Paula Rego

LONDON—Though she was born and raised in Portugal, Paula Rego has earned a level of status as an enormously respected mainstay of the British figurative tradition. (She has been so embraced, in fact, that in 1990 she was named the first associate artist at London’s National Gallery.)

For something like 40 years her work has pursued themes that are at once universal and highly personal: She has drawn her imagery from folk tales, fairy stories and the history of art, but she has also infused it with a darkness that is entirely her own. Her stylistic adventurousness has been unflagging, and whereas her first well-known pictures had a cartoon-like quality to them, she now seems to stand squarely in the tradition of large-scale historical painting.

A book recently published by Phaidon (the third, fully revised and updated edition of John McEwan’s monograph on Rego), makes plain that, although Rego’s work has changed stylistically in terms of subject matter, her core set of subjects have remained intact.

From her studio in London, the artist spoke to ArtInfo about her mission to reflect the darker aspects of life, and to give form to the unseeable.

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Paula, can we begin by talking about when your work first came to broad public attention in Britain, at the beginning of the 1980s? That must’ve a very interesting time to be a figurative painter.

Yes, nowadays you can do a lot of different things, but then it was a question of what was in fashion, really. The studios in London were full of people doing huge abstract paintings. Earlier, when I was a student, it was alright to paint the figure, and then I did a lot of collages. They’re all figurative and they all tell stories. They’re quite political some of them. And none of that was at all popular until the fashion changed. And then it was again OK to do it.

I remember that there was a lot of excitement about the return of figurative painting at that time.

Yes [in 1980-81] there was a big show here in London at the Royal Academy called “A New Spirit in Painting.” They showed Philip Guston, who was a very courageous and wonderful artist who had been doing that for some time, and others like him who were suddenly admired. They had Schnabel and Clemente and all those artists that suddenly became known—at least to me.

Did you feel a kinship with any of those artists?

You mean, did I identify with those people? No, not much. It was lovely to see figures again, but I couldn’t see that many of those people were telling stories. I like illustration and I like telling stories. I’ve always like artists like Daumier, Goya, Hogarth, Winsor McCay. It’s a different kind of art. It often isn’t called art.

In your work, you’ve used stories from fairy tales and opera libretti, but in recent years your subjects seem to be drawn from more current events. I’m thinking particularly of those rather harrowing pictures of women on beds.

Well, they’re abortion pictures. It’s the only time I’ve actually done something for propaganda. Quite frankly there was nothing else I could do. I did them because in Portugal abortion is illegal. It’s always been illegal. But it’s easy to get an abortion. Everyone has them. It’s just hypocrisy. Even now, in 2006, people are arrested and put in jail [for having or performing an abortion]. Even the nurses who help them are put in jail. It must be the only country in Europe that’s like that.

What finally convinced you to begin these works?

I felt very strongly about the issue, and [in 1997] there was a referendum in Portugal and I thought they should vote “yes” [to legalize abortion], so I painted all these pictures and I showed them in Portugal—it was very courageous of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum to show them—and people came along and looked at them. A lot of women looked at them with great seriousness and they knew what they were about, but most of the art critics were afraid and reviewed them as art: they commented on the process, how well drawn they were and that sort of thing; never the subject matter. They could see perfectly well what it was—they’re not stupid—but they’d rather talk about how it was done, which seemed to me immaterial. But there you are. It was very peculiar.