Paula Rego facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Paula Rego
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| Born |
Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego
26 January 1935 Lisbon, Portugal
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| Died | 8 June 2022 (aged 87) London, England
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| Nationality | Portuguese/British |
| Known for | Painting, printmaking |
| Spouse(s) |
Victor Willing
(m. 1959; |
| Awards | Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire Grand Cross of the Order of Saint James of the Sword Grand Officer of the Order of Saint James of the Sword Grand Collar of the Order of Camões |
Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego DBE RA GCSE GOSE GColCa (Portuguese: [ˈpawlɐ ˈʁeɣu]: 26 January 1935 – 8 June 2022) was a Portuguese-British visual artist, widely considered the pre-eminent woman artist of the late 20th and early 21st century, known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal.
Rego studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and was an exhibiting member of The London Group, along with David Hockney and Frank Auerbach. In 1989 she became the second artist-in-residence, after the scheme re-started, at the National Gallery in London, after Jock McFadyen, who was the first in 1981. She lived and worked in London.
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Early life
Rego was born on 26 January 1935 in Lisbon, Portugal. Her father was an electrical engineer who worked for the Marconi Company and was ardently anti-fascist. Her mother was a competent artist but, as a conventional Portuguese woman from the early 20th century, gave her daughter no encouragement towards a career, even though she began drawing at age 4. The family was divided in 1936 when her father was posted to work in the United Kingdom. Rego's parents left her behind in Portugal in the care of her grandmother until 1939. Rego's grandmother was to become a significant figure in her life, as she learned from her grandmother and the family maid many of the traditional folktales that would one day make their way into her art work.
Rego's family were keen Anglophiles, and Rego was sent to the only English-language school in the Lisbon area at the time, Saint Julian's School in Carcavelos, which she attended from 1945 to 1951. St Julian's School was Anglican and this, combined with the hostility of Rego's father to the Roman Catholic Church, served to create a distance between Rego and full-blooded Roman Catholic belief, although she was nominally a Roman Catholic and lived in a devoutly Roman Catholic country. Rego described herself as having become a "sort of Catholic", but as a child she possessed a sense of Catholic guilt and a very strong belief that the Devil was real.
Education
In 1951, Rego was sent to the United Kingdom to attend a finishing school called The Grove School, in Sevenoaks, Kent. Unhappy there, Rego attempted in 1952 to start studies in art at the Chelsea School of Art in London, but was advised against this choice by her legal guardian in Britain, David Phillips, who had heard that a young woman had become pregnant while a student there. He suggested to her parents that the Slade School of Fine Art was a more respectable choice and helped her achieve a place there. From 1952 to 1956, she attended the Slade School.
Career
Although Rego was commissioned by her father to produce a series of large-scale murals to decorate the works' canteen at his electrical factory in 1954, while she was still a student, Rego's artistic career effectively began in early 1962, when she began exhibiting with The London Group, a long-established artists' organization, which had David Hockney and Frank Auerbach among its members. In 1965, she was selected to take part in a group show, Six Artists, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. That same year she had her first solo show at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes (SNBA) in Lisbon. She was also the Portuguese representative at the 1969 São Paulo Art Biennial. Between 1971 and 1978 she had seven solo shows in Portugal, in Lisbon and Porto, and then a series of solo exhibitions in Britain, including at the AIR Gallery in London in 1981, the Arnolfiniin Bristol in 1983, and the Edward Totah Gallery in London in 1984, 1985 and 1987.
In 1988, Rego was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Serpentine Gallery in London. This led to her being invited to become the first Associate Artist at the National Gallery, London, in 1990, in what was the first of a series of artist-in-residence schemes organized by the gallery. From this emerged two sets of work. The first was a series of paintings and prints on the theme of nursery rhymes, which was taken around Britain and elsewhere by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the British Council from 1991 to 1996. The second was a series of large-scale paintings inspired by the paintings of Carlo Crivelli in the National Gallery, known as Crivelli's Garden which have been housed in the main restaurant at the gallery prior to its temporary shutting to allow for the renovation works planned to renew the Sainsbury Wing in celebration of the National Gallery's bicentenary in 2024.
In 1995, Rego used pastels to revise the story of Snow White in her drawing Swallows the Poisoned Apple. In her work, Snow White is pictured after she has eaten the poisoned apple and appears older and in some type of physical pain. She "lays clutching her skirts, as if trying to cling to life and her femininity which are slipping away". This was done to show what a female goes through during the processes of life and ageing over the years, as well as showing the "physical and psychological violation" age plays in a female's life. At the time the artwork was made, Rego was about 60 years old and her age did play a significant part in this artwork.
Other exhibitions included a retrospective at Tate Liverpool in 1997, Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1998, Tate Britain in 2005, and Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 2007. A major retrospective of her work was held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2007, which travelled to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., the following year.
In 2008, Rego exhibited at the Marlborough Chelsea in New York, and staged a retrospective of her graphic works at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nîmes, France. As well as her showing at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 2010, the art historian Marco Livingstone organised a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico, which was later shown at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in Brazil. In 2011, Rego appeared in the documentary Looking for Lowry with Ian McKellen as an interviewee, commenting on her experience with Lowry at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Rego was commissioned by the Royal Mail in 2004 to produce a set of Jane Eyre stamps.
In March 2017, Rego was the subject of the BBC documentary Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories, directed by her son Nick Willing.
Rego's work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In 2023 some of her art was exhibited at the Pera Museum in Istanbul.
At the time of her death, Rego was represented by the Victoria Miro Gallery and the Cristea Roberts Gallery. Her work can be seen in many public and private institutions around the world. There are 43 of her works in the collection of the British Council, ten works in the collection of the Arts Council of England, and 48 works at the Tate Gallery, London.
