Paula Rego at the Tate Britain review – eleven rooms of abstract excellence
An elderly man – with his eyes half-closed, semi-obscured – slumps to one side, his head resting against his hand. The dark shadow behind him seems less like an intangible trick of the light than a near oppressive weight, the force pushing the man down and out of the frame. His features are gestured at in thick oil; they are striking yet fluid and indeterminable enough to appear almost uncertain.
The man is Figueiroa Rego – Paula Rego’s father. Figueiroa was an anti-fascist in Portugal under Salazar’s Estada Novo; he suffered from bad depression, made worse by the Portuguese regime. Rego’s painting captures her father’s near-resigned, despondent opposition, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that she painted the portrait when she was just nineteen.
The portrait is one of the first paintings in Tate Britain’s Paula Rego retrospective: the largest ever exhibition of her works, it fills eleven rooms with over a hundred paintings. The exhibition spans the early years of the Estada Novo to paintings finished only a few years ago. Rego is now 86. Her career bears witness to nearly a century’s worth of political turmoil, oppression, and difficulty.
The touchingly quiet, intense portrait of Rego’s father is one of the most overtly personal – and non-abstract – in the exhibition. Rego moves onto abstracted forms, contorted limbs, and collage-based works as she responds to the absurdities and injustices of Salazar’s regime. In Turkish Bath (1960), she collages an advertisement for breast-enlarging pills with cut-out limbs of nude women’s bodies; in Salazar vomiting the homeland (1960), the dictator is placed next to a woman’s naked body complete with pubic hair. In Interrogation (1950) – painted when Rego was only fifteen – a woman is being tortured; her arms and legs closely curled and intertwined so as to appear almost non-human. In the face of torture and interrogation, Rego’s subject has retreated into herself, her body is left slack.
In all of these paintings – and ones later in the exhibition – Rego positions the female body as a site of political disturbance and resistance. The disconcertingly dismembered bodies of the collage make a mockery of Portugal’s twentieth-century gender politics, and it is the woman’s stridently naked body that makes Salazar’s bent, vomiting figure all the more ridiculous.
Critics have long since focused on Rego’s political commentary – when reviewing Rego’s 2004 Tate Britain exhibition in the London Review of Books, Peter Campbell argued that each of her paintings is a “political narrative”. It is undeniable that Rego is a political painter; her paintings record and critique the political horror she has lived through. And, indeed, she has not stopped producing political works since the end of the Estada Novo: the exhibition ends with a harrowing room of paintings about contemporary human trafficking and female genital mutilation.
But it would be a mistake to say that Rego is only a political painter, or that her works are more propaganda than portraits. Peter Campbell writes about Rego’s Abortion Series (1998) – a series of large pastel works created at the time of Portugal’s first referendum on legalising abortion – and argues that “Rego is unsentimental”. Yet this is a work of anger, not pieces that inspire pity.
Rego’s women are impressive, stoic figures in their predicaments. But it is impossible to see them as uncomplicatedly resilient. In one of the works – Untitled, VIII – a woman who looks no older than a teenager lies on the floor, her trainers giving her an emphasised childlike air. Rego’s portraits are not unsentimental – there is something undeniably emotional in her commitment to recording these many women from a position of such unflinching honesty. Untitled No.1 is the painting that dominates the room – and possibly the whole exhibition. A woman sits on a towel on a white bed, presumably to prevent any blood from staining the white sheets. She wears a blue dress that is pulled up as she sits holding her legs apart. She looks out of the painting, but her eyes do not stare at the viewer; they seem to look beyond, in a gaze not unlike Rego’s father in the early portrait. Despair and resignation are mixed with a vacancy that is not exactly strength. Her position is vulnerable and it is hard to view the work without feeling like a voyeur, or somehow complicit in her situation.
To insist on the purely political aspects of Rego’s work is to miss out on her skill at mixing the political with the personal, the ideological with the human.
And indeed, it is the range of Rego’s work that is most striking about this exhibition: from oil paintings to collages and etchings, Rego turns her hand to works inspired by poetry, plays, and folklore. She is as skilled at creating etchings which bring to light the disconcerting nature of fairy tales as she is creating gasp-inducingly bold pastel drawings influenced by Jungian psychology. Rego was once quoted saying that she wanted to join the “big boy’s club” – the leagues of male painters like David Hockney and Frank Auerbach. With her skill, range, and intensity, she more than constitutes a club of her own.
There are a number of self-portraits of the artist in the exhibition, but the most striking is hardly a self-portrait at all. The Artist in her Studio (1994) uses Lila Nunez as a model; she is a George Sand-like figure dressed mixture of male and female clothing. The artist smokes a pipe whilst surrounded by half-finished works: sculptures of figures and monsters which appear in Rego’s other paintings. Rego is not a sculptor – this artist is not her. But “The Artist” is a testament to Rego’s creative powers and vision: it is an image of a woman occupying a male space, the possibilities of art, and her capacity to mix personal experience with universal.
This exhibition and Rego deserve every bit of praise they receive.