Force for good

This is the first in a series of short sharp shows devoted to leading British artists which Tate Britain proposes to stage over the coming years. According to Stephen Deuchar, Tate Britain’s director, Rego was easily the most popular choice, and little wonder. It is a sign of true quality that in a 50-year career she has gone from strength to strength. Her imaginative vitality and range, her technical command, her historical depth, above all her humanity are an inspiring and moral force for good at this sickly time, when the art world’s decadent promotion and peddling of relics is oddly reminiscent of the mediaeval Church — as witness the recent auction of Damien Hirst effects or the colossal and vacuous self-conceit of Michael Landy’s replicated home, ‘Semi-Detached’, currently also at old Tate.

Rego’s show features three rooms of masterpieces from the 1960s, ’80s and ’90s, finishing with a new and disturbing triptych ‘The Pillowman’ — after a doll-like character in a stage play by Martin McDonagh who kills children to spare them the bitterness of life. Most visitors will probably only be familiar with her figurative work, which is surely unique in painting (not literature) for exploring the human comedy from a female point of view. So they may be puzzled by the 1960s collages whose intestinal forms tell stories but are hard to decipher.

They are described as ‘The Early Works: Political Collages’, which is inaccurate and misleading. Her paintings in the 1950s were impressively large and figurative; and although some of her collages have an anti-fascist message, that is an irrelevance in terms of our enjoyment and understanding. As she has said in print, ‘I can only understand ideas in terms of human relationships — I don’t understand political abstractions.’