Paul Rego II

‘Mankind doesn’t need art. What he needs is stories.’ - G. K. Chesterton

This is the catalogue introduction to Paula Rego’s exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 2012.

The author of the Father Brown stories was quite often profound and wise, but here the first sentence is nonsense while the second is true, particularly if one applies it to the work of Paula Rego, which we surely need as much as ‘art’ even if, or rather because, she is obsessed by stories. Without stories her art and our world would be much poorer places. It is no surprise that she has called the building in Cascais devoted to her art not ‘The Paula Rego Museum’ but ‘Casa das Histórias Paula Rego’, The House of Stories.

These days the word ‘literary’, when applied to a painter, is, whether intended or not, deemed to be derogatory.

Nor is there much merit in the word ‘narrative’ which, like ‘literary’, is an almost automatic down-grading of a ‘true artist’. Yet Rego’s art is both literary and narrative, and these two unfashionable qualities, when mingled with her extraordinary imagination, combine to constitute her genius and make one wonder whether Dame Paula should be enthroned as ‘England’s greatest living painter’, as she is already her native Portugal’s greatest. That she is Portuguese is no bar to the English throne. After all, Francis Bacon was Irish born and Lucian Freud was German (born in Berlin 1922, arrived in England 1933), after which, like Rego, he became bilingual.

In fact there is something alluring in the concept of Rego as a Goya-like colossus, standing majestically over England and Portugal, known after all as ‘our oldest ally’.

One of the other risks of labels such as ‘literary’ or ‘narrative’ is that one stands accused of being a mere illustrator (as indeed she was by Brian Sewell, eliciting her sardonic comment ‘Like Goya and Hogarth’) and indeed many competent, even great, artists have been illustrators of books, producing pictures on a page which identify, in all senses of that word, the author’s characters and locations. One thinks of Dickens being illustrated by the redoubtable ‘Phiz’ and his brethren to brilliant effect. Rego is not, of course, only an illustrator. She does not record the images she reads of in books. She creates wholly original images based not on the earlier efforts of previous illustrators, but goes back to the roots of the narrative she has read and then lets her imagination take over and produce versions of characters and situations which, once seen, are never forgotten. They transform the picture formerly in one’s head into something utterly psychologically accurate but often savagely different, even traitorous, but believable. In musical terms she could be compared with Franz Liszt who, without restraint, borrowed or stole themes from other composers, usually those he most admired, and produced endless scintillating piano versions which were actually his own, new and brilliant pieces, by and large pianistically so difficult that other pianists were unable to play them.

Straight narrative painting went out with the Victorian age. It was painfully literal and used a high level of technical skill to seduce an audience who liked that sort of thing. Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Alma-Tadema, Lord Leighton, Frith, etc., were all detailed literary narrators but none of the pre-Raphaelites, whom, incidentally, she greatly admires, was driven as Rego is driven by the original perception of their literary sources. Who else, having done her great series of Peter Pan etchings, could have taken Wendy, eschewing all the mawkish sentimentality that normally surrounds her, and showed her standing and stirring a bloody pot full of aborted foetuses? Surely a useful addition to the words spoken in the interval of Peter Pan’s first night by the novelist Anthony Hope: ‘Oh for an hour of Herod!’

Rego, for all the gentleness of her disposition and her close family relationships, has a strong, political and social, savage streak, as in paintings like The Dogs of Barcelona (1965). Rego likes dogs and did not approve of the city fathers of Barcelona, who put out poisoned meat to dispose of the city’s excessive stray canine population. (No Battersea Dogs Home in Cataluña.) Also much influenced by Picasso - to her the artistic giant of the twentieth century - she owes the vicious political satire of her painting, now at the Lisbon Gulbenkian, Salazar Vomiting the Homeland of 1960, to Picasso’s 1937 etchings, The Dream and Lie of Franco I and II. She paid a further tribute to Picasso when she produced in 1964 two etchings, both called Untitled, attacking Salazar and his fellow Iberian dictator, Franco. Both etchings go further than Picasso, who uses images familiar in his own usual œuvre, such as bulls, horses, picadors etc, whereas Rego’s images in these two etchings are more fantasies than lies and show Salazar and Franco hugging each other and dancing on each other’s backs; one of them - it’s not quite clear which - is being anally raped by a giant Yale key; chance would be a fine thing...

