Catalogue | Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance

The focus of Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance as an exhibition (at MK Gallery until 22 September) and book is the relationship of the artist’s work to lived experience and social and political justice. The pictures address themes that in their making have required the artist to “go down a dark corridor”.

Rego has faced up to hard subjects such as poverty, gender discrimination, abortion, female genital mutilation and depression. She invents adult dramas that can extend to dark symbolism by way of objects and secondary scenes, like that of rape in the first panel of the triptych The Betrothal; Lessons; The Shipwreck, after ‘Marriage à la Mode’ by Hogarth, 1999. Or the sense of martyrdom in the little-known painting Two Women Being Stoned, 1995. 

Another example is her extension of the plot in the 19th-century novel The Crime of Father Amaro, by José Maria de Eça de Queirós, in The Coop (1997), where viewers enter the bedroom in which the protagonist, Amélia, gives birth after the priest-seducer and doctor desert her. She is surrounded by women and “a spot of voodoo”, represented by a dead chicken. 

Rego leaves room for the viewer’s own interpretation. For example, the black humour and accounts of torture in Martin McDonagh’s 2003 play The Pillowman inspired the artist to make a triptych of the same name. In it she juxtaposes fabricated manikin-like monstrous characters with her life models in the studio. 

So, the works in the exhibition and book depart from familiar associations of Rego’s art with fantasy and escape, and underscore her distinct take on feminism. There is an emphasis on her acceptance of conflicted emotions, such as affection and resentment, in relationships.

In 2015, working with Anthony Spira, the director of MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, and Fay Blanchard, its head of exhibitions, I envisaged a room of challenging, unfamiliar pictures made in the 1960s – the young Rego’s response to growing up in Portugal under António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist state and Catholic strictures on women’s role in society. 

These works, made with collage and loaded with autobiographical messages, also reflect the artist’s attraction to the “non-art” of the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet and popular culture. 

In the 1990s, Rego began drawing from life, using pastel sticks, in some ways returning to her training at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1950s. From the 1970s to the present, as a curator and art historian, I have concentrated on several of these Slade artists, namely William Coldstream, Euan Uglow, Michael Andrews, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. 

My essay introduces unexplored material and makes comparisons, connecting this to knowing Rego personally and seeing exhibitions of her work since 1981. 

The US writer Kate Zambreno had an open brief for her text and focused on a few key works, zoning in on details and Rego’s sources, especially Disney’s Snow White and Jean Genet’s mid-century play The Maids, while introducing the artist’s experience of coming of age and motherhood. 

Rego’s candid statements in the arresting film Paula Rego: Secrets & Stories (2017), directed by her son Nick Willing underpin our analysis. Andrew Brown, the publisher at Art/Books, was involved in the book’s content and design. 

In Scotland and Ireland, the curators at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin share the wider intention to reassess the grandeur and relevance of Rego’s art from the angle of moral and political challenges, and accordingly these museums will relate Rego’s achievements to their collections when the show tours both venues later this year and into 2020.