PAULA REGO
main page here
Rego meets Mr Rochester
In the past, Paula Rego has explored fairy tales and delinquent monkeys, but her new obsession is Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and the pent-up passion of its characters
Kate Kellaway
Observer
Sunday April 14, 2002
There is alifesize horse swaddled in bubble-wrap in Paula Rego's studio. You can't see its face - it is gallant but paralysed. It is no surprise to see this arresting creature under her roof, for Rego is the mistress of images that stop you in your tracks and of paintings that seduce, frighten and confound. 'That is the model for Rochester's horse,' she announces, as if this settled everything.
But it only begins to explain what she has been up to: ever since last summer, Rego has been in thrall to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. She read the novel for the first time recently (she is in her sixties and Portuguese - the book did not come her way naturally). Jane (straitened but passionate governess), Rochester (one of the great romantic heroes of Victorian fiction) and Bertha (Rochester's mad ex-wife locked in attic) took hold. Since then, she has entered the novel, as a housebreaker might, to upset it a little, pilfer and subvert. She can, once inside, almost 'smell' the story, she says.
We sit at a table at one end of her studio in Kentish Town, north London, and, like the manager of a small café, she produces bitter lemon to drink.
She is tiny, warm, unpredictable. Her hair is a planned nest, she wears a sea-blue cardigan, has an hour-glass figure, a wicked laugh with crooked, quarrelling teeth and gold earrings that prove that pigs can - and do - fly.
I'm thrilled to meet her and to walk into what amounts to a fantastic, unexpected, ad-hoc private view. None of the work that surrounds us has been seen anywhere yet, she tells me. But she has nearly finished and everything must go, along with the work from her recent Kendal exhibition, to Yale for 'a huge show', before returning, some time next year, to this country.
Rego's success has been unwavering (a Rego painting will reliably sell for £60,000 or more), but she made her name as a painter only in middle-age, not long before her husband, Victor Willing, the star of his generation at the Slade, died of multiple sclerosis.
It was an exhibition at the beginning of the Eighties that made her conspicuous. It was comic and disturbing; a frightening sequence of paintings of delinquent monkeys, horribly human in its implications. In 1990, she became the first artist in residence at the National Gallery,where she produced Crivelli's Garden, the mural in the Sainsbury Wing restaurant.
Her figures occupy one's mind as a troubled extended family might. She explores strained, sometimes incestuous, relationships and her painted children share an unnerving maturity. She appears like them - in a topsy-turvy way - a child-like grown up. But there is nothing innocent about her mind. She sees children as knowing without knowing, she believes they are 'not boring, not tedious in any way; they don't impose. They know about things, they certainly know fear and don't pretend they don't'.
For a long time, I tell Rego, I had a poster of The Policeman's Daughter stuck up in my bathroom. Every night, I considered her as she polished her father's black boots with an inscrutable and by no means kindly look on her face. She seemed to be undertaking an angry duty, possibly with a sexual subtext. But what I liked most was all that could not be explained: the window of her room looked out on inconclusive Mediterranean blue. I enjoyed puzzling over her, even though she wasn't the most relaxing prospect from the bath. 'Except that she was like a swan,' Rego says, ready at once to see her afresh.
Rego's indebted to narrative, but is no illustrator. There is always something that she 'can't put into words because otherwise I wouldn't be able to do the pictures'. She believes in mystery but doesn't sound like a sphinx; she has a just perceptibly indignant intonation (a Portuguese variant of what every Frenchwoman does when speaking English). She pursues what is just out of sight: 'You think it is there but you are not sure. I love stories; I can only read books with stories but while your attention is taken, this liberates other bits of your mind, and what gets out often has nothing to do with the story. Subverting seems to go on constantly; subversion is a pleasure.'
Rego grew up an only child in Lisbon; her father made precision electrical instruments - and his fortune. There is a marvellous photograph of her as a little girl in John McEwen's biography of her wearing fancy dress, a tiny, beaded squaw. Her gaze is gentle, dark, direct; not mature but watchful, expectant, a touch tense. She is disguised but not deceived.
