Profile: Paula Rego (original) (raw)

When fire destroyed the Momart warehouse in London in May, Paula Rego was appalled, not only by the loss of four of her works and those of fellow artists, but by the display of "so much hatred and resentment. Someone said it was 'aesthetic cleansing', which is disgusting - like burning books".

Of her lost paintings, only Ambassador of Jesus (1998) belonged to Charles Saatchi, a collector of her work since the 1980s. The rest were her own: two from a 1983 series on operas, and Departure (1988), the last painting she did before her husband, the artist Victor Willing, died of multiple sclerosis in 1988. It was of a woman on a seaside rooftop combing a young man's hair, preparing to send him off, perhaps to war. "It's very sad and significant," Rego says. "It was the last of a series, and Vic said it was the best, so I kept it back. Time is a much better selector of pictures than fire; time will decide what will last."

The lasting reputation of Rego, 69, is beyond doubt. Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, which is holding an exhibition of her work in the autumn, describes her as a major figure, who has "taken her own childhood experiences, memories, fantasies and fears, and given them universal significance". For Germaine Greer, whose 1995 portrait by Rego hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, her work is both feminist and subversive. As Greer wrote in 1988, "It is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting, still less to see their private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly, with such depth and colour." According to the art critic Robert Hughes, Rego is the "best painter of women's experience alive today".

Yet despite acclaim since the mid-1960s in Portugal, where she is a household name on a par with footballers, according to Lisbon-born artist and friend João Penalva, Rego found success in Britain only in her 50s. She ascribes her rising fortunes to a growing acceptance of figurative painting in the 1980s. The watershed was a retrospective at London's Serpentine Gallery soon after Willing's death. Now, says Rego, "fashion won't affect me whatever happens, because I can sell pictures". According to her biographer, art critic John McEwen, a Rego masterpiece can fetch £500,000.

Rego's work has evolved from early oil paintings through collage and acrylic (she hates the smell of oils and turpentine) to what she calls pastel paintings, but her abiding love is drawing. She sees printmaking, of which she is an acknowledged master, as an extension of that. Three drawings entitled Misericordia, now in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, won this year's Hugh Casson prize for drawing. A trade edition of 25 lithographs from 2003 inspired by Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre is published later this month, and an exhibition transfers to the Brontë Parsonage Museum on August 7.

Rego rejects received hierarchies that scorn illustration, since "pictures have always been about stories, like Christian mythology", and admires English social satirists from Hogarth to Posy Simmonds. Besides, as she wrote in 1985: "My paintings tell stories; they do not illustrate sto ries... they are not narratives... everything happens in the present."

According to Hughes, Rego's work "isn't on the curatorial radar in America" partly because "she's simultaneously an 'old-fashioned' painter, obsessed with traditional art from Balthus to Courbet, and unfamiliar". Since she was the first associate artist at the National Gallery in London in 1990, Rego's work has alluded increasingly to old masters, a mature style that has its detractors. For Tim Hilton in the Independent on Sunday, it was "lumpen realism with emblematic overtones". Others see her as a surrealist.

Rego often stages dramas within the family or between lovers, with anthropomorphic animals or children. For the writer Marina Warner, she is a "painter of interior states and processes, the chaotic flux and mess of inner contradictions, not of static, achieved states of mind like a Renaissance portrait. More like a novelist, she takes you into a character's feelings, inviting empathy without judgment." The ambiguity of her work, with its suppressed violence, cruelty and subversive humour, has invited myriad interpretations, from the intimately biographical and political to a Freudian psychoanalytic gloss on incest and the Oedipus complex. Yet according to the writer and translator Tony Rudolf, Rego's partner of eight years, the story shifts with the demands of composition: "There's more to it than what triggered it; her eye is in command as well as her heart and mind." Meaning is never closed or resolved. As Rego has said: "I like it when people make up their own stories in front of my pictures."

