28 SEPTEMBER – 12 NOVEMBER 2016
FROM DISNEY’S ‘FANTASIA’ 1995
Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY + 44 (0)20 7629 5161 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughlondon.com
DANCING OSTRICHES Jan Dalley, Arts Editor, Financial Times
“Fantasia”: that is the title of the Walt Disney film that inspired Paula Rego’s magnificent, eight-panel pastel series entitled “Dancing Ostriches”. But “Fantasia” could just as well be a catch-all title for much of Rego’s work. Over a career spanning six decades – she was born in 1935 – her paintings, prints and drawings have been profoundly imbued with a sense of the fantastic, whether from fairytale, myth, literature, stories from her native Portugal or the rich imaginative seams of her own dreamworlds. As a girl in the harsh traditional Portugal of the dictator Antonio Salazar, with extremely restricted outside influences, the sudden impact of Disney films must have been exceptionally powerful. The flights of fancy of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, “Pinocchio” and especially “Fantasia” chimed perfectly with Rego’s own taste for the fantastical and the grotesque. So when in 1996 she was invited to contribute to an exhibition at London’s Hayward gallery to commemorate 100 years of the British film industry, these early visual experiences suddenly bore fruit. The exhibition’s title, “Spellbound”, must also have beguiled her with its connotations of magic and fairytale. In Disney’s “Fantasia” the dancing ostriches, whose comic cavortings are set to the Dance of the Hours from Ponchielli’s opera “La Gioconda”, are an outright caricature of the classical ballet tradition. Their gawky limbs, giant blue flipper-feet, preposterous eyelashes and even more preposterous notions of their own beauty make a hilarious mockery of the impossible ideals of female grace demanded by the ballet. We laugh at them, we feel slightly sorry for them – and then, when their careful pirouettes descend into a squawking, feather-flying brawl, we almost sigh with relief that they have returned to something like their true nature. In Rego’s version, the dancing ostriches are returned to the human realm. Here we have stocky, hardworking, unillusioned women on the cusp of middle age, their tough lives written on their careworn features. Why they are dressed in this absurd ballerinas’ garb, the flimsy black tulle only emphasising their manly knees and sturdy arms, the shiny unused pointe shoes making their hefty feet seem even bigger, we don’t really know. Just as Disney’s ostriches are birds that can’t fly, Rego’s ostriches are equally earthbound – dancers who can’t, don’t, never will dance. They hold their limbs in hopeful imitations of a balletic poses, yet their copious thighs and backsides are supported by cushions, or firmly planted in the tapestried studio armchair that appears time and again in Rego’s work. In this artist’s imaginative landscape, there’s almost always a story to be told, or heard. Although she studied at the Slade at a time when figuration was very much out of fashion (and she remembers the pressure from tutors such as Victor Pasmore towards abstraction), she later emphasised the importance of storytelling in her work; not surprisingly, the museum now dedicated to her in Cascais, Portugal, is called the House of Stories. The Dancing Ostriches series has a strong if mysterious dramatic thrust to it, even a haunting touch of foreboding: Rego has interpreted “Fantasia” as a fairy tale in the same vein as “Snow White” and “Pinocchio” and it fits clearly into that powerful strand of her work.
“… WHAT I REALLY LIKE TO DO IS DRAW. I’M NOT A PAINTER REALLY, I’M A DRAWER. I DRAW A LOT. WHEN YOU DRAW YOU CAN PUSH YOUR PENCIL OR YOUR PASTEL – EVERYTHING IS MUCH MORE VIOLENT.”
