The Deeply Political Art of Paula Rego

Today Paula Rego (1935–2022) is recognized as one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century, renowned for her searing, darkly sophisticated compositions that confront women’s oppression. She created psychologically complex works using various techniques and styles that challenged stereotypes, countering narratives, histories, and viewpoints of men that have dominated (and continue to dominate) art. Instead, Rego privileged the viewpoints of girls and women; her subjects included fairy tales, nursery rhymes, Disney animations, and literature by Charlotte Brontë, Jean Genet, Martin McDonagh, and José Maria de Eça de Queirós, among others. She also made works in which she referenced contemporary political and social events, as well as her personal life and family history, all of which she presented through a distinctly feminist lens.

Audiences in Europe have embraced and celebrated Rego’s work for decades. The Casa das Histórias Paula Rego (House of the Stories) is a museum dedicated to the artist and her influential legacy that opened in the Portuguese town of Cascais in 2009. In 2005, the Royal Mail commissioned a suite of postage stamps based on her Jane Eyre lithographs, and in 2010, she was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her contribution to the arts. Despite receiving much acclaim elsewhere, she has not yet achieved this level of recognition in the United States. The recent acquisition of a suite of untitled etchings, which will feature prominently in an upcoming solo exhibition of Rego’s art at The Met, will allow American audiences to experience the power of her work, which remains as relevant today as when it was created.

Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935 and moved to England in 1951 to study and to escape the Estado Novo, or New State, a Portuguese fascist regime that was in power from 1933 to 1974. Rego attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London between 1952 and 1956 and participated in several art exhibitions. For the rest of her life, Rego lived between Portugal and Great Britain, two countries where she would find success with numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, as well as collectors.

As early as 1950, while still a teenager in Portugal, Rego made art that exposed and challenged the abusive regime of the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar. Over more than six decades, Rego maintained the same anger at injustice, which she would fearlessly address through her art. Her subjects included the mistreatment of women and girls, colonialism, the war in Iraq and earlier colonial wars, human trafficking, female genital mutilation, and authoritarianism.

Perhaps Rego’s most famous series are the untitled pastels and prints that are frequently referred to as her “abortion works.” Between 1998 and 1999, Rego created ten large pastels in which she depicted women of various ages and socioeconomic classes having illegal abortions, a subject almost entirely absent from art history. The untitled works were made in response to a referendum held earlier that year in Portugal to legalize abortion that narrowly failed to pass.[1] Rego was outraged, especially because less than half of the eligible voting population had voted, which, she believed, reflected a desire to avoid the issue. Rego frequently spoke of the number of women she knew who had had illegal abortions for a variety of reasons and later discussed her own. She described the danger and even death that resulted from this unsafe practice. As Rego stated: “I got so angry because I’d seen it all in Portugal—the suffering that went on when abortion was totally illegal. It was mind-boggling. There is still much suffering.”[2]

The following year, she created eight etchings based on the series.[3] Published in an edition of seventeen, the prints enabled her to show the horrors of illegal abortion to a broader audience through multiple exhibitions and a wider distribution of the images.

Rather than copy the pastels, she restaged the scenes and worked directly from her model, Lila Nunes, whose likeness is found frequently in Rego’s art. As opposed to the vibrant colors of the pastels, the prints are realized in black, white, and various shades of gray. According to Paul Coldwell, the printer and artist with whom Rego made the series as well as other prints, these lighter tones had the effect of making the prints appear to be “tragedies being conducted while the lights are on.” Rego varied the amount of contrast as well as the density of etched lines to create both deep shadows and sections without any marks or color. The dark tones and variety of etched lines—wiry, crosshatched, parallel—work together to amplify the starkness of the setting and dramatically convey the women’s isolation. To amplify the sense of claustrophobia and confinement, Rego cropped the compositions, which visually pushed the bodies of the women to the foreground and, by consequence, into the viewer’s space.

Some of the prints contain quotidian details such as watches, overstuffed chairs, decorative fabrics, and pillows; others have items like jugs, buckets, and stirrup-like chairs as seen in Untitled 7 (1999) that indicate an unsafe and illegal abortion, likely in a domestic setting. These elements work in tandem with the clothing of girls and women to help the viewer construct a possible narrative: for example, the tie and collared shirt of a schoolgirl’s uniform in Untitled 3 (1999), or the underwear worn by a figure in Untitled 5 (1999). Other prints are sparer, containing only the image of a woman either lying down or seated with her legs open. Some women appear unaware they are being watched, while others seem to confront the viewers, returning their gaze.

Rego spoke of the suffering girls and women experienced from unsafe, illegal abortions and described the series as “born from my indignation.” She declared that the works expressed her wish to portray “the fear and pain and danger of an illegal abortion, which is what desperate women have always resorted to. It’s very wrong to criminalize women on top of everything else. Making abortions illegal is forcing women to the backstreet solution.”

In the pastels and the prints, Rego portrayed women experiencing a range of emotions—fear, anger, pain, defiance—alone and either recovering from or performing unsafe abortions on themselves. Rego deliberately avoided graphic depictions, instead striving to make the images as clinical as possible: “I didn’t want to show blood, gore or anything to sicken, because people wouldn’t look at it then. And what you want to do is make people look, make pretty colours [sic] and make it agreeable, and in that way make people look at life.”[4]

In 1999, Rego exhibited the abortion pastels and prints in Lisbon at the Centro de Arte Moderna José de Azaredo Perdigão (Center of Modern Art José de Azeredo Perdigão), which was part of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, where they drew a record attendance. Rego also allowed the prints, which she frequently referred to as “propaganda,” to be reproduced in journals and newspapers and used by pro-choice organizations.

Almost ten years later, in 2007, Portugal had a second referendum on abortion. Rego’s works have been credited with inspiring this vote, as well as a larger voter turnout, resulting in the legalization of abortion (up to ten weeks) in Portugal. While Rego was widely celebrated for her art, even being named a Dame of the British Empire in 2010, she later described her Untitled works as “one of the things I’m most proud of having done.”

Notes

[1] Abortion was illegal in Portugal and punishable by prison until 1984. After that, it was permitted only in specific instances, such as the health of the mother, fetal abnormalities, and rape.

[2] PAULA REGO interviewed by Edward King, February 2001, Celestina’s House (Kendal: Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Yale Center for British Art, 2001), 11.

[3] In 2020, in response to global threats to reproductive rights, Rego published two additional etchings, printed from the plates she had made in 2000.

[4] Edward King interview with Paula Rego, 11.