Paula Rego.pdf

Textual Practice 15(1) , 2001, 67–85

Ana Gabriela Macedo

Through the looking-glass: Paula Rego’s visual rhetoric, an

‘aesthetics of danger’

Satire and political memory

Paula Rego’s paintings 1 may haunt or shock, but, more often, they make us

laugh. A mocking and subversive laughter erupts from Rego’s paintings as a

form of ultimate survival against dogmatic truths, translating the artist’s deep

carnivalesque sense of the world. This world of ‘joyful relativity’ is a ‘topsy-

turvy’ world, ‘opposed to that one-sided and gloomy official seriousness

which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to

absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order’. 2 As the artist

wrote in a short text for an exhibition which took place in São Paulo, Brazil,

in 1985, ‘my favourite subjects are the “games” originated by power, domi-

nation and hierarchies. They make me always feel like setting everything

upside-down and reversing the established order of things’. 3

The reasons for such a dystopic vision are largely to be found in Rego’s

past, memories of which, like a storehouse of images, are often revisited by

the artist and leave strong imprints on her canvases. Paula Rego left her native

Portugal in the 1950s to become an art student in London, also leaving

behind a comfortable middle-classs background and the family house in

Ericeira (which was to become a recurrent motif in her paintings). Portugal

was then at the height of the Salazar’ dictatorship, a country numbed by a

strict ideology of silence and repression enforced publicly by the political

police and privately by the sti � ing weight of tradition and clerical power.

Her paintings from the 1960s are heavily ridden with the claustrophobic,

oppressive atmosphere of those years, often conveyed through a mesmerizing

sense of awe and immobility. Surreal imagery, grotesque distortion and

cruelty are also obsessively and disturbingly represented in her painting,

striking the viewer with a discomfort which is provocatively political. This

is the case, for example, of the paintings ‘Salazar vomiting the Homeland’

(1960), ‘Hurray for the Ding-Dong’ (1960), ‘Order has been established’

(1961), or ‘Always at your Excellency’s Service’ (1961). 4 During this period

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080 /0950236001001385 7

Textual Practice

Rego used the technique of collage, a medium with which, she says, her

strategy of composition took an ‘instrumental anger’ made of danger and

humour. 5 Describing the making of these collages, Rego claims that they did

not simply represent violence, they were violent:

When I was making these collages , I would draw the images and then

cut them in pieces with the scissors, and that process of cutting,

scratching, hurting . . . it’s as if I was plucking off the eyes of a Salazar’s

picture, or the Archbishop of Lisbon! 6

The representation of violence in Rego’s pictures is thus ‘useful and

subversive’, as the artist states, and not a mere masquerade or technical mise-

en-abyme . Rego’s paintings show the violence that exists violently , without

false rhetoric or super � uous discursivization, 7 and her visual imagery employs

‘violence’ as a recurrent trope. Whether in the political violence of her pictures

from the 1960s on the Portuguese dictatorship, or in the psychological

violence of Rego’s representations of the family as an oppressive and often

perverse institution; whether in her subversion of fairy-tales and nursery

rhymes, or in the representation of violence against women and children in

the later paintings, Rego’s visual rhetoric exposes a hidden world of secret lies

and veiled truths in which she claims as an ‘ideologically strategic terrain’ 8

her own territory in art.

Tradition through the looking-glass: the space of womanhood

Rego’s paintings have long been a hybrid discourse of visual and literary

imagery, Ž rmly grounded, on the one hand, in frequent revisitations of the

classical pictorical tradition, and, on the other, in legends, riddles, nursery

rhymes, fairy-tales or, as of late, in the Portuguese literary canon itself. As she

herself claims, the paintings are simultaneously loving ‘re-visions’ of the

classics as well as ‘buffoonish’ travestissements of their themes and motives.

The essential distinctive element is, as Rego asserts, that the artist is now

a woman , so the art product reinstates a woman’s vision: ‘my subject is my

story, the story I have to tell and my way of telling it.’ 9

Images of childhood, as is well known, are central to Rego’s work.

Finding an almost overpowering presence there, they probably constitute

the kernel of her aesthetics. For that very reason, they have often been the

object of critical study. In this essay, however, I want to shift the focus of

analysis to another crucial thematic, the place women occupy in Rego’s

pictorial world, while proposing an interpretation of her oblique relationship

with tradition as an ‘aesthetics of danger’. Rego explained in an interview that

it was not any abstract concept of childhood that she was interested in

Ana Gabriela Macedo Rego’s visual rhetoric

representing and preserving in her work, but rather her adult childhood .

