Dame Paula Rego, acclaimed Portuguese-born figurative artist who painted ‘to give fear a face’ – obituary
Paula Rego #PaulaRego
Dame Paula Rego, who has died aged 87, was Portugal’s most famous artist, and was hardly less revered in Britain, her adopted country through marriage to her fellow artist Victor Willing.
The biggest change in contemporary art has been the ascendancy of women, and as a pioneer of this ascendancy Paula Rego was a feminist and artistic heroine, a status consolidated with pictures challenging abortion, female trafficking and circumcision, and triumphantly saluted by a climactic retrospective at Tate Britain in 2021.
Paula Rego was of a generation for whom drawing was the cornerstone of fine art, and that Tate exhibition celebrated the extraordinary energy with which she pursued and achieved its mastery.
Drawing for her was inspired by storytelling. In this she benefited from being born when oral culture still flourished. As a child she was told stories as a matter of course. Her daughter, the actress and playwright Victoria Willing, recalled that her grandmother’s stories were gentle, “about the lives of lizards, things like that – lizard soaps”.
Her grandfather’s, meanwhile, “were more horrible than Paula’s, which were bad enough”. Victoria and her sister Cas (Caroline), the writer who is married to the sculptor Ron Mueck, “would lie awake after he’d gone, not daring to go to sleep”.
Paula’s aunt Ludgera had capped it all when she brought stories to life by acting them out in unannounced disguises. “We make sense of the world through stories,” Paula Rego said. “That’s how you give life some structure.”
Her son, the film director Nicholas Willing, who made the 2017 award-winning BBC documentary, Paula Rego, Secrets and Stories, said: “Her art is principally to do with experiences of her childhood… That is part of their enchantment, their power.”
Telling stories through her art was always her refuge and strength. It allowed her to delve deep and reveal the human comedy from a relatively uncharted female point of view – and enabled her to survive financial ruin, the premature death from multiple sclerosis of her husband and artistic mentor, and finally the ravages of old age. All was grist to her artistic mill. It was typical that her only self portrait was of her mutilated face after a fall late in life.
Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego, an only child, was born in Lisbon on January 26 1935. Her father had a precision-instruments business; her mother was a trained and talented amateur painter. He was an anti-clerical liberal, she a devout Catholic. When her father’s work took her parents to England for a year, she was entrusted to her grandparents and an aunt.
Life with Paula’s grandparents, especially at their quinta outside Ericeira, was always fun. Her aunt, by contrast, was a depressive recluse. Coping with this duality had a profound effect. “The greatest problem all my life has been the inability to speak my mind. Therefore the flight into storytelling.”
When her parents returned, Paula found that she was happiest when drawing stories in her play room, her imagination lastingly fed by Disney films, and operas seen at Lisbon’s opera house.
The 2021 Tate retrospective’s catalogue cover had a photograph of the artist in middle age, still kneeling on the floor to draw, as in childhood. When asked in a 1965 interview by her first champion, the poet Alberto de Lacerda, “Why do you paint?” she answered: “I say: ‘To give fear a face’. But it’s more than that. I paint because I can’t help it.”
Privilege for her mother’s generation meant that “the less women did the more they were admired,” she said, and her precocious talent took her to the Slade School of Art, her Anglophile father adamant that Portugal was “not a place for women”.
Her talent was duly recognised when she shared the summer prize with the future novelist and playwright David Storey. At that postwar time she found that convention dictated that female students served the men, ideally as future wives. Before the contraceptive pill abortion – although illegal – was routine. While still a student she had her first child, Caroline, by Victor Willing, student star of her generation, who was older and married. After his divorce they married and lived in Portugal.
In 1965 she received a retrospective at Lisbon’s Gallery of Modern Art. By now her pictures, elusively representational collages, criticised Salazar’s dictatorship. Her career prospered while Willing’s declined, and his ceased when he managed the family business on her father’s death. In 1969 she represented Portugal at the São Paulo Biennial.
The 1970s were an unhappy time. Willing fell ill, the family business was lost, the quinta sold, and they moved permanently to London, helped by a timely grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation. Paula Rego subsequently dismissed her more expansive 1970s collages as “art”, unfairly in the opinion of Nick Willing and other scholars of her work.
Jungian therapy helped her rediscover the childlike spontaneity she felt she had lost. She produced riotous and large stream-of-consciousness paint-on-paper works, intermingling people and animals, and people in the guise of animals. The Red Monkey series described domestic strife; exhibited by Robert McPherson at the Art’s Council’s AIR Gallery in 1981, it was seen by the young gallery owner/dealer Edward Totah, securing her the support of a London commercial gallery for the first time. In 1985 she represented Great Britain at the São Paulo Biennial.
