Martin Gayford

Strokes of genius

As you walk through this exhibition at the excellent new MK Gallery, the experience just gets stronger and stronger

In 1965 a journalist asked Paula Rego why she painted. ‘To give a face to fear,’ she replied (those were the days of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal). But when asked the same question shortly afterwards, Rego added a qualification: ‘There’s more to it than that: I paint because I can’t stop painting.’

Rego has carried on making pictures ever since and the results can be seen in a remarkable exhibition, Obedience and Defiance, curated by Catherine Lampert at the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. This is not quite a career retrospective — Rego will get one of those at Tate Britain in 2021. But it is the first time that I have seen so much of her life’s work laid out consecutively in one place.

The effect is truly powerful. Sometimes when an important artist passes the age of 80 — Rego was born in 1935 — it becomes clear that what they have done is going to last: they are joining the old masters. You can see that happening to Rego now.

Her work is full of echoes of the past — Goya, Ensor, Zurbaran — but at the same time it is completely contemporary. These pictures might have been made by one of the women from Goya’s work, but reincarnated in modern Britain, rueful and angry about the way her gender had been treated.

The pictures are also full of Rego’s own experiences, imagination and emotions. She remembers how country girls used to come to the door of her family house, begging for money for a clandestine abortion. These memories underlie a number of vehement works from the late 1990s.

Rego does not feel, she once told me, either Portuguese or British, but ‘exactly both’. She was born and brought up in Portugal, educated at the Slade in the early 1950s, then returned to her native land for much of the time until the 1970s, since when she has been working in London.

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