‘My mother used to say a change is always good, even if it's for the worse. Every change is a form of liberation.’
Paula Rego

I recently attended an excellent exhibition of the work of Paula Rego (Tate Britain, London until 24 October).

Through her art Rego has raged against the injustices she encountered in her native Portugal. She has fought the oppression of women. She has put strong females at the centre of narratives that express powerful, raw emotions; hidden feelings and conflicting desires. She has taught us strategies for subversion.

‘The picture allows you to do all sorts of forbidden things. And that is why you do pictures.’

1. Laugh in the Face of Your Oppressor

In 1935 Rego was born into a comfortable middle-class Lisbon family. Portugal was at the time ruled by the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship and Rego’s anti-fascist, Anglophile parents wanted their child to have a liberal education. They sent her to an English language school, then a finishing school in Sevenoaks. And she went on to attend the Slade School of Fine Art from 1952 to 1956.

Rego grew up hating the authoritarianism of the Estado Novo regime. 

‘People talked about football a lot and behaved themselves.’

She resented the lack of political freedom, the constraints that were placed on women, and the limited possibilities that were available to her mother, who had been a talented artist.

‘My mother was really a casualty of the society she lived in. That society was a deadly killer society for women and I despised it for that. You see, they encouraged women to do nothing, and the less they did the more they were admired for it… That is women of a certain class – the poor women had to do bloody everything.’

Through the ‘60s and ‘70s Rego poured her anger into her work, creating visceral surrealist collages representing the evil soul of President Salazar; the corruption of the Church and the elite; the crimes of colonialism. 

Rego found it liberating to laugh in the face of the oppressor.

‘The Portuguese streak of perversity often came out in humour. Jokes were difficult to control. They were a form of rebellion.’

2. Put on a Brave Face

In 1959 Rego married fellow artist Victor Willing whom she had met at the Slade. The couple lived and worked between Portugal and Britain, settling eventually in Camden, London in 1972.

In the 1980s Rego abandoned collage, in favour of bright, colourful paintings that featured animal characters and revisited her childhood memories and fantasies. She found that through this work she could explore her feelings towards Willing. He had been unfaithful and, having developed multiple sclerosis, required increasing care. 

A resolute girl chains a brown dog, another shaves it with a cut-throat razor, another lifts her striped skirt towards it. A serene girl plucks a goose, another concentrates as she polishes a policeman’s jackboot, another takes a firm grip of a garrotte. There are sharp shadows. A cat climbs the wall, a stork sits atop a chair, a bird flies overhead. 

The pictures are disturbing, ambiguous, menacing and darkly sexual. 

Three female family members undress a man at the edge of a bed. Are they helping or harming him? Nothing is as it seems.

'If you put frightening things into a picture, then they can't harm you. In fact, you end becoming quite fond of them.’

At the heart of all these paintings Rego places strong, independent, rebellious girls and young women. They are smartly dressed, with neat hair and serious expressions. And they set about their business with grim determination.

3. Rewrite the Narrative

Rego had always been fascinated by nursery rhymes, fairy stories and folk myths. She took to researching them in the Reading Room of the British Museum.

‘I read Italian stories, French stories, Portuguese stories. Portuguese stories were the most cruel and the most close to me.’

For Rego these traditional tales conveyed truths: about the world’s strangeness, cruelty and corruption; about the fundamental doubts and desires that animate people.

'We interpret the world through stories... Everybody makes in their own way sense of things, but if you have stories it helps.’

Through her own pictorial narratives Rego could articulate her anxieties and fantasies. She could reconfigure the world around her particular experience and perception.

Rego also subverted familiar images from art, literature and film. She cast Snow White in a sinister light and explored the cruelty at the centre of the Pinocchio story. She took paintings by the mostly male artists in the National Gallery, freed the women of the idealised and stereotypical, and presented them as defiant, determined, driven by real and varying passions.

‘In my pictures I could do anything.’

By taking control of the narrative in this way, Rego could be fiercely political. She campaigned for abortion rights in Portugal; against female genital mutilation and the trafficking of women.

‘You can bring some justice where justice is needed.’

4. ‘Go To the Origin’

For many years Rego underwent Jungian analysis to deal with her depression. Her work acted as therapy, as she sought constantly to explore how past feelings and experiences drove her current moods and behaviour. 

Sometimes, in stripping away culture and convention, she revealed our animal cravings, our primal desires.

‘To be bestial is good. It's physical. Eating, snarling, all activities to do with sensation are positive.’

Rego was always seeking the origins of things.

‘It was very important to go to the origin, the imaginative origin that provides the images of what we have inside us, without knowing what it is.’

Paula Rego, 86, is a supremely psychological artist. She shows how in the act of creation, by ‘going to the imaginative origin,’ we can better understand our fears and frailties, our doubts and desires. And she demonstrates how we can fight injustice through subversion: laughing in the face of the oppressor; putting on a brave face; and rewriting the narrative around ourselves. 

'This is the happy house - we're happy here.
In the happy house - oh it's such fun.
We've come to play in the happy house.
And waste a day in the happy house.
It never rains.
We've come to scream in the happy house.
We're in a dream in the happy house.'
We're all quite sane.’

Siouxsie and the Banshees, 'Happy House' (S Sioux / S Severin)

No. 338