She lives in Hampstead, north London, and her studio in a Kentish Town mews is redolent of both the backstage prop room and the playroom, with costumes for her life models (she favours 1940s and 50s clothes), mannequins and toys. Though she is often described as child-like, she can smile vaguely, with an air of mischief, then nail a point with almost brutal precision. For Robert McPherson, former director of the AIR Gallery where she had her first London solo show in 1981, she "comes across as whimsical and fey in public, but she's much tougher". Alistair Warman, principal of the Byam Shaw School of Art who curated the Serpentine show, sees her as "marvellously warm and extremely sharp, with a very developed sense of the ridiculous. But there's always some part of her which she protects, a formidable toughness and watchfulness at the core of what she does."

She is in the studio six days a week, from 9.30am to about 7pm, leaving "in time for EastEnders , which I love". Sunday lunch is for family. She has three children: Caroline, a scriptwriter married to the sculptor Ron Mueck; Victoria, an actor; and Nicholas, a film director; and five granddaughters, aged from almost two to 17. Family and friends all model for her. "Tony dresses up as Rochester, my daughter as the Virgin Mary. They all act out things, stand in for other things."

Her Jane Eyre series was partly inspired by Jean Rhys's "prequel" novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) about the first Mrs Rochester, the West Indian Creole Bertha who becomes the madwoman in the attic. For Polly Teale of Shared Experience, whose play about Rhys, After Mrs Rochester , was partly inspired by Rego's art, her work has a "tremendous theatricality, but the sets are rooms of the unconscious; there's something secret and buried". One hook for Rego was having arrived in England, like Rhys and Bertha, as an outsider ("sure, a dago"). But she adds: "I thought the way Jane Eyre was strictly brought up, she could have been a Portuguese girl from where I grew up."

Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935, three years into the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar. Her father, José, was an electrical engineer and her mother, Maria, had studied painting. When Rego, aged three, was diagnosed with incipient tuberculosis, the family moved to the seaside town of Estoril, spending summers in the fishing village of Ericeira, whose coastal vistas feed her work.

Her father was an "immensely kind and liberal man who tried to give me my freedom", taking her to operas and Disney films. Her mother was "quite a lady; I learned from her the pleasure of clothes. She had a marvellous eye for painting." Among other early influences were Goya, Mantegna and the surrealists, including Buñuel ("shocking and wonderful") - "though very few stories were painted from a woman's point of view". She did absorb earthy folktales from the women around her, and, as a shy, only child, drew on the playroom floor, making noises "for company". Her talents were spotted at an Anglican English school after the war. Her father opposed the Salazar military dictatorship and the Catholic church, which conspired to control women. Rego was never a Catholic: "I was baptised but my father wouldn't let me be taught by a priest. I pray when necessary - but I don't like the Pope; the way they forbid birth control is scandalous."

A hatred of political persecution still surfaces in her work, as in her 2000 pastel series, The Interrogator's Garden, which came, she says, scowling with sudden fury, out of "contempt for bullies: when the secret police interrogate a victim on their own, they can do whatever they like". But she also reveals the bullying and power play within families, and women's collusion in them. As she said in a 1993 South Bank Show : "I was being repressed and restrained by my mother, not Salazar. Maybe the authoritarian thing comes right through to the kid, who takes it out on the dog or the doll." In The Policeman's Daughter (1987), a girl polishes her absent father's jackboot. Ruth Rosengarten, co-curator of a Rego exhibition at the Serralves Museum in Oporto from October, says: "The daughter is saying, 'up yours' to the father by sticking her hand up his boot, but she's also doing what's required."

After an "awful" finishing school in Kent at 16, she went to the Slade in 1952-56 ("In the women's life room, the men had their sex covered"). It was a "good time; there were very sophisticated people, though I never said anything; I'm getting better at speaking my mind." Rego, who won prizes for painting and portraiture, fell in love with Willing, who was six years older and married. Pregnant at 20, she returned with the infant to Portugal. "Going back was like going back to prison, to a bourgeois life I detested; I felt I was never going to escape," she says. "I wasn't angry with Vic; I needed him." In 1957 Willing left his wife and joined Paula and their daughter Caroline in Ericeira. They were married in 1959. "Vic said 'draw', and I started to draw again. He saved me." In 1963 they bought a house in London's Camden Town, spending summers in Portugal.

