In the Studio with Paula Rego: An Interview with Anthony Rudolf, Poet, Translator and Artist's Model

Abstract

During the more than half a century since his earliest appearances in print, Anthony Rudolf has published many works in prose and verse, and also translated (and co-translated) books, mainly poetry, from the French and other languages. As a literary essayist, he has written on authors as diverse as Balzac, Byron, Borges and George Oppen, as well as several essays on Primo Levi and Yves Bonnefoy. He has also written on the work of visual artists, including Paula Rego, R. B. Kitaj, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Charlotte Salomon and Fermin Rocker, and younger artists including Haidee Becker, Jane Joseph, Jane Bustin, Arturo di Stephano, Paul Coldwell and Charlotte Hodes. In addition, he is a reviewer and obituarist and has contributed to Radio Three, Radio Four and—in English, French and Russian—the BBC World Service. Born in London in 1942, he still lives in the north-west of the city. His books include Jerzyk (2017), a study of the diary of his second cousin, the youngest known suicide of the Holocaust; Silent Conversations (2013) (a book on his reading); and European Hours (collected poems, 2017), whose eponymous prologue is a prose poem about places visited with Paula over the years.

Keywords:

• Paula Rego
• artists' models
• contemporary women artists
• representation
• gender
• studio

Afterword

Paula Rego sadly died before this interview was published. Tributes have flooded the press. Michael McNay praised ‘the sheer visual power of her work, in painting, in fluently wonderful drawings, and etching and acquaints, carried by a magnificent technique’. Adrian Searle commented, ‘Rego continued to surprise and shock right to the end’. Tacita Dean remembered her as ‘a powerful presence with enormous European charm and sophistication - a bit of something that came from elsewhere, but childlike too . . . A defiant painter who worked with the stuff of herself, she was indefatigable, courageous, single-minded, endlessly imaginative, resolutely curious and 100% original'. Women: a cultural review shares this admiration and sadness.

Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego

(26th January 1935 - 8 June 2022)

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.