I first met Portuguese-born British artist Paula Rego 20 years ago, interviewed her again as she turned 80 and had a final conversation by e-mail last year, just before a magnificent retrospective of her work at the Tate Modern in London — it was quite possibly the last interview she gave.
Our first meeting — she would have been in her 60s — was in her studio in Kentish Town, an area of northwest London. She came across as a thriving Londoner and, at the same time, as unswervingly Portuguese.
Her studio was filled with outlandish creatures — a life-sized horse, a stuffed pelican, a battered toy monkey — and there were clothes on racks: a Victorian frock coat, a tomato-colored waistcoat, a taffeta dress. It was like being backstage at the theater — she was director, designer and wardrobe mistress all in one.
Photo: AFP
I was thrilled by her imagination and by everything she had to say. She was about to exhibit her formidable paintings based on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I remember telling her how I marveled at the way she had released Jane from the straitjacket of being an English governess and translated her into a Mediterranean figure with grimly undisguised desire.
“Her Jane,” I reflected out loud, “was no mouse.”
At this, Rego, who had until this point been talking in a generous, modest, cooperatively responsive way, exploded: “I don’t believe in the existence of little mice. Every mouse has intestines and teeth and they are terrifying, those little mice. Jane Eyre is actually a bit of a rat, although noble and very proud.”
Photo: Reuters
Throughout her career, Rego’s championing of women was faithful, fierce and complicated: She was no polemicist, yet her work — in particular, the 1998 sequence of 10 paintings on abortion — did more than any verbal demonstration could to help change Portuguese anti-abortion law.
The championing was complicated because she did not turn her women into heroines, but explored their pain, sorrow, ardor — and faultiness.
She continued to express her own feelings about being a woman, too. Several of her best paintings grew out of her marriage to the artist Victor Willing, who died tragically young of multiple sclerosis.
Rego was certainly no mouse herself, although one could say — she would not have minded — that there was a playful monkey in her (delinquent monkeys feature in wonderful paintings from the 80s).
I can still see the mischief in her smile, the quarreling teeth, the flash in her eyes — the sense of the inextinguishable child in her.
At 80, she told me: “I’m not brave in real life, but I’m not frightened of doing anything in my work.”
I love her work because it does what the best paintings do: It raises questions that cannot be definitively answered.
Looking through the Tate’s catalogue of last year’s retrospective, I am struck again by how seldom her subjects look back at you. There is a sense of trespass as you intrude on their reverie. This, in part, is what makes her work powerfully enigmatic and subversive.
What is The Policeman’s Daughter (1987) thinking as she polishes her father’s boot? What does the woman dancing without a partner in the moonlight in her masterpiece, The Dance (1988), feel in her unsuitable walking shoes? And what, in The Family (1988), are we to make of the woman dressing a helpless man — roughest of nurses — her arm across his mouth as if stifling him, her own mouth fixed in an expression of unreliable pleasantness?
She told me, in our last conversation, that she painted to find out what she felt. There was no such thing as known quantities or foregone conclusions.
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