Some artists spend their later years either repeating themselves or, whether subtly or obviously, softening their hostile and crusading attitudes. Needless to say that is not Rego’s way. To declare my interest, in producing the new and enlarged edition of my book, Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Works, I have, in covering nearly a decade since the original book was published in 2003, added approximately a third to cover her recent years of prolific graphic output. Far from mellowing with age - Rego was born in 1935 - she has become even fiercer in her denunciation of new targets, whether it is the trafficking of helpless young women and girls or female circumcision - FGM, to give it its only marginally less shocking title. As with her earlier Abortion series of 1994, she is no do-gooding feminist, worried about female promotion through glass ceilings, but a savage yet wholly controlled fighter for women’s rights in excoriating these unspeakable practices.

When I spoke to Rego before the additional chapters were written I recorded our conversation:

Rosenthal: There’s not a lot in the recent work that’s brimming with laughter and cheerfulness. You are exploring some of the most terrible human feelings that exist.

Rego: If that were true that would be wonderful.

Rosenthal: I think it is true.

Rego: Do you?

Rosenthal: Well, female genital mutilation, selling little girls’ bodies...

Rego: Yes.

Rosenthal: All of that is delving deep into social evils... It’s evil that you are fighting.

Rego: Fighting, you see; you have to say something about it because otherwise no one speaks up. It’s like the Abortion pictures: you have to legalize abortion otherwise it goes on and on in the most horrendous way.

It was partly because of Rego’s paintings, drawings and graphic works that abortion became legal in Portugal. Ironically Rego’s work on abortion was done for its protection, for its de-criminalization.

Her work on female genital mutilation (FGM) and sex-trafficking of women and children is done to achieve and retain their suppression and to encourage their abolition since, even if illegal in most of Europe, we can still read in the newspapers their continuance almost every day. Rego will have no truck with the so-called liberals who say that FGM is OK because it’s ‘part of their culture’. That it is ‘part of someone’s culture’ does not make it acceptable, let alone good. As Rego’s etchings reveal, FGM is a monstrous evil, and that it is still practised in Britain and Europe, regardless of banning legislation, is for Rego and many thousands of other people a terrible stain on our society.

The innocent gallery-goer might well find these images repellent; but the practices they condemn and contemn are repellent. As often Rego is not far from Goya, and one can well imagine how his contemporaries reacted to Los Desastres de la Guerra when they were first shown. They, and Rego’s two series, were not created to be easy on the eye, to please comfortable bourgeois taste, but rather to shock the bourgeoisie and, in Goya’s case, ruling class taste. In Penetration, one of the child-trafficking lithographs, the sinister child broker, a sexless creature with a death-like head but with woman’s clothing, is holding a victim and sticking her hand into the child’s mouth, like a horse dealer checking an animal’s health and age. This bears an uncanny likeness to Goya’s painting El Lazarillo de Tormes, drawn from a Spanish sixteenth-century picaresque fiction in which a blind swindler suspects that his carer has fobbed him off with a turnip rather than the meaty sausage that piqued his appetite, and which the carer has decided to eat himself. Therefore he shoves his hand into the carer’s mouth and gropes around until the sausage is disgorged and restored to its rightful consumer.

Later this year, the Casa das Histórias will exhibit Rego’s new sequence of large, if not actually gigantic, paintings based on a novella by the historian of Portugal, the nineteenth-century writer Alexandre Herculano. It is based on an eleventh-century legend and is called The Woman with Goat’s Feet. These five canvases are not entirely sequential in narrative form but each tackles one or two aspects of this legendary tale. The central canvasas are so tall, at 240 cm, that Rego had to use a cherry picker to execute the top section, and to watch her being thus hoisted and precariously working in the upper reaches of the picture was an awesome and, nerve-wracking experience.

