Paula Rego
5-9 OCTOBER 2016 STAND C8, FRIEZE MASTERS REGENTS PARK
Paula Rego PAINTINGS & ETCHINGS FROM THE 1980’S
Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street London W1S 4BY + 44 (0)20 7629 5161 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughlondon.com
Paula Rego is above all a storyteller, but her stories are seldom easy to read. Her paintings fuse make-believe and real experiences, gathered thirstily from her own and other people’s lives. Characters act in anarchic and unexpected ways, rarely having to abide by pictorial conventions of time or scale. As a result, she thinks, of her cautious disposition and strict upbringing in Portugal, the work is riddled with rebellion. When painting she can do as she pleases; pictures are the places where she takes her risks. It was at “The Outsiders” exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1979 that Rego first encountered The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal of the Glandico-Angelinian Wars, as Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion. The 15,000-page chronicle was written and illustrated, in complete secret, by Henry Darger, a reclusive hospital janitor from Chicago. Following his death in 1973, Darger’s pictures of the Vivian Girls’ bloody and convoluted crusades against child slavery had been exhibited across the US and Europe, heralded as an extraordinary example of outsider art, or Art Brut. To Rego, the story of the seven saintly Vivian sisters – endowed with Shirley Temple looks, supernatural powers and, inexplicably, penises – had an immediate, visceral appeal. Rego’s discovery of Darger coincided with a significant shift in the direction of her work. She would not paint the series named after the Vivian Girls for another five years, but her reaction to his fanatical inventions revealed where her painterly instincts lay. “I loved the subject matter. I wanted to be as outrageous,” she remembers thinking. “I liked that Darger drew girls getting out of trouble helped by magic animals. Soldiers were attacking the girls, crucifying them and torturing them. I was shocked and horrified to see such brutality and I admired it.” In her mid-40s, Rego began to rediscover her sense of mischief. At the start of the new decade she left behind, for good, the fractured painted collages that had preoccupied her since the 1960s. She began to paint more freely, unplanned and directly from her mind, reigniting her love of drawing and releasing her from the stifling belief that she needed to “make art”, as she puts it. In the catalogue for her
solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988, she cited this period as one of two occasions where she felt the paintings being “most real, closest to my personal experience.” The first time was in 1959, after encountering the work of Jean Dubuffet, champion of Art Brut. His guileless disregard for cultural conventions, she said, “got me back in touch with being a kid again on the floor… and play – and play.” A cast of vividly coloured animal-like characters, inspired by a toy theatre that Rego’s husband Vic loved as a child, found their way into these freshly inventive works. But strange savagery accompanied the cartoonish creatures. There is nothing cute about the mauve bird in Cruzada (1983), for instance, who scratches out the eyes of an attacking lobster-clawed, scarlet dragon. And it is unclear whether the slathering yellow dog in Girl tickling Dog, from the same year, will maul or lavish licks upon the girl held captive under his enormous paw. Despite their surreal elements and narrative ambiguity, these pictures show keen emotion – humour, jealousy, lust, callousness, shame – and respond to observed relationships. Affording Rego the freedom to satirise aspects of her own life and develop her empathetic eye, the arrival of animals within her work would lead onto the series of pictures informally known as Girl and Dog of 1986, which In the Garden (1986), with its depiction of a girl cradling a dog, anticipates. Rego’s husband was very ill at the time, and the series’ invocation of the complex emotions brought about by caring for an invalid brought widespread acclaim to the artist for the first time in her career. The larger works of the mid-1980s, which Rego painted swiftly on all fours on the floor of her London studio, reveal more of the kind of imaginative world that rarely survives beyond childhood. These paintings are among the densest Rego has ever made. Each is a bright and graphic playground of ideas, with every character exuberantly participating in a nonsensical tableau-vivant. In 1984, Rego took the idea of the Vivian Girls and used it to tell her own stories, often subverting their saintly
By Lily Le Brun
characters by involving them in casual acts of cruelty. She used a bolder spectrum of colour that is akin to Darger’s (“the most marvellous colourist you can imagine”), and a took palpable pleasure in the young girl’s pranks and power play. Though the Vivian Girls series ended after a year, the formal characteristics of the paintings and, moreover, the impish spirit of their strong-willed heroines survive in the works immediately following them; The Gluttony of Fish (1985), for instance, both “is and isn’t” part of the series, according to Rego.
