Paula Rego. In Memoriam

Many newspapers report the news of the death of the artist Dame Paula Rego (1935-2022):

Picture Credits: Paula Rego at her London studio in 2005, surrounded by lithographs from her ‘Jane Eyre’ series. Photo: Paul Massey, Camera Press London. Artwork: © Paula Rego

Rego was remorselessly described as a storyteller, which was true, and which cuts across the thrust of the art of the past century (with the exception of surrealism). She claimed her favourite painting was Max Ernst’s depiction of the Virgin Mary spanking the child Jesus. And it helps to know what she thought she was about (her stories changed with each telling), but no more than it helps looking at certain Titians or Picassos to know the myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The bottom line was the sheer visual power of her work, in painting, in fluently wonderful drawings, and in etching and aquatints, carried by a magnificent technique. (Michael McNay in The Guardian)

Paula Rego, who has died aged 87, was the world’s greatest woman artist of the past three decades and, with Lucian Freud, continued to make figurative painting the most exciting, provocative art form in the global, multimedia 21st century.
Subverting the language of male painterly tradition to express modern women’s experience, Rego liberated a generation — viewers as well as artists — by her rendering of the unidealised female body, and of vulnerable men. Among her masterpieces from the 1990s and 2000s, middle-aged women prance as clumsy flightless birds in her “Dancing Ostriches”, feeble giants collapse as big babies in “The Pillowman”, and gender roles reverse in a sparkling reimagining of Hogarth’s “Marriage A-la-Mode”. (Jackie Wullschläger in Financial Times)

Also in  Visão (Portugal), Ara (in Catalan), and many others.

Her 2002 Jane Eyre series of fifteen lithographs was one of the most iconic and well-known works of her opus (maybe in close competition with her Abortion series). The success and recognition of the series were such that after several exhibitions (in the Marlborough Gallery in New York, the Marlborough Fine Art Gallery in London and the Galeria 111 in Lisbon), the British Post Office chose it for a commemorative issue of six stamps celebrating the 150th anniversary of the death of Charlotte Brontë in 2005.

One year earlier, in 2004, the Jane Eyre prints had been exhibited in the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Jane Sellars, a former curator of the Brontë Parsonage and co-author of The Art of the Brontës, wrote in Brontë Studies (vol. 30, n° 1, March 2005, 85) about how bold this exhibition was:

The display of contemporary art in a historic house is not a new idea, but it was a first for the Brontë Parsonage Museum, and for that it must be commended.

In a way, it can be said that the Brontë Society Contemporary Arts Programme which has brought so many different voices with different, challenging, and sometimes controversial perspectives on the Brontës, was born with Paula Rego's groundbreaking exhibition.

That same year, 2004, Marina Warner wrote the introduction for an edition of the Jane Eyre series interspersed with some excerpts from Charlotte Brontë's novel. Her final words describing Paula Rego's approach to Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea will be also ours:

Paula Rego is able to record that coming-into-being of her dream world and, as she sees with Jane’s ‘spiritual eye’, through Charlotte Brontë’s dramatic storytelling, through its heroine’s trials and survival back to her personal experiences of benightedness; her work helps release her viewers from that state through a different way of seeing, as when Psyche struggles through one kind of darkness into another. (Marina Warner, ‘An artist's dream world: Paula Rego’, Tate Research Publication, 2003, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/paula-rego-1823/artists-dream-world, accessed 9 June 2022)