This sense of a narrative, as well as the fact that Rego’s loyal model Lila Nunes is portrayed again and again, are what binds these panels into a single work. Yet the actual story, and the drama, are left open for us to imagine. In the first panel, the (almost life-size) woman proudly displays her body for the viewer, the rapt expression on her face betraying dreams of her lost youth and beauty – an illusion cruelly contradicted by her grimy toenails, her coarsely shaven armpit. In the second panel three “dancers” – this time with mockingly little-girly pink and blue satin bows in their hair (echoes of Disney’s silly dancing birds) – make clumsy attempts at balletic grace. In successive panels, disillusion and acceptance have settled into the faces, the physical poses have become even more parodic and clumsy, the bodies stuffed awkwardly into the constricting frame. And in the extra piece included in this exhibition, “Reclining Hippo”, the model lounges lewdly, all thoughts of grace forgotten. So what, in the artist’s narrative, are these women doing? Are they waiting the wings – of a theatre, or more likely of their own lives – desperately hoping still to be called into the spotlight? Are they in some private dressing-up-box fantasy of their own making? Is it all a parable of ageing and disappointment, a nightmare vision of what happens over the years to women who do not achieve impossible standards of physical perfection? And what – crucially – is the event that triggers the high drama of the diptych formed of the seventh and eighth panels? Suddenly, here, the viewer is forgotten. The shoes are off. The idiotic tulle skirts are hitched up around sturdy thighs, not coquettishly but in readiness for action. There is palpable aggression between the groups of women facing each other like fighters across the two panels. But for what cause? Throughout this extraordinary series, there are constant echoes of other great works. The knees of Rembrandt’s Saskia. In the diptych, the vast busy frescoes of Masaccio, rippling with calf-muscles. Velasquez’s “Las Meninas”, especially in the unsettling dwarf-figure of the sixth panel. The severely restricted palette of greys, blacks and flesh tones – Goya. And of course Degas, whose dancers were criticised as portraying their young subjects un-idealised , real young women caught unawares, off-guard. The other strong association with Degas is the pastel medium in which Rego chose to make this series. But while Degas’ pastel is airy, sketchy, lightly evoking speed and quickly captured movement, Rego’s is deeply layered, worked, hunkered down, fierce. For her flesh tones she uses under-layers in shades of green - as the Old Masters did – overlaid by built-up layers of peaches and pinks and browns, giving weight and solidity and dimension to her magnificent fashioning of muscle and sinew and fat and skin. Hard black outlines emphasise the tough reality of these faces and figures, while unrelenting white highlights cast a ruthless cinematic glare. With modelling like this, lighting like this, there’s nowhere to hide. Her own explanation of her liking for the medium is eloquent. With pastel, she has said, she “could get what I wanted better than in paint. I didn’t have the wobbly brush, you see, because what I really like to do is draw. I’m not a painter really, I’m a drawer. I draw a lot. When you draw you can push your pencil or your pastel – everything is much more violent.” Word such as “violent”, “fierce”, “unforgiving” come to mind over and over again, in the face of the Dancing Ostriches. But is Rego – a passionate supporter of women and their fate, throughout her work – really so unkind to her subjects? Is she mocking these women and their broken dreams? It all seems a very long way from Disney and his “Fantasia”. But perhaps not. These days, we tend to think of Disney’s imagery as saccharine and sentimental, but that is not how it appeared to the young Paula Rego. She saw beyond cuteness to complexity, cruelty, threat, darkness. She saw the infantile terror of Bambi’s mother’s death. As she told one interviewer: “Disney… didn’t sanitise. His work is grotesque. There are many grotesque moments in Disney. Snow White, when she’s being caught by the branches of the trees when she’s running away. Pinocchio is pretty grotesque, when they all change into donkeys.” That word “grotesque” is another difficult one for today’s audience. A woman, these days, does not easily describe another as that. Yet there’s much that is – complicatedly, fascinatingly – grotesque in the Dancing Ostriches. For Rego, it’s not a term of censure, nor a mockery of her delicate subjects, it’s all about investigating the “grotto”, the dark hidden places of the human spirit. This series of work by Paula Rego shows how a great artist can shine a bright, hard, cinematic light into the grottos of the human psyche, and make ostriches dance.
