Curator’s Voice: Marco Livingstone on Paula Rego

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Paula Rego has long been one of Britain’s mostly highly respected and popular painters, but she's remained relatively under-the-radar in the United States. That situation is changing quickly, though: She currently has a show of new work at Marlborough Chelsea through May 17; Phaidon has just published the book Paula Rego Behind the Scenes, by John McEwen; and most important of all, a large-scale retrospective of her career — originally organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid — is at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. through May 25.

Rego's style has changed often over the years, but nowadays the impassioned figurative artist almost exclusively uses pastels to make large-scale, narrative tableaux. These locate her squarely in the tradition of heroic figure painting as she deals with some of the biggest themes affecting the human condition: Fantasy, anxiety, cruelty, lust, and death are the touchstones of her art.

The curator of the show is the distinguished London-based art historian and independent curator Marco Livingstone, who specializes in Pop Art and figurative painting and sculpture. His books include Pop Art: A Continuing History and monographs on Jim Dine, David Hockney, and R. B. Kitaj. He spoke with ARTINFO about Rego's development as an artist and the challenges of curating a traveling exhibition.

Marco, can you explain how this show came about?

The Portuguese and the Spanish do not necessarily have close communication, yet they have much in common culturally. Spanish painting from many different periods has been extremely important to Paula: Catalan frescoes of the Romanesque period had been a reference point for her paintings during the 1960s, and since her return to a more ostensibly traditional figurative language in the mid-1980s, she has drawn inspiration from the great Spanish painters of the 17th century, from Goya, and from the great modernists, above all Picasso and Miro. So having her works seen in a Spanish context has been an ambition of hers for a long time.

The then-director of the Reina Sofía museum, Ana Martínez de Aguilar, was approached by the Portuguese cultural attaché to Spain, the writer João de Melo. Martínez de Aguilar responded with great enthusiasm to the proposal and extended the invitation to present the largest ever retrospective of Paula’s art.

Can you outline your own relationship with Paula? Are there aspects of her work that you understand better because of your relationship with her?

I met Paula around the time of her first solo exhibition at the Edward Totah Gallery in London in 1984. By her 1986 show, where she presented her untitled “girl and dog” pictures, I was quite a fan, but it was her retrospective two years later at London’s Serpentine Gallery that made me realize what a great artist she was becoming. I had also got to know her much better because she was working with my partner, Stephen Stuart-Smith, on beautiful limited-edition books through his Enitharmon Press. I feel a special affinity with her work since the mid-1980s and above all with her pastels, a medium she took up in 1994. As time went on I became more familiar with her work of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, which hadn’t really been seen in the U.K., and grew to admire that, too.

There are more than a hundred pieces in this show. Are there particular challenges in curating a retrospective of this scale?

The retrospective was actually much, much bigger in its original incarnation: There were just over 200 works in the Madrid show, including many large paintings that we simply didn’t have space to hang in Washington, D.C. It is always a tall order borrowing back such major works from both museums and private collectors, but everyone was unbelievably generous and supportive, including Charles Saatchi — who owns the most important and extensive collection of Paula’s pictures — as well as her two most enthusiastic institutional patrons, the Tate in London and the Gulbenkian in Lisbon.

The exhibition’s wall labels (and the excellent exhibition catalogue) draw heavily on Paula’s own comments about her pictures. What is the story behind this?