Portuguese artist Paula Rego is one of the most influential figures in the visual arts. Aidan Dunne visits a show of her graphics.
In tandem with its exhibition, Through the Looking Glass, which looks at representations of childhood in contemporary art photography, Cork's Glucksman Gallery is showing Paula Rego: Graphic Work. It's an appropriate pairing because, as the writer Marina Warner puts it, "girlhood and its appetites" have been a major preoccupation in Rego's work for more than 30 years. On view are two sets of her graphics, the substantial suite of lithographs inspired by Jane Eyre and a dozen etchings based on the story of The Children's Crusade.
Rego, who was born in Lisbon in 1935, is a ferociously good graphic artist. In fact, drawing and print media probably better suit her gifts than painting. She is primarily a storyteller and the graphic media are intrinsically sympathetic to the illustrative, descriptive nature of her style.
As the Glucksman show demonstrates, print also allows her to work in narrative series, elaborating and developing her themes as she goes. This becomes further evident in Paula Rego: The Complete Graphic Work, by TG Rosenthal (Thames & Hudson), a beautifully produced and richly informative volume newly out in paperback.
Rego's parents moved abroad within a couple of years of her birth, and she spent much of her childhood, very happily, in the care of her paternal grandparents, with other family members also playing a part. During these years she developed her taste for stories with bizarre and fantastic elements.
Later, she also began to be aware of the controlled, circumscribed role allotted to women in Portuguese society. Her hatred of patriarchal authority in all its forms has been a consistent feature of her work.
She attended the Slade School of Art in London and, though she did subsequently return to Portugal, she spent more and more time in England, definitively settling there in the mid-1970s. Yet her ties to Portugal remain incredibly strong and important.
Her work is unmistakable in appearance and has been enormously influential. Its impact is perceptible on that of Alice Maher and Rita Duffy in Ireland, for example. Instinctively subversive and transgressive, she has developed an iconography of female empowerment. Her mode of representation is overtly theatrical, devising elaborate tableaux, using models as actors, drawing on and alluding to myriad sources, including nursery rhymes, children's stories, popular mythology, historical episodes and autobiography.
Though much of what she does contains elements of dream or fantasy, she is always fiercely engaged with the real world. When a referendum to permit abortion was defeated in Portugal, she made a searing, emotionally powerful series of works on the subject in 1999.
Rosenthal notes her anticlericalism, her contempt for false piety and her deep suspicion of such conventional social structures as the family.
He also points to the transgressive erotic tension, the "sense of forbidden sexual interplay" that attends the interactions between adults, children and animals in her images. A menagerie of animals, beautifully rendered, plays a strong symbolic role throughout.
If Rego had been around during the Inquisition, Rosenthal suggests quite plausibly, "she would have been drowned as a witch or burned as a heretic." This is particularly so because of the archetypal heroine that she has created: a prepubescent girl who is a formidable, volatile and unpredictable protagonist. Strong, wilful, capricious, unimpressed by authority, playful and cruel and a bit sinister, Rego's girls are mysterious and untamed.
Paula Rego: Graphic Work is at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC, until Sept 28.
Paula Rego: the Complete Graphic Work, by TG Rosenthal, is published by Thames & Hudson, £29.95