Paula Rego

Marlborough Fine Art, London
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to the backing board in several places. All four edges are deckled. There are artist's pinholes in the top two corners.
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The following impressive group of ten works by four of the most important postwar artists working in London, provides an outstanding cross-section of their formal innovation over the course of the past fifty years. This carefully curated selection from an English Private Collection includes outstanding examples that characterise the figurative work of Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Paula Rego.

Forming a coherent and emblematic corpus of work that reflects many central concerns in British postwar art-history, from an early Auerbach landscape to a more recent portrait by Lucian Freud, these works constitute an encompassing overview of the influential contributions of the School of London, complemented by the highly original work of Paula Rego. The masterful handling of paint that characterises the work of Auerbach, Kossoff and Freud is matched by Rego’s unique exploration of various mediums on paper. Moreover, the inclusion of portraiture by each of these four artists, demonstrates their common interest in capturing the psychological tension of their sitters, and their superb ability to translate this emotional world into a visual rendering.

Whilst the subject-matter of these works provides a magnificent overview of their shared interests, each unique artistic vision is equally well articulated. The assertive brushwork of Frank Auerbach, the sculptural quality of Leon Kossoff’s textured paintings, the psychological tension of Lucian Freud’s canvas and the intriguing narratives of Paula Rego, are all exquisitely embodied in this group. These ten works therefore offer a comprehensive insight into five decades of figurative painting in London, as well as the unique and influential contributions of its most important artists.

 

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As synonymous with the majority of Paula Rego’s pictures, the protagonists of Girl Reading are all women in quaint epoch’s costume, and a pervasive feeling of unease and nostalgia clouds the overall mood. At first glance, the present work brings to mind the charmingly outdated pre-feminism early Modern paintings, such as the work of Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot, in which the spaces of femininity are confined to the domestic realm (Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London 1988, pp. 245-265). In Paula Rego’s oeuvre, however, the women in these socially contrived orders of gendered difference are not the polite, constrained women of le monde depicted by female Impressionists. Stout and masculine, the well-dressed figure at the forefront of Girl Reading, instead of attending to her lecture with quiet contemplation, wears a wicked expression that is the antithesis of the servility and docility expected of her. Her face emerges from the shadows, seemingly animated by a plotting of revenge, whilst her thrown-back head and parted legs suggest sexual provocation.

A gifted storyteller, Paula Rego draws inspiration for her timeless, wonderful and eerie scenes from a vivid imagination fed by Portuguese folktales and nursery rhymes that her beloved grandmother, fanciful Aunt Ludgera or old servant Jacinta (perhaps the elderly maid here) would tell her as a child. Rather than being direct illustrations of readily-available stories, however, many of Rego’s work is fable in the making. Often depicting fantasised situations inspired by her own upper middle-class childhood, the narratives unfolding with maids, well-dressed ageless women and pretty little girls as protagonists, are infused with a disquieting aura of transgression, repressed cruelty and unspeakable domestic horrors.

Rego grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in Salazar’s Portugal, which was very much frozen in time. There was an extreme gap between social classes, and rural space was cut off from modern technological advancements. Rego recalls that men were “running the show”; bourgeois women such as her mother were expected to be religious and well-mannered whilst the laborious working-class women “worked like donkeys. I thought it was disgusting” (the artist in conversation with Mick Brown in The Telegraph, 4 November 2009).

Rego’s primal instinct to please as a little girl in the highly stratified society she grew up in led, to an inner struggle between education and subversion. She explains: “The greatest problem all my life has been the inability to speak my mind – to speak the truth. Adults were always right, never answer back. To answer back felt like death, like being in a sudden huge void. I’ll never get over this fear; so I’ve hidden in childish guises – or female guises. Little girl, pretty girl, attractive woman. Therefore the flight into storytelling. You paint to fight injustice” (the artist quoted in: John McEwen, Paula Rego, London 1992, p. 17).

Masterfully executed in pastel, Conté and charcoal applied in a multitude of layers, Girl Reading demonstrates the full extent of Paula Rego’s dominance of narrative drawing. One of the most celebrated female figures of the postwar era and one of the extremely few living artists to have a Museum dedicated entirely to their oeuvre, Rego’s endeavour is to depict the beauty of an immemorial vernacular vocabulary which is at once highly mysterious yet speaks to everyone.