After the Slade, Rego says, "I seized up and got into a terrible depression. I couldn't keep following the rules; I had to break out. But I never lost the love of drawing out of my head, not copying from life. You have to play again; make-believe, dressing up, being outrageous - it's all done in play." Her collages, "violent things, cut up", were among her most overt political work against the Iberian dictatorships, and incluided Salazar Vomiting the Homeland (1960) and The Dogs of Barcelona (1965).

Her first solo show in Lisbon in 1965 was praised for its startling freedom of expression - though the catalogue had to be censored. Yet, although a member of the London Group, with David Hockney and Frank Auerbach, she says, "Almost no one would show me here; they didn't understand the works at all." She admires Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, but says: "The English art scene was very parochial and provincial. Then everyone wanted to go to America and be abstract expressionists."

João Penalva, who was an art student in London in the 1970s, recalls Rego as "glamorous and eccentric, in white pilot's overalls and black high-heel shoes", doing "bizarre collages at the back of a garden; she's never been interested in what's hot". Yet in Rego's memory, "If you were a married woman with children, no one took you seriously. But art doesn't have to be a higher thing; it can be like looking after children - very down to earth." She adds: "I admired Vic and thought he was better at everything. I did my own thing, and he encouraged it. But it's only later that I had the possibility of showing it, and only after he died that I could be competitive." In John McEwen's view, "Victor Willing was the dominant artist in England and Paula took second place; in conversation she'd defer to him. But they were supportive of each other; through his writings he's still the ultimate authority on her work."

Rego's father died in 1966 and, soon afterwards, Willing was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Though Willing had taken over her father's factory in Portugal, it collapsed after the "carnation revolution" of 1974 that ousted Salazar's successor. In Rego's view, "the revolution was inevitable and wonderful, but it was extremely Maoist. Thanks to Mario Soares and the Socialists, Portugal became a real democracy, but by then everybody was broke or had gone to Brazil." The couple moved permanently to London in 1976; Rego lived by teaching at the Slade and, with grants from the Gulbenkian Foundation, researched Portuguese fairy tales, but was too depressed to paint. Since 1973 she has had Jungian psychotherapy almost weekly. "It's taken away the shame of being myself. When I was stuck, it took me back to fairy stories I'd adored as a child." The late writer Rudolf Nassauer was a close friend and mentor who, according to another friend, Helder Macedo, professor of Portuguese at King's College, London, was "immensely important to Paula when the world collapsed" with Willing's illness. "He'd ring her at 8am and say, 'go and paint'."

Abandoning collage, she painted violent triangular relationships, between a red monkey, his wife and a polar bear, or a rabbit child with her parents. Rego, who sees them as "hilarious but very tragic", says: "You can get away with so much more truth and cruelty if you dress people up as animals, but they're acting parts." In one, red monkey vomits as his wife cuts off his tail. Rego has described art as revenge, saying, "I can turn the tables and... make women stronger than men. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time." In pictures, she says, "You have an emotional freedom to express everything. You can't do that in life - you wouldn't want to. Sometimes you express things that aren't just."

The abstract painter and Rego's closest artist friend, Colette Morey de Morand, had a studio next to Rego's. "Paula's made her own language, first with animals then children and stories. She takes over the figure, so she's there, rolling on the ground, expressing intense emotions, giving rein to something in herself. You could be well brought up and have a river of hatred or anger that you've channelled away and can unleash in art. People respond, because it's in them too."

When Willing became ill, says Rego, "I had to curb my feelings. It's not good not to feel, to go cold, but children learn it to survive." Her 1986 Girl and Dog series, in which a sick dog is cared for by a little girl, feeding, shaving, coaxing and lifting up her skirt to it, reveal a fine line between nurturing and harming, love and dependence, desire, frustration and anger. The series was "the nearest I got to being able to feel, through the pictures", says Rego. "The dog bites the hand that's feeding him; all that relationship came in. Vic wasn't a fool; he saw what they were. He liked them." According to a friend, Suzette Macedo, Helder Macedo's wife, "Vic was extremely powerful, incredibly sexy to women, and a serious intellectual, but wild, not your tame husband. Then this person becomes ill. There was an inversion of roles when he became the sick dog, suddenly maimed - like Rochester. Paula was tempted, but she never thought of leaving him." In The Family (1988) a girl and servant seem to be undressing a helpless man by a bed, with ambiguous intent. "They're trying to make him better," says Rego. "She's trying to excite him sexually to see if he'll come back to life. He doesn't. Shame."

