Power of the pencil

Andrew Lambirth

Wednesday, 25th March 2009

Andrew Lambirth talks to Paula Rego about the new museum dedicated to her and the politics behind her work

Paula Rego is an artist working at the height of her powers, internationally celebrated and with a museum dedicated to her about to open in her native Portugal. It’s been a long climb to this pinnacle of success, and Rego has worked exceptionally hard to reach it. Born in Lisbon in 1935, she grew up largely in the care of her grandparents while her father, an electrical engineer, took a job in England with Marconi. His anglophilia was responsible for Rego herself going to London to study art. She attended the Slade in a golden period (1952–6), with such contemporaries as Craigie Aitchison, Michael Andrews and Euan Uglow, and it was there that she met Victor Willing, whom she married. To begin with they lived in Portugal (1957–63), then spent increasing amounts of time in England until Willing’s death from multiple sclerosis in 1988. Since then she has continued to live and work in London and her reputation has gone from strength to strength.

Although trained as a painter, these days Rego draws rather than paints. Her current popularity rests principally on a remarkable body of graphic work which includes pastels, ink drawings and a huge range of etchings and lithographs. Most recently she has eschewed the succulent textures and sensual layering of pastel and has reduced her art to the bare bones of linearity, using mainly graphite and conté pencil. Her work is essentially narrative in impulse: she is a great storyteller who is unafraid to engage with the darker aspects of the human psyche.

I visited her in her north London studio, and asked her about the Rego museum, which is planned to open this September. ‘I didn’t know whether to accept or not. It’s a big honour to have something like that. It’s in Cascais, which is a beautiful place very near where I was brought up, and it has a marvellous architect called Souto de Moura.’ Appropriately, the building will be called House of Stories and Rego is donating to it a complete set of her prints (now numbering well over 300 items), together with her collection of paintings and drawings by Victor Willing. ‘We can’t really show together — it’s very different work — therefore I will have the opening exhibition and then it will be him. My involvement [with the museum] is very little. The whole point is to collaborate with other countries, especially England, to do shows of narrative art. Hogarth and Daumier, for example. The chance to show things that most people don’t see.’ Apparently, it’s being funded by the local casino, a sponsorship solution unlikely to occur in England.

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