She is still like this, an essentially theatrical painter (someone should commission her to do the design for opera; I'd love to see her Carmen). And at the moment, her studio is like being backstage at the theatre. I inspect Rochester's maroon coat, tomato waistcoat and well-travelled white shirt which hang in a corner. But there are racks of other clothes too; she hires them from a local firm that makes them for films but the result is that Rego, a keen shopper, has turned her studio into an unbuttoned Victorian boutique. I note also a diminutive blue and white striped marquee and two stuffed dead dogs, plus a pelican and a mangled crow. It is as if some irregular animal salon were under way.
The model for Rochester is her new partner, Anthony Rudolf, publisher of Menard Press. He is a 'good sitter,' she says approvingly. 'He used to go to sleep but he has improved.' How did they get together? 'He asked me out,' she says, suddenly shy.
I walk round and find a lithograph of Rochester on the horse; he is a bit of cad, a tricky fellow. He slouches and cringes. His face is wonderfully challenging to read; his eyes suggest habitual displeasure and impatience but he has cantankerous good looks. In the background is Rego's family house in Portugal (teasingly masquerading as an English mansion). In a larger painting, Rochester tucks his hands haughtily inside the rims of his boot, his legs are open. 'He is showing off his crotch,' Rego says dismissively. At another point, she describes Rochester as 'just a dummy'.
She has always been an ardent champion of women. In her most recent exhibition in Kendal, there was a series of pictures of abortions, the decision to cover this subject triggered apparently by the Portuguese electorate's decision to vote against abortion. In Jane Eyre, she has a perfect subject: obedience containing rebellion. Her model is Lila with whom she has worked since 1988. She is apparently most gifted at settling herself into evocative poses. Is she an actress? 'No. A chiropodist. She used to be my au pair and she nursed Vic [when he was dying of MS]; she has worked with me always.' Just as Jean Rhys extracted Wide Sargasso Sea from Jane Eyre (a novel which Rego greatly admires; she even borrowed the title for a painting, a crowd scene on an evening terrace), so she has responded in her own way. In particular, she has disinterred its buried sexuality, made repression flower.
Jane Eyre, herself, is a revelation; uncorseted, she sinks her mouth into the sleeve of Rochester's jacket, at once feral and Victorian. Rochester has one hand on her breast; in another, the pent-up emotion in her face makes her look almost ready to burst, as if all the passion she had ever felt had found its way into her body and her pose. In another, she is a figure lying down, a substantial, crushed butterfly. It is as if Bertha's madness had migrated and taken up residence in her bosom. 'Bertha and Jane are two sides to the same woman. She can set fire to things.'
In another painting, Jane, in sage green, looks askance. It is affecting to see Jane Eyre so powerful, I say, when it would be more obvious to present her as plain and inconsequential, a little mouse. At this, Rego explodes suddenly: '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.'
There is an extraordinary picture of Jane Eyre kneeling, holding a pelican, with its mighty beak descending towards her open mouth. 'That one is just sex,' Rego says and laughs.
Rego may have partly inherited her unusual take on life and its narratives from her mother, to whom she was close. The most famous and priceless anecdote about Rego's mother is that when she was represented as a weeping cabbage, she commented favourably, saying she thought she looked flatteringly youthful. But Rego wants now to pass on a saying of her mother's to me, like a lucky charm: 'A change is always good, even if it is for the worst.' Rego believes she is right: 'It takes away fear of change.'
Now she has to apply the saying to her mother's own death and that is not such an easy matter. When her mother died a few months ago, Rego fell ill because of it. Work was her way of coping: 'Habit is a wonderful thing. I work, I get started at 10 o'clock and work until 7.30.' And she listens to the same music again and again: Rigoletto, Traviata and Carmen, she says, do not wear out. She likes traditional Portuguese folk music, too, and Fred Astaire, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra. Music can change her mood.
She is someone of instinctive generosity and absolute loyalty. This is made touchingly manifest when I ask her which painter (in the whole of history) she admired most. 'My husband, of course, Vic, 200,000 times more than anybody. He taught me things I should have known, about tonalities, about the way a hand goes to the canvas, pauses a bit, and then makes a mark. He is a very great artist and was the most different person and artist from myself. He taught me distancing, made sense of things simply, never through convoluted explanation.'
She and Vic had three children and she has four grandchildren: Lola, Grace, Carmen, Madison. She gives me a book about Vic's work. She is disparaging about herself as she praises him to the skies. Vic used to say she was like a 'monkey with a typewriter who if he kept going would eventually write like Shakespeare'. She insists, before I can object: 'He could see what I was doing more than I did.'
