http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7125-8875
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Abstract
This article follows Paula Rego’s first experiments in figuration from the late 1950s on, and analyses how the motifs suggested by her Portuguese background and particular conceptions of British art, such as Herbert Read’s ‘geometry of fear’, were connected. Rego’s exploration of unconscious and automatic resources in this period’s paintings and drawings signalled a direct relationship between subjectivity and creative practice. In this process of converting personal references into visual forms, her artistic training at the Slade and the intellectual, cultural and artistic framework that her experience in London provided clearly pointed to a certain plastic direction.
Acknowledgements
This article draws on from the text published in the catalogue 1961: Order and Chaos, by Catarina Alfaro and me. We also curated the corresponding exhibition which brought together for the first time a comprehensive view of Rego’s paintings and drawings produced during the 1950s and 1960s. I therefore must acknowledge Catarina Alfaro’s fundamental contribution to the analysis of the artist’s early work and consequently to this article’s line of argument.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. ‘I’ve been asked that before, and my answer was: “To give fear a face”. But there’s more to it than that: I paint because I can’t stop painting’. Interview with the artist conducted by Alberto de Lacerda (Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, 4).
2. Interview with the artist conducted by Alberto de Lacerda (Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, 4).
3. Livingstone, ‘Tales to Tell’, 40.
4. McEwen, Paula Rego, 27. Fiona Bradley also associates Rego’s creative practice with surrealistic processes: ‘The Surrealistic picture plane was a site for the collision of interior and exterior, of reality and imagination, and its influence may be clearly seen in Rego’s work at this time’ (Bradley, Paula Rego, 12).
5. Rego quoted by John McEwen (McEwen, Paula Rego, 20).
6. Eça de Queirós (1845–1900) published this book in Portugal in 1875. Rego’s painting quotes a passage concerning Amaro’s childhood, in which he is described as a lazy, apathetic and fearful boy, toyed with by the maids who dressed him up like a girl.
7. Rego in conversation with John McEwen (McEwen, ‘Paula Rego em conversa com John McEwen’).
8. Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’, 162.
9. Interview with the artist conducted by Alberto de Lacerda (Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, 4).
10. The Estado Novo dictatorship was established in 1933 and headed by the economist António de Oliveira Salazar. After the Second World War, although still defending the legitimacy of its colonial empire, Salazar’s regime was positively acknowledged by the international community that did not force a political change in the country. This indulgent attitude of the Western States was mostly related to the importance of Portuguese territories in the defence of the North Atlantic area (with an American military structure established in Azores) and with the threat of the Portuguese Communists replacing Salazar’s government after its fall.
11. In 1961, the colonial war broke out in Angola after a violent guerrilla attack in the north of the region. In the end of that year, the Indian Union invaded the Portuguese territories of Goa, Daman and Diu. Although the Portuguese military forces surrendered in India, war in Africa carried on until 1974, when Portuguese dictatorship finally collapsed in the aftermath of a military coup.
12. Victor Willing (1928–1988) attended the Slade School of Fine Art, where he met Rego, whom he would later marry. As Willing was a more experienced artist with close connections to London’s contemporary art scene, he bridged Rego’s post-Slade artistic experiences and that city’s creative environment. Willing also consistently complemented his wife’s work with literary essays that created an interpretative framework for her paintings.
13. As domination is, according to Victor Willing (Willing, ‘The “Imagiconography” of Paula Rego’, 43–49), one of Rego’s paintings' main subjects, it becomes clear that this first period defined the themes that she would persistently invoke in her work. For Rego, authority is not only a political issue, but is also entangled in human relationships. Nonetheless, in the late 1950s and 1960s, when Rego was living in Portugal, this subject entailed a sarcastic and sometimes brutal comment on Salazar’s dictatorship, its prohibitions and persecutions, and on the illusion of a colonial empire which began to crumble in 1961, when the Indian Union invaded the Portuguese territories in India and colonial war in Africa broke out.
14. Rego discovered Jean Dubuffet’s work four years after this artist’s exhibition at the ICA. Rego did not visit this show but came across its catalogue on a visit to London, in 1959 (Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures by Jean Dubuffet [S.l. s.n., s.d.] [Paris: Chantenay, 1955]).
15. She also discovered in London Henry Miller’s books, which impressed her with ‘their erotic candour, the turmoil of their torrential style’. Interview with the artist conducted by Alberto de Lacerda (Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, 3).
16. Another clear example are the Abortion series, which was Rego’s reaction to the referendum held on June 28, 1998, about the decriminalisation of the voluntary termination of pregnancy, which resulted in a massive abstention and the victory of the movement against decriminalisation.
17. Interview with the artist conducted by Alberto de Lacerda (Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, 3).
18. Herbert Read’s text quoted in Tate’s website. ‘Glossary of Art Terms: Geometry of Fear’. http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/g/geometry-of-fear.
19. Willing, ‘The “Imagiconography” of Paula Rego’, 43.
20. Holloway, ‘Salazar’s Boots’, 124.
21. Rego in conversation with John McEwen (McEwen, ‘Paula Rego em conversa com John McEwen’).
22. Rego’s interview to the Web of Stories website, ‘The beautiful Italian girl in The Dogs of Barcelona’. http://www.webofstories.com/play/paula.rego/17.