Sniffing out the sinister and surreal in each story, Rego pulled each nursery rhyme into adult territory. Aided by aquatint’s capacity to describe every graduation of tone, she conjured a shadowy dreamland populated by conniving children, amorous insects and giant farm animals. She costumed her characters in outfits familiar from traditional illustrations, only to make them play their parts in a mise-en-scène distorted by exaggerated scales and realistic ugliness. Polly and Sukey in Polly put the Kettle On wear starched white aprons over their dresses, but they are serving tea to six uniformed In an essay dating from this time, Rego wrote that her greatest soldiers who are half their height. One grips a soldier in her arms, wish was to work with stories which emerged as she painted. She added, manipulating his movements like a puppet, while the other swings “If the story is ‘given’ I take liberties with it to make it conform to my a huge kettle perilously close to the men’s own experiences, and to be outrageous. At the same heads. The etchings of Three Blind Mice also time as loving the stories I want to undermine them, “If the story is ‘given’ I bleed the rhyme of its violence, portraying like wanting to harm the person you love.” The ambiguity of Rego’s paintings – their wilful the farmer’s wife mocking the mutilated mice take liberties with it to disregard of linear narrative, their fantastical with their own freshly removed tails. In their make it conform to my subjects – leaves their stories open to interpretation. agile juxtaposition of innocence and danger, own experiences, and to Echoing her own unpremeditated approach to each figuration and fantasy, these etchings are a key picture, their cryptic meaning is an invitation to link between the cartoon imagery of the early be outrageous. At the share in the artist’s enjoyment of creating. 1980s and the figures drawn from life that have same time as loving the prevailed in her work ever since. The more familiar the story therefore, the more
stories I want to undermine
obvious Rego’s rebelliousness becomes. In 1989 she In 1985 Rego went on a pilgrimage to the made a suite of etchings based on popular nursery them, like wanting to harm single room apartment that Darger occupied rhymes. It was her first major series in this medium, for over forty years. She saw his strange and the person you love.” and it came as a welcome respite from the large solitary world; the hundreds of pictures of paintings. A two-year fellowship from the Gulbenkian young girls cut out from magazines and colouring books tacked to Foundation to study historic illustrations of fairy and folk tales at the the walls, the piles of journals and typed pages, pots of paint, rolls of British Museum, coupled with the recent birth of her first grandchild, unsettling watercolours. As she left the room, the door closed heavily meant that she knew the nursery rhymes intimately. Working with on her hand. She resolved then to never make another picture about ready-made stories was a relief, and it liberated the sense of play that the Vivian Girls again. It seems apt that superstition should bring to was becoming so crucial to her work. Paul Coldwell, the printer who a close the period of her career that strengthened the connections worked with her on the project, observed in the catalogue how the between her observations and her instincts. She needed the help of strength of her drawing skills lent itself to etching, where the artist the girls no longer. At a time when it was unfashionable to do so, she draws directly onto the plate. “The technique of etching can be learned became clear sighted about her desire to make pictures that would tell in a day,” he said. “It’s the invention of the drawing that matters.” stories. Like the fantasy realms she had dreamt up for her characters, Because their subject is well-known, the originality of the Nursery Rhymes portfolio owes much to Rego’s talent for invention. painting had become the place where she felt bold enough to run free.
List of paintings
1. The Creatures 1981 Acrylic on paper 151 x 197.5 cm
6. The Gluttony of Fish 1985 Acrylic on paper 240 x 190 cm
2. Marathon (Running II) 1983 Acrylic on paper 239 x 202 cm
7. The Umbrella Pine 1985 Acrylic on paper 240 x 190 cm
3. Cruzada (Crusade) 1983 Acrylic on paper 121 x 151 cm
8. On the Beach 1985 Acrylic on paper 179.2 x 242.5 cm
4. Nick’s Favourite 1983 Acrylic on paper 101 x 137 cm
9. In the Garden 1986 Acrylic on paper on canvas 150 x 150 cm
5. Girl tickling Dog 1983 Acrylic on paper 101 x 137 cm
1. The Creatures 1981 Acrylic on paper 151 x 197.5 cm
2. Marathon (Running II) 1983 Acrylic on paper 239 x 202 cm
3. Cruzada (Crusade) 1983 Acrylic on paper 121 x 151 cm
4. Nick’s Favourite 1983 Acrylic on paper 101 x 137 cm
5. Girl tickling Dog 1983 Acrylic on paper 101 x 137 cm
6. The Gluttony of Fish 1985 Acrylic on paper 240 x 190 cm
7. The Umbrella Pine 1985 Acrylic on paper 240 x 190 cm
8. On the Beach 1985 Acrylic on paper 179.2 x 242.5 cm
9. In the Garden 1986 Acrylic on paper on canvas 150 x 150 cm
Nursery Rhymes 1989 The Nursery Rhymes were published by the Artist and Marlborough Graphics in 1989. Of the 30 etchings and aquatints, 25 were included in the ‘Standard Portfolios’ and the remaining 5* were published separately. All prints were in editions of 50, signed and numbered. All prints proofed and editioned at Culford Press, London, on Velin Arches paper. Paper size: 52 x 38 cm Plate size: 32.5 x 21.5 cm or 22.5 x 21.5 cm
1.