She directs my attention to a photo of Vic as a young man, sitting looking intent and unsmiling, taken in 1957, cigarette in hand, shoes scuffed with paint, looking upwards. 'Wasn't he handsome?' she asks. And then she leafs through the book looking for something: Standing Figure and Nude. On the left, a man fully dressed in blue stands observing a naked woman who is getting down from the bed. 'That's me - she is like a dog!' exclaims Paula, only partly scandalised. I ask her: 'Did you give him a hard time about it?' She replies: 'No, I never gave him a hard time.'
Otherwise, she says Goya and Mantegna are the painters that matter most to her. 'Mantegna moves me. His work is so profound... he holds the secrets more than Goya who gives a face to things, to imagination.' Max Ernst has been important, too.
Fear animates Rego's paintings; sometimes, I suggest, there is even a kind of glee in it. She disagrees. 'I think the fear comes in the act of doing the picture, in the physical act of painting. I am terrified it won't come off.' The painting begins in adrenaline: 'When you have an idea for a picture, you're very, very excited. You don't want to cry or laugh but you want to get it down. You get someone to sit - it is a question of arrangement.'
In the corner, there is a last picture of Rochester bent double, head in hands; it is hard to know what he is tormented by - the picture is not yet finished. 'I don't know what is going to happen next. Is it going to be punishment or forgiveness? It is like EastEnders, my favourite programme. It was just an afternoon's work. I don't know what I am doing. Is it before or after the confession?'
She is superstitious about work that is unfinished in this way; we must not discuss it further. She introduces me, instead, to a strange, bashed little monkey. 'It was made in 1840; I found it in a doll shop in Camden passage. It is a little lucky monkey. Is it a voodoo doll?' It is made of soft, yellowing kid, its stitches are crude, as if the handiwork of a rough surgeon. She shows me its scars and says that that when she first bought it she was 'a bit scared because I am very superstitious'.
She decides she should keep paying it homage with occasional drawings and other tributes. She has painted it already, as Bertha's toy monkey, and if you look at the photograph that accompanies this piece, you can see she has paid it the oddest and most eerie compliment of all - it looks exactly like her.
A Painter of Stories
Paula Rego's works are packed with layers of meaning
By Tara Pepper
Nov. 29 issue - When artist Paula Rego was growing up in Lisbon in the 1940s, her grandparents and great-aunt would spin vivid stories rooted in Portugal's folklore tradition, thrilling and terrifying her with their embellished tales. Perhaps it is no accident, then, that storytelling is the key to her dark, captivating art, displayed in a powerful new exhibit, "Paula Rego" at London's Tate Britain (through Jan. 2). Inspired by works as diverse as Disney films, the 19th-century stories of Comtesse de Segur and Irish author Martin McDonagh's menacing play "The Pillowman," Rego allows her tales to evolve out of the process of creating a painting; each work depicts not a static state but a layered and shifting narrative. Like a novelist, she draws you into her characters.
Among the Saatchi Gallery's permanent collection of mutilated mannequins and dead-fly sculptures, Rego's acrylic canvases appear strangely traditional. The Tate show reveals them to be richer and more deeply disturbing than anything recent Brit Art has produced. Christina Bagatavicius, assistant curator at the Tate, says Rego's paintings haven't been well understood: "People are just starting to realize the depth in her work." She has long been regarded as a masterly painter of women's experience. Germaine Greer wrote in 1988: "It is not often given to women to recognize themselves in painting, still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale." Now Rego's art is accepted as much more than an exploration of femininity. Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, argues that Rego has "taken her own childhood experiences, memories, fantasies and fears, and given them universal significance."
But Rego, who grew up under Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's repressive regime, is not concerned only with inner worlds. Politics have been a running theme since her early collages, which are infused with malevolence and brutality. She sliced apart her paintings then rearranged them into rebellious, fractured works like "The Dogs of Barcelona" (1965), inspired by a report in the London Times explaining that the authorities had decided to solve Barcelona's stray-dog problem by feeding them poisoned meat. Her obsession with power and politics has also influenced her most recent and notorious paintings like "Triptych" (1998), created after inadequate turnout at a Portuguese referendum to legalize abortion meant the status quo was upheld. Palpable, physical anguish engulfs each of the cramped and twisted female bodies. They not only question Portugal's anti-abortion laws but also beautifully subvert the traditional female nude.