LIST OF WORKS
1, 2 DANCING OSTRICHES FROM DISNEY’S ‘FANTASIA’ 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 150 cm 3, 4, 5 DANCING OSTRICHES (TRIPTYCH) 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Each panel 150 x 150 cm 6 DANCING OSTRICHES FROM DISNEY’S ‘FANTASIA’ 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 150 cm 7, 8 DANCING OSTRICHES (DIPTYCH) 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Left hand panel: 162.5 x 155 cm Right hand panel: 160 x 120 cm 9 RECLINING HIPPO FROM THE DANCING OSTRICHES, WALT DISNEY’S ‘FANTASIA’ 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 151.1 cm
EXHIBITED:
LITERATURE:
Spellbound: Art and Film, Hayward Gallery, London, May 1996
Paula Rego The Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s ‘Fantasia’, Sarah Kent Introduction ‘Mutton dressed as Lamb: Paula Rego’s Ostrich Women’; John McEwen Essay ‘The Ostriches: A Tribe of Bird Women on the edge of the Sea’, Saatchi Publications 1996
Paula Rego New Work, Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York, December 1996 - January 1997, Catalogue Nos. 3-8, reproduced Paula Rego Retrospective exhibition, Tate Gallery Liverpool, 8 February - 13 April; travelling to Fundação das Descobertas, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 15 May 17 August 1997, Catalogue Nos. 66-73 reproduced Paula Rego Retrospective Exhibition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 25 September 30 December 2007; travelling to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, 1 February 25 May 2008. Exhibition curated by Marco Livingstone. Reproduced pp 141-147 Paula Rego, Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal, 18 September 2009 18 March 2010, reproduced Paula Rego Retrospective exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico, September 2010 - March 2011; travelling to the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo, Brazil, 19 March - 5 June 2011. Exhibition curated by Marco Livingstone. Catalogue Nos. 63-67, reproduced
John McEwen, Paula Rego (3rd Edition), Phaidon Press, London, 2006, Reproduced pp 214-221 John McEwen, Paula Rego Behind the Scenes, Phaidon Press, London, July 2008, No. 44 reproduced Fiona Bradley, Paula Rego, Tate Publishing, London, 2002, Figures 62-65 & frontispiece reproduced The History of the Saatchi Gallery, Booth-Clibborn Editions, London, June 2011, Contributors: Edward Booth-Clibborn, Richard Cork, Steve Marin, Norman Rosenthal, Brian Sewell, reproduced pp. 426-432
1 DANCING OSTRICHES FROM DISNEY’S ‘FANTASIA’ 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 150 cm
2 DANCING OSTRICHES FROM DISNEY’S ‘FANTASIA’ 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 150 cm
3 DANCING OSTRICHES (TRIPTYCH), LEFT PANEL 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Each panel 150 x 150 cm
4 DANCING OSTRICHES (TRIPTYCH), CENTRE PANEL 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Each panel 150 x 150 cm
5 DANCING OSTRICHES (TRIPTYCH), RIGHT PANEL 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Each panel 150 x 150 cm
6 DANCING OSTRICHES FROM DISNEY’S ‘FANTASIA’ 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 150 cm
Overleaf: 7, 8 DANCING OSTRICHES (DIPTYCH) 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium Left hand panel: 162.5 x 155 cm Right hand panel: 160 x 120 cm
9 RECLINING HIPPO FROM THE DANCING OSTRICHES, WALT DISNEY’S ‘FANTASIA’ 1995 Pastel on paper mounted on aluminium 150 x 150 cm
BIOGRAPHY
for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 18 April 14 July 2002 Paula Rego – Pendle Witches, Hebden Bridge Arts Festival, Linden Mill, Hebden Bridge, N. Yorkshire, 18 June - 20 July Jane Eyre and Other Stories, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 15 October - 22 November 2003-04 Paula Rego, Corner 2004, Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 27 December - 18 January 2004
Born in Lisbon
Educated in St. Julian’s School, Carcavelos Studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London 1957-63 Lived in Ericeira, Portugal with her husband, the painter Victor Willing
2004 Paula Rego Retrospective Exhibition, Serralves Museum, Oporto, 15 October 2004 - 23 January 2005 Paula Rego in Focus, Tate Britain, 27 October 2004 2 January 2005
1992 Honorary Master of Art, Winchester School of Art, 12 June