Humpty Dumpty
16. Who Killed Cock Robin? II
2.
Jack and Jill
17. Little Miss Muffet I*
3.
Three Blind Mice I*
18. Little Miss Muffet II
4.
Three Blind Mice II
19. Little Miss Muffet III
5.
Sing a Song of Sixpence I
20. Ride a cock-horse
6.
Sing a Song of Sixpence II
21. Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
7.
Goosey-Goosey Gander
22. A Frog he would a-wooing go I
8.
Hickety, Pickety
23. A Frog he would a-wooing go II
9.
Polly put the Kettle On
24. Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary I
10. Old King Cole
25. Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary II*
11.
26. Old Mother Goose
How many Miles to Babylon?
12. Hey diddle, diddle
27. The Grand Old Duke of York
13. The Old Woman who lived in a Shoe
28. Ladybird, Ladybird*
14. There was a Man of Double Deed
29. Ring-a-ring o’ Roses
15. Who Killed Cock Robin? I*
30. Dance to your Daddy
1. Humpty Dumpty
3. Three Blind Mice I
4. Three Blind Mice II
2. Jack and Jill
5. Sing a Song of Sixpence I
6. Sing a Song of Sixpence II
7. Goosey-Goosey Gander
8. Hickety, Pickety
11. How many Miles to Babylon?
9. Polly put the Kettle On
10. Old King Cole
12. Hey diddle, diddle
13. The Old Woman who lived in a Shoe 14. There was a Man of Double Deed
15. Who Killed Cock Robin? I 16. Who Killed Cock Robin? II
17. Little Miss Muffet I 18. Little Miss Muffet II 19. Little Miss Muffet III
20. Ride a cock-horse 21. Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
22. A Frog he would a-wooing go I 23. A Frog he would a-wooing go II
24. Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary I 25. Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary II
26. Old Mother Goose 27. The Grand Old Duke of York
28. Ladybird, Ladybird 29. Ring-a-ring o’ Roses 30. Dance to your Daddy
Marlborough
LONDON Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44-(0)20-7629 5161 Telefax: +44-(0)20-7629 6338 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com info@marlboroughgraphics.com www.marlboroughfineart.com Marlborough Contemporary 6 Albemarle Street London, W1S 4BY Telephone: +44-(0)20-7629 5161 Telefax: +44-(0)20-7629 6338 info@marlboroughcontemporary.com www.marlboroughcontemporary.com MADRID GalerĂa Marlborough SA Orfila 5 28010 Madrid Telephone: +34-91-319 1414 Telefax: +34-91-308 4345 info@galeriamarlborough.com www.galeriamarlborough.com
NEW YORK Marlborough Gallery Inc. 40 West 57th Street New York, N.Y. 10019 Telephone: +1-212-541 4900 Telefax: +1-212-541 4948 mny@marlboroughgallery.com www.marlboroughgallery.com Marlborough Chelsea 545 West 25th Street New York, N.Y. 10001 Telephone: +1-212-463 8634 Telefax: +1-212-463 9658 chelsea@marlboroughgallery.com BARCELONA Marlborough Barcelona Enric Granados, 68 08008 Barcelona. Telephone: +34-93-467 4454 Telefax: +34-93-467 4451 infobarcelona@galeriamarlborough.com www.galeriamarlborough.com
Works photography: Prudence Cuming Associates FXP Photography Design: Shine Design, London Print: Impress Print Services Cat no.: 660 ISBN: 978-1-909707-33-7 Š 2016 Marlborough
5-9 OCTOBER 2016 STAND C8, FRIEZE MASTERS REGENTS PARK
Paula Rego PAINTINGS & ETCHINGS FROM THE 1980’S