Willing saw Rego's themes as "domination and rebellion, suffocation and revolt",and Rego wrote in 1985 that her favourite themes were "power games and hierarchies. I always want to turn things on their heads, to upset the established order." Her work of the 1980s, such as The Maids (after Genet) or the 1984 Vivian Girls series, based on Henry Darger's epic scroll novel, show servants and capricious, lascivious girls turning the tables. Rego was taken up by her first commercial gallery, Edward Totah, then in 1987 by the "blue-chip" Marlborough Fine Art gallery. Financially, she says "that's when I found my feet".

As Willing declined, Rego painted scenes of absence and farewell, valedictions to her husband that allude to a Portugal of the 40s and 50s, and to soldiers departing for the colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola that triggered the 1974 revolution. Rego had depicted the savagery of the "terrible colonial war" in early collages, but was aware, as Helder Macedo says, that men's absence "empowered women in men's jobs". Rego's images might suggest both sadness and liberation, tenderness and malevolence. "When you paint," she says, "things come out you don't intend, then you discover what you've done. Sometimes they're not very nice."

In Warman's view, Willing's death "freed Paula to realise her own creativity". Yet for De Morand, "there was no release or relief; it was a terrible blow. But she coped by going to the studio every day." Rego painted the 1994 Dog Woman series, of women baying after an absent man, begging, sleeping on the master's coat or being punished, suggestive of both submission and animal power. De Morand sees in them "keening, mourning for an intrinsic part of her lost". For Rego, they were about "sorrow, and very personal; a lot of things between Vic and me are there". Bride (1994), in which a woman in bridal gown lies belly-up in appeasement, is about marriage. "It doesn't mean my marriage was bad," Rego says. "I deeply loved my husband, more even than one should. But it's a story: one sees enormous cruelty in life, and loyalty often isn't rewarded. You submit and get your guts torn out. Maybe it means you should go on fighting and not give up."

Tom Lubbock of the Independent saw her work as "woman-centred" without being feminist, since "men may appear in her pictures as passive toys, but there is always an offstage context of invincible male power. Liberation and equality aren't her business at all." For Helder Macedo, "One of the deep revolutions in perception in Paula's paintings is she's showing 'virility' - sexual force and potency - in female terms." Having grandchildren triggered a return to childhood stories, from 30 etchings of English nursery rhymes to Peter Pan , Snow White , Pinocchio , Hans Christian Andersen and Red Riding Hood. Marina Warner, who senses Goya's influence and a "post-Freudian mordancy", says: "They're beyond morality; she's more interested in the power of feeling than in good conduct. She sees sexuality everywhere." For Rego, "there is adulthood in childhood; children have uncommonly strong desires and fears; they're very aware of their own bodies and sexual feelings. We only put a name to it later." She is sometimes compared to Balthus - the French painter Count Balthasar Klossowski De Rola - yet for Warner, "Balthus is voyeuristic, looking at little girls who are unaware of their sexuality. But Paula's are in possession of their own feelings, which we're invited to feel too."

At the National Gallery, which was "very scary at first, but I loved being there", Rego reversed the relationship between male artist and female model in paintings such as Joseph's Dream (1990). When she paints, she says, "I stand like a man, like in Portugal when you grab a bull by the horns. I feel I'm powerful in a masculine way, because doing a picture is a physical thing; it takes energy." She also painted the mural Crivelli's Garden for the Sainsbury wing brasserie, a triptych styled like the blue tiles of a Portuguese garden. Rego, who "swore allegiance to the Queen" in 1959, has "always thought of England as home; I can't work in Portugal, but I do things about Portugal here. Where is home? My studio."