Paula Rego’s artistic reformation coincided with that of her husband. Despite mounting disability he produced a remarkable series of reverie-induced paintings which earned him a Whitechapel retrospective in 1986. In 1987, Paula Rego’s Girl and Dog show at the Totah Gallery, reflecting Willing’s dependence, was a commercial success.
Taken on by Marlborough Fine Art, she embarked on a series of large, fully realistic paintings on canvas. Charles Saatchi bought these, and thereafter all her principal pictures for 20 years.
In 1988 Willing died. His parting advice to her was: “Trust yourself and you will be your own best friend.”
The same year Alister Warman, director of the Serpentine Gallery, gave her first major show in Britain. Lila Nunes, who had been Willing’s carer and artistic assistant, became her assistant and permanent model – her adoption of characters both male and female evoked the example of aunt Ludgera set many years before.
The following two decades produced her most famous series of paintings and prints, not least an etching suite of English Nursery Rhymes. In 1990 she was appointed as the National Gallery’s first Associate Artist and was commissioned to paint a mural, Crivelli’s Garden, for the restaurant of the Sainsbury Wing extension.
At 6 x 16 ft it is her largest public work: in style derived from Portuguese tiles, it tells stories inspired by pictures in the National’s collection, initially the predella of Carlo Crivelli’s The Madonna and the Swallow.
In 1994 she bought a small factory building in Camden Town, her first permanent London studio. It quickly became her play room, filled with the props for her pictures – clothes, wigs and models (both figures and animals), some made latterly by her granddaughter Carmen Mueck and Nunes, which were sometimes exhibited.
The first inclusion of sculpture as an adjunct to her paintings was in Unbound (1994) at the Hayward Gallery, celebrating the centenary of cinema. Her subject was Disney films, and for Pinocchio she invited her son-in-law Ron Mueck, an established model-maker, to provide a Pinocchio figure to stand with the picture. Charles Saatchi saw it and launched Mueck’s international career as a sculptor.
At this time Paula Rego rejected painting with acrylics in favour of drawing with pastel, her preferred medium, with which she conveyed expression and texture with increasing mastery. Family members (notably Victoria Willing and Ron Mueck) and others (principally her friend Anthony Rudolph, the poet and publisher) were models.
A succession of notable figurative series followed, among them Dog Women – a woman behaving like an animal, the reverse of Paula Rego’s earlier anthropomorphism. There were also The Ostriches, inspired by Disney’s Fantasia, and interpretations of classic novels such as Eça de Queiróz’s The Sin of Father Amaro and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Other subjects included Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White; Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman and her daughter Cas Willing’s tale Stone Soup.
She received retrospectives on both sides of the Atlantic, and printmaking (notably with Paul Coldwell) and a set of Royal Mail stamps depicting scenes from Jane Eyre brought her work to a wider audience.
Paula Rego considered her Abortion Series to be her most important pictures, because they had a political effect. Inspired by her memories of the Slade, and especially by the clerically intimidated fishing community of Ericeira, where she and Willing first lived in Portugal, they were prompted by Portugal’s rejection of reform in 1997. In 2007 a second referendum was held and abortion legalised.
The series was cited in Portugal and the country’s president, Jorge Sampaio, acknowledged Rego’s influence. For her the pictures were anti-clerical, not anti-religious. When asked in Nick Willing’s film if she believed in God, she answered: “Of course.”
Sampiao subsequently commissioned her to make eight small pictures on the life of the Virgin Mary for the chapel of the presidential Palacio de Belém. “They were the works I most loved doing, and the subject matter was important,” she said. “Painting helps you find out about things through painting them. It’s not a career, it’s an inspiration.”
The ultimate accolade arrived with the opening in 2009 of the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego (the Paula Rego House of Stories) at Cascais, which helped to earn its architect, Eduardo Souto de Moura, the 2011 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honour.
In Britain she received honorary doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge and was appointed DBE in 2010. In 2016 she was elected to the Royal Academy.
“Work is the most important thing in life,” Paula Rego taught her children, and with Lila Nunes she continued her strict daily studio routine, except for family Sundays, Opera would be played before lunch, a brief rest taken, perhaps Frank Sinatra or Fado music in the afternoon, a glass of champagne to end the day, and home in time for EastEnders.
In 2020 she moved to the Victoria Miro Gallery, and her Tate Britain retrospective – Covid-postponed until 2021 – proved a fitting climax to a long career. But when Nick Willing asked her to name her proudest achievement she replied: “Winning the summer prize at the Slade.”
Victor Willing died in 1988 and Paula Rego is survived by their son and two daughters.
Paula Rego, born January 26 1935, died June 8 2022
Sign up to the Front Page newsletter for free: Your essential guide to the day’s agenda from The Telegraph – direct to your inbox seven days a week.