The best description, or adaptation, of Herculano’s novella inevitably comes from the master story-teller herself as it is set down here:

Rego: This man was walking along and he looked up. He was a fighter, a duellist and everything, and he looked up and he saw sitting on top of a hill the most beautiful girl he had ever seen and she was singing and playing a guitar. Then she came down and he took her home and set her on the bed and undressed her.

Rosenthal: As one does.

Rego: As one does, immediately and then he noticed that she had the feet of a goat, but he didn’t mind.

Rosenthal: So he was not a foot fetishist.

Rego: [Laughs mischievously] Oh no. After he’d undressed her he bathed her and she said: ‘This is very strange, but I’ll be with you and I’ll live with you for ever provided you never cross yourself. Otherwise something terrible will happen.’

Rosenthal: Well, the Devil sometimes has goat’s feet, doesn’t he?’

Rego: Well, she could be a relative of the Devil...

Rosenthal: The Devil’s niece perhaps?

Rego: The Devil’s Niece would be a good title. So he stayed with her and they had two children, a boy and a girl.

Rosenthal: And how were the feet of the children?

Rego: [Laughing] I think they were normal. That’s where he set her up, near my house in Portugal, in the bottom right-hand corner. And on top of the hill there’s a windmill and that’s where they used to hang people, where they had the scaffold. It was called the Hangman’s Hill.

Rosenthal: Well if you hang someone there everyone can see, it’s a warning.

Rego: Yes, a warning. And that’s what it was, I could see it clearly from my house. We looked at it... Anyway he loved to hunt. He went hunting every day and he had a big horse that he loved and he had a hunting dog and one day he killed a wild boar. The woman had a cat and while the man is chewing on a large bone from the boar which he is ready to throw to his big hunting dog, probably an Alsatian, her little cat attacks and kills this great hunting dog. Astounded, the man crosses himself. She is horrified. And she seizes the girl and levitates herself, clutches the girl and takes her upwards towards heaven apparently never to be seen again, while the hunter seized hold of the boy to retain at least one of his children. In fact she has retreated to the mountains whence she came, and becomes again what she always was, a siren, a seductress. He goes off on his horse Onagra looking for her and he goes on a rickety bridge which is a bridge over hell. He is - this is the eleventh century - fighting the Moors. He is captured and imprisoned by them. The boy asks the horse what to do and the horse says, go and find your mother. She will help you. He finds his mother in the mountains and she tells him to get his father out of gaol. In effect he rides on Onagra to the gaol and horse and rider dislodge the bars and his father and his fellow prisoners all escape and the son goes on to fight and kill and drive off the Moors as a natural leader, a proud and successful soldier.

Needless to say Rego diverges from the original tale because she is herself such a brilliant story-teller, and the five canvases are full of images, apart from the modern dress of the characters, which readers of Herculano will not find, such as Mary Magdalene with her cross or the beautiful white house. The house is the one Rego grew up in and, when the family went bankrupt, had to be sold. Even more painful than the enforced sale was the conduct of the purchaser, who had the house - and its capacious grounds which provided the family’s fruit and vegetables - bulldozed so that he could build a group of ugly, small, suburban houses in order to make a fat profit. As so often in her œuvre Rego has taken a highly specific narrative supplied by someone else and has both interpreted and embellished it with her own powerful imagination. As the Italian proverb has it: tradutore traditore, to translate is to betray; but when Rego adapts a story, a legend, even an entire novel, she works with an extraordinary respect for the original, inseparably linked to what amounts to an imagined adaptation. No matter how original and even distinguished the source whether it is the mawkish sentimentality of J. M. Barrie or the chilling, even brutal, satire of the nineteenth-century Catholic church by Eça de Queiros (The Crime of Father Amaro), she makes someone else’s vision her own, ruthlessly cutting the dross and enhancing the skeleton.

A classic case of this freedom of adaptation is to be found in most of her graphic work of the recent decade. Apart from the FGM and the trafficking of young girls series, which are, as it were, sourced from our daily press, the bulk of the work is, if not actually based upon them, at least triggered off by literary sources.