Whatever her subject, Rego slices through to the primal bone. In 1973 she began Jungian analysis after the death of her father, her husband's illness and the takeover of her family's business left her too depressed to paint. The analysis revitalized her interest in her own childhood and opened up a new seam of inspiration, which was enriched when she won a Gulbenkian Foundation research grant to study illustrated children's books. Her works from the early 1980s, when she abandoned collage, lay bare the vivid mental states—potency, violence, erotic pleasure—which animated these tales. The compliant, innocent girl, clad in white, polishing her father's jackboot in "The Policeman's Daughter" (1987) gradually appears more unsettling. There is an erotic edge to her rigid arm, which is rammed up the boot.
Within all of Rego's paintings lurk stories and secrets. Nothing is what it seems. The instinctive animal within human beings, papered over by civilization, is exposed in her "Dog Woman" series, in which feral models crouch and howl. She explores the way deeply conflicting emotions can exist within a relationship. In "The Maids" (1987), a painting based on infamous reports of two French servants who brutally murdered their employers in the 1930s, it is not clear whether a young, blond woman is being awkwardly embraced or gently executed. Rego allows the viewer to see both: her rich canvases seduce the eye, but the dark tales they depict give a face to deeply rooted fears.
Longtime Expatriate Rego Paints Portugal
By BARRY HATTON
Updated: 2:16 p.m. ET Nov. 17, 2004
PORTO, Portugal - In the 1950s, when Paula Rego was 17, her father gave her some advice.
Leave Portugal," he said. "This is no country for a woman."
She agreed, and set off for London on a career path that would establish her as the foremost Portuguese artist of the 20th century and one of modern art's most collectable talents.
Now, almost 70 and with a distinguished 40-year career behind her, Rego was back in her homeland recently to open a major exhibition of her work at Porto's Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art. The show runs through Jan. 23, 2005, before touring Spain, France and Italy next year. Another exhibition of Rego's work is on view at Tate Britain in London through Jan. 2, 2005.
Though she made a new home in a drab climate almost 1,200 miles to the north, sunbathed Portugal and Rego's childhood here still color her art. "A lot of it is in my pictures," she said in an interview. "Quite a lot of it."
Rego grew up by the sea, around the classy, seaside town of Estoril just outside Lisbon. An only child, she attended a private British school. The break from her family when she was a teenager had a single cause: Antonio Salazar's dictatorship.
Salazar's rallying slogan for his so-called New State, which began in the 1930s and lasted four decades, was "Deus, Patria, Familia" (God, Homeland, Family). Women were considered second-class citizens. Among numerous humiliations, women needed written permission from their husbands to travel abroad; voting restrictions for women were lifted only after a 1974 army coup introduced democracy.
"It was a fascist state for everyone but it was especially hard for women. They got a raw deal," Rego said.
For a teenager, Portugal under Salazar wasn't much fun. His regime kept the country of 10 million people tethered to the past. While the rest of Europe was bopping to rock 'n' roll, Salazar was signing a ban on Coca-Cola.
Meanwhile, in swinging London, Rego expressed her loathing for the regime in "Salazar Vomiting the Homeland," a semiabstract oil painting from 1960 that now hangs on the walls of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Producing such a work in Portugal would have landed her in jail.
Rego is slightly built with thin, mousey hair, which is offset by a mischievous glint in her eye and a quick smile. She's like an amiable, obliging aunt you might take to tea on a Sunday afternoon. But she is also candid and speaks her mind. She paints it, too.
Despite the geographical distance, her political outrage flared again in 1998 when Portugal held a referendum on abortion rights. She leapt into the debate with an emotionally violent series of paintings on the theme. Rego, who is pro-choice, sees a fundamental hypocrisy in Portugal's attitudes toward abortion: Thousands of Portuguese women go abroad to terminate pregnancies every year, even as the country's laws remain among the most restrictive in Europe.
"When I was young, there was great distress and torment over it. It's incredible it's still going on," she says. It still makes her wince.
The tension between what is visible and what is going on beneath the surface _ during Salazar's regime, under the cloak of the influential Roman Catholic Church in Portugal, and behind the facade of polite society _ provides much of the power in her work.
