. “If there’s someone you don’t like you can scratch all over them. I mean, you can let all your rage out.”
Rego’s rage runs through the decades, and the galleries of the show, like a third rail. “Paula has always defined herself as someone who grew up under a dictatorship in a quite conservative family,” Crippa, the lead curator, told me. “As a woman, you did not speak up.” Sometimes her anger is frank and righteous, as in her painting “Angel,” from 1998, in which a larger-than-life woman in a luminous yellow skirt holds a sword in one hand and a sponge—a reference to Jesus’s crucifixion—in the other. (She’s not there to play.) Other times, it is an undercurrent, a sublimated rage, just barely visible in the body language of female subjects who might otherwise appear unimpeachably demure. In one room, three stunning acrylic works show a young woman engaged in a domestic task. In “The Soldier’s Daughter,” she’s plucking the feathers from a dead goose, its wings around her in a kind of embrace; in “The Cadet and His Sister,” she is kneeling before a man in uniform, tying his shoelace. In “The Policeman’s Daughter,” she’s got her hand plunged down a tall black boot. There’s an erotic charge to these paintings, a sense that the power dynamic might shift at any moment. Against their stark backgrounds, these women seem to be performing their duties with a wink, as if to say, I may be scrubbing your boots now, but someday I’ll get my payback.
In 1966, Victor was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and began a long decline, which Rego incorporated into her work. They had been living on-and-off in the countryside in Portugal, in a rambling house that had belonged to Rego’s grandparents, but eventually the family moved to London. In Camden, living on Albert Street with three children, money was tight. Victor was deteriorating and Rego fell into a depression. She took a lover, Rudi Nassauer. Animals, humanlike in their tenderness or aggression, began to appear in her paintings, often standing in for the people in her life. In 1987, Rego exhibited a series of paintings at the Edward Totah Gallery in London known as the “Girl and Dog” series. Brightly colored, and darkly outlined, they show a little girl interacting with a dog—stand-ins for Rego (the girl) and Victor (the dog). In one, the girl shaves the dog’s neck, his paws resting on her knee. In another, “Girl Lifting Her Skirt to a Dog,” the girl holds her skirt up in a pose suggestive of restless nights and unmet desire while the dog looks on helplessly. It reads like a standoff. Something red, perhaps blood, stains the ground between them. These are warped cartoons for adults, depicting feelings both difficult to define and painful to confront.