Moon Eggs is also original and, inter alia, manages to turn her partner and most regular male model, Anthony Rudolf, into a chicken. Prince Pig is based on an Italian Grimm-like fairy tale by Giovanni Francesco Straparola, who wrote it in the first half of the sixteenth century. It is a somewhat cautionary tale which mingles love, lust and murder before the highly conventional happy ending. It is in many ways the gentlest and most aesthetically pleasing of Rego’s series in colour, and it is almost, but not quite, hard to believe in the Prince turned into a vast, stinking, pig who murders two beautiful, innocent sisters, in order to marry the third and most beautiful who does what’s necessary to turn him into Prince Charming. Its luscious imagery is part comical and part ironical and is one of Rego’s most subtle series.

O Vinho (Wine) has a bizarre history which reveals, wonderfully elegantly, how easily Rego can get up the noses of Philistine officialdom. She was invited to produce some wine labels, did them beautifully, but the jobsworths who ruled the wine trade not only turned them down but threatened court action and possible imprisonment if they were to adorn bottles of Portuguese wine. Which is why these wholly engaging lithographs were printed privately and accompanied the text of a quite wonderful short story about the joys of wine by João de Melo. Rego does of course approve all aspects of wine, including giving it to babies to make them sleep and the consequences of excessive consumption, but all the lithographs, far from deserving prison, constitute a sublime celebration of this unique and multifarious liquid.

The Curved Planks is one of the most complex and most varied series she has made. It accompanies a brief text by the French writer Yves Bonnefoy, who had a particular affinity with Rego’s œuvre and who added to his text for the portfolio, after he had seen the prints, a personal letter full of wisdom and perception: ‘Your dark revelations have become the entire sky, the entire earth,’ The Curved Planks is perhaps the most interesting combination of artist and writer apart from that with João de Melo. Both series have a perfect fit with their respective writers.

In the period that ended with the book published in 2003, there are several striking works not done in series form. The most interesting were sparked off by Rego’s meeting with the playwright Martin McDonagh, whose play The Pillowman had deeply impressed her when it was staged at the National Theatre. She made a single lithograph called Scarecrow, consisting of a girl in the crucifixion posture but with a horned skull for a head. This fearsome image, in my opinion a masterpiece, reflects McDonagh’s play in which a girl is horrendously abused by her parents, culminating in her proclamation that she is Jesus, whereupon her parents crucify her. This, in the play, is shown but does not happen. McDonagh’s play is not about child-abuse, no matter how much abuse is described or shown. The play is in fact about the nature of writing, of story-telling, of the difficulty in separating truth from lies. Its appeal to Rego is obvious once you have made the connection, so that it’s not surprising that Rego and McDonagh got on so well personally. McDonagh gave Rego the manuscript of a series of unpublished stories, many of which contain some of the same sort of paradoxical spasms of cruelty that occur (or do they?) in The Pillowman, and which have sparked off two individual prints of great power, Turtle Hands and Camouflaged Hands. It should also be noted that Rego was sufficiently impressed by the play to create, in 2004, a large triptych in pastel on board called, simply, The Pillowman, replete with the darkness of McDonagh’s tenebrous writing.

But as far as graphic art inspired by McDonagh is concerned the key work is a triptych of lithographs, Shakespeare’s Room of 2006. Inspired by an unpublished McDonagh story, it mocks the absurd statement that if you gave a sufficiently large number of monkeys a typewriter each and sufficient time, they would produce Hamlet or King Lear... In the Rego triptych the monkeys have clearly failed to produce anything of worth. Three different women (one for each print) have shot them all with pistols resembling wartime Webleys or Colt 45s. As always with Rego, this is a meticulously observed and executed piece of story-telling.

I began this article with G. K. Chesterton. Let me end it with a more recent and more revolutionary writer, David Mitchell, in his superb novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet published in 2010:

The belly craves food, she thinks,

the tongue craves water,

the heart craves love

and the mind craves stories.