Take the ambiguity of "Angel," from 1998, for example. A female figure wearing a black blouse and a golden skirt stands with open arms. In her left hand she holds what appears to be a sponge and in her right hand a small sword. Her smile _ almost a knowing smirk _ seduces the viewer but at the same time hints at a threat.
Is she offering a sponge bath or a bloodbath?
It's the same with the children's nursery rhyme themes of Rego's early work, which pull off a beguiling combination of whimsy and menace.
Rego uses mostly Portuguese models _ they're the thick-limbed, dusky-skinned women who populate her work _ when she's painting at her Kentish Town studio. While standing at her easel, she likes to speak Portuguese and listen to the nostalgic melodies of Portugal's traditional "fado" music.
Even so, Joao Fernandes, the exhibition's curator and a friend, detects a strong universal appeal in her work. He recalls attending an exhibition she held in London where admiring local visitors were astounded to learn she was Portuguese.
That broad appeal has ensured international acclaim but, Fernandes said, Rego's art "speaks particularly intensely" to the Portuguese.
"The Portuguese see themselves reflected in her stories, in her ghosts, in the past and the present" she depicts, he told The Associated Press. "The Portuguese recognize the Portuguese issues in her work _ their domestic life, the role of women, her memories of the dictatorship _ and in the cultural emblems such as the blue-painted tiles and references to old folk tales."
In Britain, she surrounds herself with Portugal _ besides her music, models and books she has her three children and five granddaughters who live nearby. Rego was married for 29 years to British artist Victor Willing, who died in 1988.
Rego returns to her house in Estoril for a 10-day vacation every year, but she doesn't paint during her stay. "Coming here is a shock, because of the light and the smell and the open air and the sea," she said.
Her native land has "changed completely," she said. Joining the European Union in 1986 set Portugal on fast-track development as it dashed to make up for lost time, and the Portuguese gulped down the novelties.
The transformations are not lost on the artist's sharp eye. "People are very different, especially the young women," Rego said.
Even today, Portugal remains a strong presence in her work, as she dips into her memory bag and conjures up snapshots of bygone days. Two recent paintings illustrate. The scene in "Madame Lupescu has her fortune told" is straight out of a well-off _ if dated _ Portuguese house. The woman of the house is having her palm read by a maidservant. Behind them hangs a Portuguese flag and, on the right, stands a girl with her arm outstretched in a fascist salute _ an apparent reference to the Salazar's "Mocidade Portuguesa," a kind of Hitler Youth movement.
"I'm drawing from my childhood," Rego acknowledged. "Our infancy is always with us, isn't it?"
Even so, she manages to splice the past and present.
"The Cakewoman" draws on her memories of Estoril beach in the 1940s, when the town was a famous hotbed of skullduggery as Allied and Nazi spies prowled the neutral country.
The stout woman selling cake in the center of the picture is a figure that can still be seen on most beaches as the Portuguese, sunburned in the late afternoon, lie on their beach towels and chomp on creamy, sugar-sprinkled buns.
These aspects of her work obviously endear her to the Portuguese who have flocked to the exhibition at Porto's Serralves Museum as they did to a retrospective of her work in Lisbon seven years ago.
"I'm amazed," she said of her popularity in Portugal. "Perhaps I'm understood better here. Could that be?"
On the Net:
|
||||
|
There is a display of Paula Rego’s work at Tate Britain until 2 January. Her pictures invite, demand even, that you attend to what they are about as well as to how they look. They are – if one allows that families, like countries, have struggles and conflicts – political narratives. They make you ask what is going on, and lead you to answers which go beyond a verbal reply. If words alone would do, why make pictures?
Sometimes images can save the facts underlying feelings of outrage from being blurred by rhetoric. In 1834 Daumier made a famous lithograph of a slumped corpse, the victim of a royalist massacre in the rue Transnonain. The man, in nightshirt and nightcap, his splayed legs towards you, lies on a sheet pulled from the bed. His head lolls against it. Daumier caricatured kings, judges and lawyers. He made little plays out of the absurdities of ordinary people. The image of the rue Transnonain victim is more a document. To look at it is painful. This is not a cartoonist’s symbolic protest or a martyred saint. It is a murdered man.