2005-06 Paula Rego Printmaker, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 5 August - 24 September; Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, 12 November - 22 January 2006; Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, 4 February - 7 May; University Gallery, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, 19 May 30 June; Waterhall Gallery of Modern Art, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery; Royal College of Art, London 9 15 October
1999 Honorary Doctorate of Letters, University of St. Andrews, Scotland, 24 June
2006 Paula Rego, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 11 October 18 November
Honorary Doctorate of Letters, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 8 July
2007 Paula Rego Graven Images, Waterhall Gallery of Modern Art, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 23 June 7 October 2007
Lived in London and Portugal 1983 Visiting Lecturer in Painting, Slade School of Art Appointed first National Gallery Associate Artist
2000 Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Rhode Island School of Design, USA, 3 June 2002 Honorary Doctorate of Letters, The London Institute, 23 May 2004 Grã Cruz da Ordem de Sant’Iago da Espada presented by the President of Portugal 2005 Commissioned by the Royal Mail to produce a set of Jane Eyre Stamps Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Oxford University, June Honorary Doctorate of Letters, Roehampton University, July 2008 Commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Sir David Hare 2009 Opening of the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal, designed by Eduardo Souto de Moura 2010 Created a Dame of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours Winner of the Mapfre Foundation Drawing Prize, Madrid 2013 Honorary Fellow, Murray Edwards College, New Hall, Cambridge Lives and works in London SELECTED RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS Children’s Crusade, Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop, 28 Nov - 24 December Paula Rego, Pendle Witches, Children’s Crusade and Drawings, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 10 February 12 March 2001-02 Paula Rego, Celestina’s House, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 11 June - 7 October; travelling to the Yale Center
Paula Rego O Vinho, a series of eight lithographs, Marlborough Fine Art, 6 September - 6 October, and at Galeria Marlborough, Madrid 2007-08 Paula Rego Retrospective exhibition, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 25 September 30 December; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, 1 February- 25 May 2008. Exhibition curated by Marco Livingstone 2008 Paula Rego Human Cargo, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, 17 April - 17 May Paula Rego Retrospective de l’oeuvre graphique, Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Nimes 19 June - 21 September 2009 Paula Rego, Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal, 18 September - 18 March 2010 – Opening Exhibition 2010 Thresholds: works from the British Council collection chosen by Paula Rego, Whitechapel Gallery, London, February - March Paula Rego Oratorio, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 7 July - 20 August 2010-11 Paula Rego Retrospective exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey, Mexico, September 2010 - March 2011; travelling to the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo, Brazil, 19 March - 5 June 2011 2011 My Choice – Selected works by Paula Rego at the British Council Collection, Casa das Historias Paula Rego, 10 February - 12 June 2011 Paula Rego Oratorio, Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Cascais, 7 July - 31 December 2012 Paula Rego Retrospective, The Gulbenkian Museum, Paris, 26 January - 30 March
Paula Rego: Balzac and other Stories, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 29 May - 30 June 2013 Paula Rego Dame with the goat’s foot and other stories, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 25 January - 1 March 2014 Paula Rego, Fábulas Reales, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Gas Natural Fenosa, La Coruña, Spain, 10 April - 28 September Paula Rego The Last King of Portugal and Other Stories, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1 - 25 October 2015 Paula Rego Cousin Bazilio and Other Stories, Marlborough Madrid, 20 October - 21 November
