Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego (: 26 January 1935 – 8 June 2022) was a British-Portuguese 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.
Early life Rego was born in Lisbon, Portugal on 26 January 1935."Paula Rego Biography" , Casa da Historias, Retrieved 8 June 2022. 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.Willing, Nick, Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories, Kismet Films for the BBC, 25 March 2017. 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.Brown, Mick. "Paula Rego interview" , The Telegraph, Retrieved 12 May 2014.
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.John McEwen, Paula Rego (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1992) pp. 25ff
Education In 1951, Rego was sent to the United Kingdom to attend a finishing school called The Grove School, in Sevenoaks, Kent. In 1952, Rego was invited to attend the Chelsea School of Art in London, but her father José Figueiroa Rego 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. Phillips suggested to her parents to try another school for Rego. Phillips knew someone who worked at the Slade School of Fine Art and persuaded them to let Rego attend on a part time basis. From 1952 to 1956, she attended the Slade School. She ultimately left without collecting her diploma.
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,Kellaway, Kate. "Artists: Paula Rego" , The London Group, Retrieve 23 May 2014. 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., Institute of Contemporary Art, Retrieved 23 May 2014. 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."Group Exhibitions" , Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Retrieved 22 May 2014. 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.Tate Gallery Archives, London, ref. TGA978.
In 1988, Rego was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Serpentine Gallery in London."Biography" , Marlborough Gallery, Retrieved 23 May 2014. 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.Patterson, Christina. "Paula Rego's private world" , The Independent, Retrieved 12 May 2014. 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.
A huge embroidery by Paula Rego (250 × 650 centimeters) depicts the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, which pitted the troops of King Sebastian I of Portugal against those of the Moroccan sultan Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik in 1578. The Portuguese were crushed, their king killed, and Spain took the opportunity to invade their country. The embroidery (commissioned to decorate a hotel in the Algarve, but refused by the client) was displayed at the "Paula Rego. Jeux de pouvoir" exhibition (Kunstmuseum, St. Alban-Graben 8, Basel, until February 2, 2025).Le Monde, Jan. 7, 2025
Women's rights and abortion Rego spent much of her career focusing on women's rights and abortion rights. A critic of the anti-abortion movement, she used the theme of abortion as a focal point in much of her art. Rego opposed the criminalisation of abortion and said that the anti-abortion movement "criminalises women" and in some instances will force women to find potentially deadly "backstreet solutions". She also stated that it disproportionately affected poor women, as it was easier for the rich to find a safe abortion (irrespective of the law) because they could afford to travel abroad for the procedure.
Rego created an art series called Untitled: The Abortion Series documenting illegal abortions in response to Portugal's 1998 referendum on abortion. She began the series of ten pastels in July 1998, completing it over the approximately six months up to February 1999. The referendum aimed to legalise abortions although the law was not passed. Rego expressed a feeling of rage, pointing out the "total hypocrisy" of the outcome. The pastels show images of women in positions such as fetal, squatting, etc., either getting ready to have an abortion, in the process of having one, or in pain from the procedure. In a 2002 interview Rego stated:
"The series was born from my indignation... It is unbelievable that women who have an abortion should be considered criminals. It reminds me of the past... I cannot abide the idea of blame in relation to this act. What each woman suffers in having to do it is enough. But all this stems from Portugal's totalitarian past, from women dressed up in aprons, baking cakes like good housewives. In democratic Portugal today there is still a subtle form of oppression... The question of abortion is part of all that violent context."
The paintings were published in several Portuguese newspapers before a second referendum on abortion in 2007, which reversed the 1998 result; it is thought that the paintings significantly affected the result.
Rego used two typical tropes of Western art history: "the gaze" and "the reclining nude". She used "the gaze" in conscious ways to challenge the viewer by having the woman or girl look directly at the viewer or away in agony or closing her eyes in pain. The "reclining nude" brings up the push and pull between sexual attraction, the act of sex and the physical outcomes like pregnancy and miscarriage that occur as a result of sex.
Personal life and death
At the Slade School of Fine Art, Rego began an affair with fellow student Victor Willing, who was already married to another artist, Hazel Whittington. Rego had many abortions during their affair, starting from when she was 18 years old, because Willing had threatened to return to his wife if Rego kept their child.
In 1957, Rego left the UK to live in Ericeira in Portugal because she had decided to keep their latest baby. After the birth of their first child, Willing joined her there. They were able to marry in 1959 following Willing's divorce from his wife."Victor Willing: Biography" , Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Retrieved 23 May 2014. Rego had two daughters, Caroline 'Cas' Willing and Victoria Willing, and a son, Nick Willing, with Victor 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.