You have to go that far back to find good comparisons for the pictures Paula Rego made in response to the news that a referendum in Portugal had failed to sanction the legalisation of abortion. These big pastels made in the late 1990s show women in bare rooms, lying on a bed, sitting over a bucket, some in poses very like that of Daumier’s dead man. Like Daumier, Rego is unsentimental. You don’t feel pity for the women she draws so much as anger that such things happen. Her victims are strong.
Everything she has done – the surreal collages which were her first notable achievement, the graffiti-like drawings, the paintings, more and more realistic until they finally become direct accounts of posed models – engages you as narrative. What is going on? you ask. Why? What next? Most of them are about the experience of girls and women, about the exercise of power and its abuse, and about subterranean aspects of human relationships. Balthus gave us the male view of pubescent girls trapped in closed rooms; Rego seems to be offering their obverse. Her women will escape. Balthus made the best illustrations for Wuthering Heights that I know of, but Rego’s lithographic riffs on Jane Eyre are stranger and go much deeper.
The early pictures look very different from the late ones, but even those furthest removed from plain views of things require narrative readings. In many of them, as in folk tales, parts are played by animals. There is a strip cartoon version of Aida in which rabbits, dogs, a baboon, a monkey and a crocodile have bigger roles than ancient Egyptians. Another set of pictures tells a story about Red Monkey, who offers Bear a poisoned dove; Wife (who is human) and cuts off Red Monkey’s tail, and so on. Animals, Rego says in an interview with Fiona Bradley in her 2002 study of the artist, were what made it possible to tell these stories. ‘With people it would have looked totally absurd.’ Animals have always been important in Rego’s pictures. The near abstract, surrealist collage at the Tate, Stray Dogs (The Dogs of Barcelona), of 1965, was a response to a news item which described the poisoning of strays by the city authorities. In a set of pictures of girl and dog painted in the 1980s the dogs are equal players, not decorative attributes. Why is one dog being shaved? Why is a girl lifting up her skirt to a dog? What will be tipped down the throats of dogs whose jaws are being forced open? In the pictures at the Tate you find animals which seem to have an active part in stories that don’t demand their presence. In The Policeman’s Daughter a cat looks out of the window. An ominous little black pig fills a corner in The Maids, a premonition of the murders to come. In Rego’s version of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode there is a dog in the first picture which the young girl whose betrothal is being negotiated rubs idly with her foot as she sits, head twisted, in a red chair. A cat snarls out at you, its ears flattened, in the final picture, where the bankrupted husband is supported in a pietà-like pose by his wife, who is sitting in the same red chair that she sat in as a girl in the first picture. There are not many simple readings here, and in that Rego is unlike Daumier and Hogarth, but like the Goya of the Caprichos. Even when they accompany specific texts, as many of the etchings and lithographs do, the result is a commentary on, rather than a pictorial realisation of Peter Pan, Mother Goose or Jane Eyre. The prints are not part of the exhibition but are illustrated in Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work.*
In Rego’s work collaboration has an unusually broad meaning, and includes printers and galleries (invitations to do work for specific exhibitions were the occasion of the wall paintings in the National Gallery restaurant), as well as living and dead writers. Her most important collaboration has been with models, and one model in particular, Lila Nuñez, who has appeared in – and, it seems, created characters for – many of the later pictures. These can seem like painted happenings, records of scenes acted out and of tableaux made in the studio. The same model takes many parts, the same props reappear. The most recent work in the Tate display is a triptych, The Pillowman. It grew from Martin McDonagh’s play about a writer of macabre tales who is being interrogated about the murders of children which seem to match murders in his stories. Rego’s mother and her granddaughter are given parts in the story of the pillowman – a black, stuffed monster who leads people to suicide. The seashore in one of the paintings is a memory of her Portuguese childhood. A photograph of Rego’s studio shows the props as well as the pictures.
The drawing in pictures like these ones (pastel makes them as much drawings as paintings) is good enough for its purpose – which is to say that it is very good indeed – but it is not engrossed in the pursuit of its own felicities. Rego has made drawing from life a tool which rises to the needs of stories. Because the models, the furniture, the clothes are all real, the images have something of the solid fleshliness that Courbet, say, achieved. This combination of the real and the imagined, of observed human presence and dramatic invention, is, so far as I know, unparalleled.
Footnotes
* Edited by T.G. Rosenthal (Thames and Hudson, 288 pp., £60, November 2003, 0 500 09315 6).
Peter Campbell is the LRB's art guru and a typographer.