Personal life and death
Rego married Victor Willing in 1959. They had two daughters, Caroline 'Cas' Willing and Victoria Willing, and a son, Nick Willing. Nick is a film-maker, who directed a television film, Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories, about his mother in 2017. The Australian sculptor Ron Mueck is her son-in-law.
In 1962, Rego's father bought the couple a house in London, at Albert Street in Camden Town, and Rego's time was spent divided between Britain and Portugal.
In 1966, Rego's father died, and the family electrical business was taken over by Rego's husband, Victor, although he had himself been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, had no experience of electrical engineering or management, and spoke only limited Portuguese. The company failed in 1974 following the Carnation Revolution that overthrew the country's right-wing Estado Novo dictatorship, when its production works were taken over by revolutionary forces although Rego's family had been supporters of the political Left. In response Rego, Willing and their children moved permanently to London and spent most of their time there until Willing's death in 1988.
Rego was a supporter of the football club S.L. Benfica, of which her grandfather was a founding member.
She died after a short illness on 8 June 2022 at the age of 87 and was buried with Victor Willing in Hampstead Cemetery.
Style and influences
Rego was a prolific painter and printmaker, and in earlier years also produced collage work. Her well-known depictions of folk tales and images of young girls, made largely since 1990, brought together methods of painting and printmaking that emphasised strong, clearly drawn forms, in contrast to the looser style of her earlier paintings.
In her earliest works, such as Always at Your Excellency's Service, painted in 1961, Rego was strongly influenced by Surrealism, and particularly the work of Joan Miró. This shows itself not only in the type of imagery that appears in these works, but in the method employed, which is based on the Surrealist idea of automatic drawing, in which the artist attempts to disengage the conscious mind from the drawing process in order to allow the unconscious mind to direct the making of an image. At times these paintings verged on abstraction.
There are two principal reasons why Rego adopted a semi-abstract style in the 1960s. First, abstraction dominated in avant-garde artistic circles at the time, which had set figurative art on the defensive. But Rego was also reacting against her training at the Slade School of Art, where there had been a very strong emphasis on anatomical figure drawing. Under the encouragement of her fellow student and later husband Victor Willing while at the Slade, Rego kept alongside her official school sketchbooks a "secret sketchbook" in which she made free-form drawings that would have been frowned upon by her tutors. Rego's dislike of crisp drawing techniques in the 1960s revealed itself not only in the style of such works as Faust and her Red Monkey series of the 1980s, which resembled expressionistic comic-book drawing, but in her acknowledged influences at the time, which included Jean Dubuffet and Chaïm Soutine.
A notable change in Rego's style emerged in 1990, following her appointment as the first Associate Artist of the National Gallery in London in what was effectively an artist-in-residence scheme. Her remit was to "make new work that in some way connects to the National Gallery Collection." The National Gallery is overwhelmingly an Old Masters collection and Rego seems to have been pulled back towards a much clearer, or tighter, linear style reminiscent of the highly-wrought drawing technique that she was taught at the Slade. The result was a series of works that came to characterise the popular perception of her style, combining strong clear drawing with depictions of equally strong women. Works such as Crivelli's Garden had clear links to the paintings by Carlo Crivelli in the National Gallery, but other works made at the time, such as Joseph's Dream and The Fitting, drew from works by Old Masters such as Diego Velázquez, in terms of subject matter and spatial representation.
Rego gave up working with collage in the late 1970s, and began using pastels as a medium in the early 90s. She continued to use pastels up to her death, almost to the exclusion of oil paint. Among her most notable works in pastel were those in her Dog Women series. Paula Rego challenges traditional female depictions by illustrating women in their natural state of strength and power, showing the reality of womanhood rather than trying to satisfy the gaze of the viewer. This and others of her works caused Rego to be associated with feminism. She acknowledged having read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, a key feminist text, at a young age, and that this had made a deep impression on her.
Public collections
Rego's works can be found in a number of public institutions, including:
- Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal
- Arts Council England
- Berardo Collection Museum, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Portugal
- British Council, London
- British Museum, London
- Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery
- The Chapel of Belém Palace, Lisbon
- Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal
- Frissiras Museum, Athens
- Leeds Art Gallery
- Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- National Gallery, London
- National Portrait Gallery, London
- Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, in the New Hall Art Collection
- Rugby Museum and Art Gallery
- Tate Gallery, London
- Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester
- Yale Center for British Art
Awards and recognition
Rego's first award was a bursary from the Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon in 1962–63, an organisation that later held a retrospective solo exhibition of her work in 1988.
She further went on to receive honorary degrees: a Master of Arts from the Winchester School of Art in 1992, Doctorate of Letters from the University of St Andrews and the University of East Anglia, both in 1999, the Rhode Island School of Design in 2000, the London Institute in 2002, and the University of Oxford and Roehampton University in 2005. In 2011, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Lisbon and in 2013 she was elected Honorary Fellow of Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, receiving an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of Cambridge in 2015.
She was appointed a Grand Officer of the Order of Saint James of the Sword by the President of Portugal in 1995 and a Grand Cross of the order in 2004, and was made a Dame of the British Empire in the 2010 Queen's Birthday Honours. In 2019, she was awarded the Portuguese government's Medal of Cultural Merit.
In 2009, a museum dedicated to Rego's work and designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, was opened in Cascais, Portugal, and several key exhibitions of her work have since been staged there.
Rego also won the MAPFRE Foundation Drawing Prize in Madrid in 2010. In 2017, she was one of the first five recipients of the Maria Isabel Barreno prize.
In 2022, she was posthumously made a Grand Collar of the Order of Camões by the President of the Portuguese Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
See also
- War (Rego painting)