23. Letter of recommendation from Keith Sutton sent to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to support Rego’s application to a grant (attached to Rego’s application form). [London], February 7, 1962, p. 1. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Archives, SBA0835.
24. Rego in conversation with Salette Tavares (Tavares, ‘A Estructura Semântica na Obra de Paula Rego’, 3).
25. Rego in conversation with Salette Tavares (Tavares, ‘A Estructura Semântica na Obra de Paula Rego’, 3).
26. Sylvester, ‘Round the London Galleries’, 162.
27. Rego was certainly familiar with David Sylvester’s promotion of a new figurative approach in the 1950s and with Francis Bacon’s work. Besides lecturing at the Slade in the same period that Rego was studying painting, Bacon and Sylvester also had a close relationship with Victor Willing.
28. For a broader view on the artistic debates around Realism during the 1950s see Hyman, The Battle for Realism, and Steyn, ‘Realism versus Realism in British Art of the 1950s’.
29. Rego in conversation with John McEwen (McEwen, ‘Paula Rego em conversa com John McEwen’). In this period, between 1949 and 1954, William Coldstream, director of the Slade School of Fine Art (1949–1975), gathered a new teaching staff, which included William Townsend, and brought other artists, such as Lucian Freud, to the school as visiting teachers. Francis Bacon was also a frequent visitor at the Slade and David Sylvester lectured at this school from 1953 to 1957. In Rego’s view, Coldstream favoured a variety of artistic expressions at the Slade School.
30. Rego remembers that she was mostly impressed by the shows devoted to Mexican Art (Tate Gallery, March to April 1953) and Goya (Arts Council, June 2 to July 25, 1954). In 1955, two of the most influential exhibitions for the artistic scene of that time took place, the Alberto Giacometti’s (Arts Council, June 4 to July 9, 1955) and Jean Dubuffet’s (ICA, March 19 to April 20, 1955) first solo shows in Britain.
31. Interview with the artist conducted by Fernando Pernes (Pernes, ‘Entrevista com Paula Rego’, 1).
32. Interview with the artist conducted by Alberto de Lacerda (Lacerda, ‘Paula Rego nas Belas-Artes’, 3).
33. Interview with the artist conducted by Fernando Pernes (Pernes, ‘Entrevista com Paula Rego’, 1–2).
34. ‘Exposições em síntese’, 4.
35. This exhibition was open between December 1965 and January 1966.
36. Uruguayan art critic active in Portugal since 1962.
37. ‘Exultante fantasia’ and ‘irrealidade mágica’ (Maggio, ‘Medo Criador’, 8).
38. ‘Cruelmente nítidas’ (Maggio, ‘Medo Criador’, 8).
39. Pernes was also the director of the Modern Art Gallery of the National Fine Arts Society and it was him who invited Rego to set up her first solo show in this gallery.
40. ‘Recursos populistas’ (Pernes, ‘Exposições na S.N.B.A. galeria de arte moderna’, 60).
41. ‘O aproveitamento directo dos objectos fabricados na obra de arte, a recuperação estética do banal, as importações vindas da tecnologia para a expressão criadora, falam-nos desse esforço através da arte contemporânea que age entre o corajoso terror e a lúcida fascinação de quanto há de mais poderoso, insistente e devastador na cultura e na vida dos nossos dias’ (Pernes, ‘Exposições na S.N.B.A. galeria de arte moderna’, 61–62).
42. ‘Se a pintura é uma fuga, é uma fuga a uma certa realidade onde todas as vias estão vedadas e portanto é necessário actuar. O refúgio é contar uma história interior, destruindo aquela realidade para inventar uma outra … O medo é creador. O absoluto indispensável para aceder à elaboração de um objecto mágico: a obra de arte … E o medo não se constitui como um elemento presente e paralisador; projecta-se no futuro e no passado e é como um nevoeiro que apaga os seus contornos para revelar o sentido do mundo. O medo torna-se assim – segundo Heidegger – um modo de existência da consciência, uma das maneiras como ela compreende o seu “estar-no-mundo”’ (Maggio, ‘Medo Criador’, 8).
43. Letter sent by Rego to the director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Fine Arts Department, regarding the purchase of Manifesto for a Lost Cause by this institution. Estoril, January 21, 1966. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s Archives, SBA12739. This painting was reproduced in the catalogue’s cover.
44. José Figueiroa Rego (c. 1907–1966) was an Anglophile electronics engineer who completed his training at the Marconi factory in Chelmsford, Essex. Having grown up in a Republican and anti-clerical environment, José Figueiroa Rego disapproved of Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship and its corporative and pious ideology. For this reason, he planned for Rego an Anglophile education that would eventually enable her to settle in the UK, a less repressive and more liberal country.
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Leonor de Oliveira
Leonor de Oliveira is a Post-Doctoral fellow affiliated with the Institute of Art History, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her research is funded by the Portuguese funding agency Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BPD/95549/2013) and addresses the internationalization of British arts in the post-war period. It is centred on the specific case of the Portuguese artists who decided to complete their artistic training in London’s arts schools and, consequently, promoted a cultural and artistic dialogue between Portugal and Britain. She has been studying specifically Paula Rego’s early work and as a result she co-curated the first exhibition devoted to Rego’s 1950s and 1960s production at the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal. She is currently preparing a book on the Portuguese artists in London since the 1950s.