Paula Rego at Tate Britain review: disturbing and invigorating

The Portuguese-born artist’s dark and dreamlike paintings weave a compelling story over 60 years of work
A detail from Cast of Characters from Snow White, 1996
Paula Rego

“Don’t be afraid,” she seems to say, hovering in her voluminous golden skirt, a gleaming sword in one hand, the other holding a sponge like that which wet the lips of the dying Christ. “Yes, I’m going to kill him for you, but don’t worry - he won’t die thirsty.”

The spirit of Paula Rego’s compassionate, avenging Angel (1998), part of a series of paintings based loosely on the Portuguese novel The Crime of Father Amaro, in which a priest seduces and impregnates a young girl, hangs over the whole of this potent exhibition by the 86 year-old artist. Though in painterly terms this major retrospective - her biggest to date - shows a clear evolution in style, it also proves in no uncertain terms that since her earliest works she has been preoccupied by political and social oppression, particularly of women.

Starting in 1950 with a deeply sinister scene called Interrogation, painted when Rego - who grew up in an anti-fascist family in Portugal under the Estado Novo, the brutal dictatorship led by António de Oliveira Salazar - was just 15, the show spans 60 years of Rego’s practice.

Rego painted Interrogation aged just 15
Paula Rego

It’s fascinating to see the progression through her early experiments with near-abstraction (still highly provocative; two politically punchy works here had their titles censored on exhibition to avoid trouble), collage and bold colour before she settles, in the Eighties, into the rich yet muted tones of her most famous works.

There’s evidence too of the influence of film and cartoons - some pictures resemble jumbled storyboards, with action all over the place, timelines unclear - as well as folk tales and literature; appropriate for an artist whose work tells such complex and layered stories (the museum devoted to her work in Lisbon is called the Casa das Histórias). In every canvas, Rego combines personal experience and memory, satire and symbolism to evoke the anguish and rage, frustration and fear felt by those living under political or social oppression.

Rego’s is a weird world, dreamlike, floating on the edge of nightmare; populated by animals and fantastical creatures (constructed in her studio out of materials at hand, then incorporated into her paintings) alongside weak men and rebellious girls.

The Little Murderess, 1987
Paula Rego

The latter, impassive and yet with an unmistakable undercurrent of potential violence, often represent Rego herself as well as being a symbol of womanhood developing under the weight of behavioural expectation. You get the feeling, in paintings like The Family (1988) or The Policeman’s Daughter (1987), that something really grim is about to happen to someone.

The potence of female sexuality and the messiness of womanhood (Dog Woman,1994, is a case in point) or human relationships are repeated themes. The feelings of resentment that can develop from dependence are expressed in a series featuring murderous-looking girls and dogs, the needy canine representing her ailing husband, Victor Willing, who died in 1988 after years with MS.

Another series depicting women in the aftermath of illegal abortions, made after Portugal’s 1998 referendum to decriminalise the procedure failed due to low turnout, tenderly but unflinchingly show both suffering and stoicism (the pictures were used nearly a decade later to support another, successful campaign).

The Dance, 1988
Paula Rego

This is also an opportunity to see some (not quite enough, in my opinion) of Rego’s works on paper - bizarre, instinctive things dredged from her anxious subconscious and resembling a cross between the precise yet weird etchings of German artist Max Klinger and those of Franciso Goya. “You punish people with drawings,” Rego once said. An exhibition of these alone would be worth seeing, if slightly disturbing.

Not that Rego’s work is ever not disturbing, or invigorating  (or possibly, if you are a man, terrifying). As the singer-songwriter Dory Previn, another woman whose work is characterised by honesty about the dark side of life, wrote: “Beware of young girls.”

Tate Britain, from July 7 to October 24. tate.org.uk

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