Paula Rego

Biography

In 1954 a student at the Slade received a commission from her own father: to decorate the canteen of his electrical factory with large murals. She was nineteen, her artistic career had not yet begun, but the client, it seems, believed in it.

Paula Rego was born on 26 January 1935 in Lisbon. Her father, an electrical engineer with the Marconi Company, was a committed anti-fascist. In 1936 he was posted to work in the United Kingdom, and his daughter stayed in Portugal with her grandmother until 1939. From her grandmother and the family maid she learned many traditional folk tales, which later found their way into her work. From 1945 to 1951 she attended the Anglican St Julian’s School in Carcavelos, and then her father sent her to England, to a finishing school in Sevenoaks.

In 1952 she entered the Slade School of Fine Art in London and studied there until 1956, leaving without collecting her diploma. There she grew close to a fellow student, Victor Willing; in 1957 she went to Portugal, to Ericeira, and they married in 1959; they had three children. From 1962 her father bought them a house in London, and she lived between the two countries. In 1962–63 she received her first grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

She began exhibiting in 1962 with the London Group, alongside David Hockney and Frank Auerbach. In 1965 she took part in the group show Six Artists at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and in the same year had her first solo exhibition at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes in Lisbon. In 1969 she represented Portugal at the São Paulo Biennial. Her early works, such as “Always at Your Excellency’s Service” (1961), are close to Surrealism, above all to Joan Miró, and at times nearly abstract, but the narrative element never disappears. In “Salazar Vomiting the Homeland” (1960) the political subject is direct. She herself explained her semi-abstract manner partly as a reaction against the Slade’s drilling in anatomical figure drawing: alongside the official sketchbooks she kept a “secret” one, with free drawings.

After her father’s death in 1966 the family firm passed to her husband. It failed in 1974, after the Carnation Revolution, when revolutionary forces took over its production works. In 1976 the family settled in London for good. Rego gave up collage at the end of the 1970s, and in 1983 she lectured on painting at the Slade. Her husband, Victor Willing, died in 1988.

That same year a retrospective of her work was held at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Next, in 1990, she became the first Associate Artist of the National Gallery. Two bodies of work came out of it: paintings and prints on the theme of nursery rhymes, which the Arts Council and the British Council toured around Britain and abroad from 1991 to 1996, and the large paintings “Crivelli’s Garden”, inspired by the pictures by Carlo Crivelli in the gallery’s collection. Her manner became tighter and clearer, closer to the drawing she had been taught at the Slade. At about the same time she moved almost entirely to pastel, which she kept to for the rest of her life. The pastel series Dog Women of the 1990s shows women squatting, scratching, howling, behaving like dogs. Critics linked these works with feminism; she herself rejected attempts to read too much sexual content into them.

More than once she turned to public themes. The occasion for the Abortion Series (ten pastels, July 1998 to February 1999) was the Portuguese referendum of 1998, in which the law to legalise abortion did not pass. In a 2002 interview she said that the series was born of indignation. The works were printed in Portuguese newspapers before the second referendum in 2007, which reversed the result; they are thought to have influenced the outcome. Among her other works are a triptych of 1998 on the same subject (in the collection of Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal), a series based on “Jane Eyre”, and the Jane Eyre postage stamps commissioned by the Royal Mail in 2004. From 2003 she used dolls (bonecos) alongside live models in her work.

Retrospectives followed one after another: Tate Liverpool (1997), Dulwich Picture Gallery (1998), Tate Britain (2005), the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (2007), which travelled to Washington in 2008. In 2009 the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego opened in Cascais, a museum designed by Eduardo Souto de Moura. In 2017 her son, the film-maker Nick Willing, made a documentary for the BBC, “Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories”. In 2021 Tate Britain held the largest retrospective of her work in the United Kingdom, with more than a hundred works.

Honours came late and in large numbers: an honorary Master of Arts from the Winchester School of Art (1992), honorary doctorates from St Andrews and the University of East Anglia (1999), the Rhode Island School of Design (2000), the London Institute (2002), Oxford and Roehampton (2005), Lisbon (2011) and Cambridge (2015). In Portugal she became a Grand Officer (1995) and a Grand Cross (2004) of the Order of Saint James of the Sword; in 2010 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2019 she received the Portuguese government’s Medal of Cultural Merit.

Paula Rego died on 8 June 2022 in London. She is buried beside her husband in Hampstead Cemetery; she was posthumously made a Grand Collar of the Order of Camões that same day.