Since the late 80s she has worked from life models, often from the Portuguese community in London, playing fado and opera as she works. Her favourite model is Lila Nunes, a nurse who looked after Willing: "She brings her own story and a vitality that gets into the picture." On how hers differs from a man's gaze, Rego says: "I don't fancy women, but I understand how they're put together, because it's like your own body. I identify more. Some are like self-portraits; they're being me and acting it out." Rudolf, aged 61, describes sitting for her as "a collaboration, a game, like children playing together".

She has been "hooked" on pastel, since the mid-90s because "it's like drawing, direct from your hand, and it's changeable". Dancing Ostriches (1995), pastels inspired by Disney's ballerinas in Fantasia , sardonically reflected Rego's sense of ageing. "They're quite vulnerable but they kick - like the birds," she says of her women. "They're trying to make themselves attractive and dance on points, but they're past it. It's grotesque but I'm not making fun of them. How could I? They're just like me."

Rego's painting War (2003), of bloodied rabbit marionettes, was inspired by a news photograph of Iraqi refugees in Basra. She insists she is "not proselytising; I'm not aware of what I'm doing in the pictures till I've finished, sometimes not for a long time afterwards". One exception was her untitled series of pastels and etchings of solitary girls, some in English schoolgirl uniforms, having backstreet abortions, agonised on beds or straddling pots. The inspiration came from a 1998 referendum in Portugal that failed to legalise abortion because of a low turnout. When the paintings were shown in Portugal, says Rego, "critics talked about them as art, without mentioning the subject matter. But a lot of women were moved by it." Some people, says Warner, find the "frankness of her representations too honest and painful; she's not flattering or prettifying". But Hughes admires "political art coming out of deep individual experience, not ideological rantings. They're shocking: most men aren't privy to such female experience, but it's a fact of many women's lives."

A 2000 series with elderly women reflects a time when Rego's sick mother came to live with her till her death in 2001. Rego, says Warner, has "lived with many people dependent on her, though she's a major artist. They're portrayals of helplessness and affliction and tyranny; she's very honest." For Rego, they are "about what it's like to look after someone, the distress, the anger, when someone gets sick on you. The mother figure is very powerful and possessive, trying to grab the girl's foot." But she adds: "It's less to do with my own mother than the conditioning of society that makes you responsible, indebted, as an obedient daughter to the authority of a parent. It's terrifying the power one person has over another."

She once said she painted to "give terror a face", and names among her fears "having an empty studio". Yet Penalva says, "Paula will never stare at an empty wall as long as she has a pencil in her hand." Writer Lisa Appignanesi sees her as having "turned into a wise old wicked woman: she can do and paint anything she wants". Uncertain but curious about the future, Rego says: "I'm waiting to see what comes next."

Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego Born: January 26, 1935, Lisbon.

Educated: St Julian's School, Carcavelos; 1952-56 Slade School of Art, London.

Family: 1959 married Victor Willing (two daughters, Caroline, Victoria; one son, Nicholas).

Career: 1962 bursary, Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; '63 joined London Group; '75 Gulbenkian Foundation grant; '83 visiting lecturer, Slade; '90 First associate artist, National Gallery, London.

Some solo exhibitions: 1965 SNBA Lisbon; '81 AIR Gallery, London; '83 Arnolfini, Bristol; '88 retrospective, Serpentine; '91 Tales from the National Gallery; '97 retrospective, Tate Liverpool; '98 The Sins of Father Amaro, Dulwich Picture Gallery; '04 Jane Eyre, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth.

Some books: 1994 Nursery Rhymes; '96 Dancing Ostriches (ed John McEwen); '96 Pendle Witches (with Blake Morrison); 2003 The Complete Graphic Work (ed TG Rosenthal); '03 Jane Eyre.

Jane Eyre by Paula Rego is published by Enitharmon Press at £15. Jane Eyre continues at the Artsmill gallery, Hebden Bridge, until July 25, and at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, from August 7 to September 19. Information: 01535 642 323.