2010 Mat Collishaw, Tracey Emin & Paula Rego: At the Foundling, The Foundling Museum, London 27 January 9 May 2011 My Choice – Selected works by Paula Rego at the British Council Collection, Casa das Historias Paula Rego, 10 February - 12 June Nothing in the World but Youth, Turner Contemporary, Margate, 17 September 2011 - 8 January 2012 2012 Paula Rego and Adriana Molder – A Dama Pé-deCabra, Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Cascais, 7 July 28 October
Paula Rego The Poacher, Casa das Historias Paula Rego, 17 December - 24 April
2013 Ahmed Alsoudani, Philip Guston and Paula Rego, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, February
2016 Paula Rego Old Meets New, Casa das Historias Paula Rego, 25 May - 30 October
A Opera Segundo Paula Rego, Casa das Historias, Cascais, 17 May - 29 September
Paula Rego Honoré Daumier, Scandal Gossip and other Stories, Casa das Historias, Paula Rego, 7 November 2013 - 20 April 2014
SELECTED RECENT GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2000-01 British Art Show 5, Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre Travelling exhibition: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 7 April - 4 June; Southampton City Art Gallery, 23 June - 20 August; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 8 September - 5 November; Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 24 November 2000 4 February 2001 2002 The Pastel Society Annual Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London, March Paula Rego – Jane Eyre; Marlborough Gallery Inc., New York, 8 January - 2 February
2014 1961: Ordem e Caos (Order and Chaos), Paula Rego, Victor Willing, Eduardo Batarda and Bartolomeu dos Santos, Casa das Historias Paula Rego, Cascais, 22 May 26 October 2014 Meeting Point, Rembrandt, Paula Rego, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, 27 June - 21 September 2015 Gorputz eta arima en cuerpo y alma, Mujeres artistas de los siglos XX y XXI, Women Artists of the 20 & 21st Centuries, Kubo Kutxa Foundation, San Sebastian, Spain, 19 June - 27 September
2003 Paula Rego – Pendle Witches, Hebden Bridge Arts Festival, N. Yorkshire, 18 June - 20 July
2016 A Summer Exhibition, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 27 July - 27 August
2005 The Pastel Society Annual Exhibition, Pastel Society, Pall Mall, 2-13 March
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Only Make Believe, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 23 March - 5 June Guys’n’Dolls. Art, Science, Fashion and Relationships, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, 23 April - 12 June 2006 The Pastel Society Annual Exhibition, The Mall Galleries, London, March travelling to the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, April - May Drawing Inspiration, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, 4 April - 1 July, catalogue with introduction by Deanna Petherbridge 2008 Darger-ism: Contemporary Artists and Henry Darger, American Folk Art Museum, New York, 15 April 21 September 2009 Enchanted Worlds – Art and Fairy Stories & Mermaid Tales, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, 13 June 6 September The Artist’s Studio, Compton Verney, Warwickshire, 26 September - 13 December 2009. Exhibition curated by Giles Waterfield Decadence, the Rake’s Progress, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg, Sweden, 30 October 2009 until February 2010 to include Rego’s Hogarth Marriage a la Mode from the Tate Britain’s collection, the After Hogarth etchings and O Vinho series of lithographs
Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal Arts Council, London Berardo Collection, Sintra Museum of Modern Art, Portugal British Council, London British Government Collection, on loan to the British Embassy, Lisbon British Museum, London Bristol City Art Gallery Chapel of the Palacio de Belém, Lisbon Frissiras Museum, Athens Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York National Gallery, London National Portrait Gallery, London New Hall, Cambridge Portuguese Embassy, London Rugby Museum and Art Gallery Saatchi Gallery, London Tate Gallery, London Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Yale Center for British Art
MARLBOROUGH
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Works Photography: Prudence Cuming Associates Photos of Artist: John Haynes/Lebrecht Music & Arts Design: Shine Design, London Print: Impress Print Services ISBN 978-1-909707-32-0 Catalogue No. 659 Š 2016 Marlborough