Laughingly, she explained that ‘adult childhood’ is that ‘whose loss we miss’,

and, more importantly yet, that ‘which saves us’. 10 This disconcerting phrase

may help us to understand her disturbing depiction of childhood. The whole

universe of Rego’s representations of childhood de Ž es traditional and nos-

talgic representations through a recurrent (perhaps even ‘obsessive’) treatment

of the themes of perversion, violence, malignancy, the grotesque and the

bizarre, rehearsing a continuous ‘return to the repressed’. 11 These successive,

haunting/haunted representations of childhood range from her surreal and

politically charged pictures of the 1960s to the Nursery Rhyme illustrations

(where, as Marina Warner wrote, she reinterpreted the familiar and innocent

verses of ‘Old Mother Goose’ with ‘post-Freudian mordancy’), 12 to her

parodic ‘visual readings’ of myths, fairy-tales, fables and legends. Even one

of her latest works, ‘The Children’s Crusade’ (1996–8) (a series of twelve

prints dealing with mystic, religious and allegoric motives involving the

participation of children), reveals an uncanny blending of the innocent with

the perverse, affection and abuse, the awesome, the subterranean and the

silenced, all disturbingly staged in a self-conscious parody that relativizes all

that is ‘stable, set and ready-made’. 13

In 1990, Rego became the first artist-in-residence at the National

Gallery in London. She had been commissioned to create pictures which

‘reflected on’ and were ‘directly related’ to the pictures exhibited there.

Describing the period as her most challenging encounter with the great

Western tradition in art history, she created in this context her magni Ž cent

triptych ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ (Figure 1), inspired by Carlo Crivelli’s ‘Madona

della Rondine’. It is a parodic interpretation of the ‘lives of the saints’ as told

in the thirteenth-century book by Jacobus de Vargine, The Golden Legend .

Rego transfigures these ‘lives’ of ‘saints mostly into the hard and prosaic

lives of ordinary women, very often on those of Portuguese women’. ‘Crivelli’s

Garden’ is, she claims, ‘a picture about stories, but also about how stories and

learning are passed from generation to generation’. 14 The picture is intended

as a ‘homage to the courage and steadfastness’ of these women, saints,

heroines, and ordinary women alike, who ‘never gave up Faith despite being

put to the rack or whatever’. 15 It is a tribute to the art of painting by means

of which Rego was able to imprint, as Germaine Greer writes, ‘her love affair

with tradition’, while simultaneously inscribing there, through a process

of ironic appropriation, her ‘female commentary upon the male tradition’. 16

However, ‘Crivelli’s Garden’ is also a personal picture, since, as Rego claims,

‘everything [she] know[s] is in this picture’, from her aunt Ludgera who used

to tell her stories, to her nanny Luzia or her grandmother’s garden in Ericeira.

Thus, like Alice, Rego enters Wonderland ‘through the back door’, in a

transgressive gesture which, with her characteristic sense of humour, the artist

allegorizes:

Textual Practice

Figure 1 Crivelli’s Garden (right panel), (1990–1991)

I was very scared and a bit daunted! But to Ž nd one’s way anywhere one

has to Ž nd one’s own door, just like Alice, you see. You take too much

of one thing and you get too big, then you take too much of another

and you get too small. You’ve got to Ž nd your own doorway into things

. . . and I thought the only way you can get into things is, so to speak,

through the basement . . . which is exactly where my studio is, in the

basement! So I can creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them

down with me to the basement, where I can munch away at them . . . .

I’m a sort of poacher here, really, that’s what I am . 17

The painting ‘Joseph’s Dream’ (Figure 2) exemplifies the process of

Rego’s identification with Alice. A commentary on the ‘Vision of Saint

Joseph’ (1638), by the French artist Philippe de Champaigne, Rego’s painting

Ana Gabriela Macedo Rego’s visual rhetoric

Figure 2 Joseph’s Dream (1990)

depicts the Annunciation to Mary, as painted by a woman artist who is

simultaneously a parody of Rego herself as the female artist and as the Virgin,

dressed in the traditional blue, white and yellow. Rego explains the ‘role

reversal’ that is at stake here:

I wanted to do a girl drawing a man very much, because this role reversal

is interesting. She’s getting power from doing this, you see. And then I

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