Paula Rego: From Mind to Hand. Drawings from 1980 to 2001 by Marlborough Fine Art

Paula Rego: From Mind to Hand Drawings from 1980 to 2001

Marlborough 12 September – 27 October 2018 Marlborough Fine Art 6 Albemarle Street · London W1S 4BY + 44 (0) 207 629 5161 mfa@marlboroughfineart.com www.marlboroughlondon.com

Paula Rego: From Mind to Hand Drawings from 1980 to 2001

Marlborough

The Change, 1990 Watercolour on paper 29.5 x 23.2 cm Signed lower right

From Mind to Hand Frances Carey

It is a rare privilege to get close to an artist’s wellspring of creativity, which is what this exhibition of Paula Rego’s drawings over a twenty-year period allows – a succession of windows onto the spine of her artistic integrity as represented by the commitment to drawing across her career – drawing that has taken the form of etching and lithography, working with pastel and even acrylic on paper, as well as the more conventional media of graphite, charcoal, pen and ink. ‘The drawings that you do as a child are the drawings that come from you. And then as you grow up, the drawings grow up too. But that’s not ‘Art’, so to speak, it’s the drawings that come from you.’1 ‘Art’ in Rego’s usage is generally pejorative, referring to prevailing orthodoxies and the systems they impose of whatever is in vogue at the moment, whether pedagogically or critically, academic or avant-garde. At the Slade School of Art (1952– 56), she took the compulsory courses in anatomy and life drawing of the nude model; the discipline stood her in good stead and she has denied finding it restrictive, but her early efforts in drawing from life using her grandmother, cousin and the maids in her family’s household in Estoril as the subjects, had been instinctively about character and narrative, not about pure form and correct proportion. The drive to produce ‘grownup art’2 ran counter to her natural inclinations: ‘I actually took refuge in the print room [at the Slade] … in the print room you did not have to do art … you could do drawings and then reproduce them and stories.’3 She experienced a real tension between what was in her mind’s eye and what she felt she was ‘permitted’ to translate into outward form, which she found most oppressive in the realm of painting. After the Slade, life drawing receded. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Rego became

consciously interested in fairy tales and folklore, especially Portuguese, absorbing the work of the graphic satirists and illustrators of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries: Gillray, Doré, Tenniel and Rackham, along with Hogarth and Goya in whom she was already steeped. Collage became her method of producing larger compositions until the end of the seventies when her friend João Penalva said, ‘“They look lovely drawings, why do you cut them up?” I stopped cutting them and that led me on to something totally new. It was a relief not to have to do art.’4 The drawings that she now left whole, were made on the floor, working in acrylic on paper: not life drawings but surfaces teeming with a horror vacui of hybrid creatures and anthropomorphised animal caricatures. She drew upon the influences of Art Brut or Outsider Art, notably the work of Dubuffet which she saw at the ICA in London in 1959, then that of Henry Darger whose 1979 exhibition at the Whitechapel had a big impact on her. The Opera series of 1982–3 was one of the culminating works of this phase, inspired by what she remembered hearing with her father: Aida, Carmen, Faust, La Bohème, La Traviata, Rigoletto and The Girl of the Golden West. With their related studies the ‘operas’ were ‘more like doodling, and though they are drawn quite precisely, they are done so automatically that everything comes out just like a seismograph. There is no censoring of any kind.’5 The next shift in register and in composition came in the second half of the 1980s with Rego’s return to figurative drawing. Studies for paintings such as The Maids (1987, cats.21–22) based on Jean Genet’s play of 1947, the Girl and Dog series (1986–7, cats. 12, 14–15), The Policeman’s Daughter (1987, cat.18) and The Soldier’s Daughter (1987, cats.23–26) and Departure (1988, cat.28)

not only assert the primacy of the human figure, they have volume and they are grounded; ink and wash as well as charcoal and graphite came into play: ‘The drawings are from mind to hand and the pictures [i.e. the paintings] just make them more concrete … I used to do things that were flying all over the page, because I wanted it to look like a page from a book … But to make the figures three-dimensional I had to ground them and that meant light and shade.’6 Exhibitions at the Edward Totah Gallery in 1987 and the Serpentine in 1988 brought her to wider public attention and set the seal on a career from which she has never looked back. Among the increasingly magisterial drawings of this period are the graphite studies shown here for The Maids (cat.22), The Soldier’s Daughter (cats.23 and 24), and Bullfighter’s Daughter, all from 1986–89, followed by those that came during and after her time as the first Associate Artist at the National Gallery (1989–90), which immersed her in the western tradition of narrative as well as figurative art. So many of the single figure studies shown here have the gravitas of Old Masters, with apologies for such an inappropriately gendered term in this context. Even the harrowing Abortion series (1998) is redolent of the martyrdom of female saints. Storytelling is paramount of course, to all Rego’s work, but the style has varied according to whether she wants to signal an entirely fantastical subject such as Peter Pan (1992, cat.31), The Dinner Party (c.1992, cats. 39–41) showing Princess Diana with her sons William and Harry, or The Artist in her Studio (1993, cats.37 and 38), or whether she is trying to achieve a human drama of greater psychological depth. The resurgence in observational drawing from the late 1980s, has come to dominate her

practice today, to the extent that for several years she has claimed that she is entirely dependent on having a model; her most constant living muse is Lila Nunes, supplemented by what Rego calls ‘dollies’, the lay figures that have long been part of an artist’s studio apparatus: ‘I mostly work from life now, from live models or “dollies” I make or are made for me. I draw the outline in charcoal. I usually start with the face and work my way across. Using dolls is a different experience to a live model. They are obedient – I can place them how I want and they stay still, they’re like actors on a stage. But they don’t bring life – I need a person in there, too, because the intensity is important. If you draw a person, they give a lot back to you. Sometimes they’re giving you so much – flooding you with their personality, their soul – that you can hardly hold it back. You learn so much drawing from life. You have to look so carefully. It’s very difficult to actually see what’s there. The more you do it, the better you get at looking, and that’s a discipline that’s important however you want to work. I find trees are the most difficult things to get right. And tulips. And all vegetables except tomatoes.’7 These remarks, including the intriguing thought that tomatoes are easier to come to grips with than other vegetables, bring to mind Marina Warner’s verdict on Rego’s cognitive capacity: ‘… for what she achieves is precisely that solidity, that density of presence, that stable durability that usually elude the mind’s eye of the reader.’8 But the description of the creative experience that resonates most for me with what I have seen, heard and read of Paula Rego’s work, is that of another great artist and figurative draughtsman, Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945), who also worked from the live model as well as constructing her own narratives. In 1927 she responded to

a request from a Dr Paul Plaut to ‘express the inner process of my artistic work’ in preparation for his book Die Psychologie der produktiven Persönlichkeit (The Psychology of the Productive Personality, Stuttgart 1929): ‘There are sharply different good and bad times in the work. In the bad times, nothing comes to mind, and even the more specialized, skilled tasks are then lacking. This lack of work can be felt even outside of work in overall actions. In better times, during which the work flows better from the hand, it goes here and there – not to anticipate when – the climax. Then one realizes: something will come. It begins with a state that is light as well as pleasantly enthusiastic and eager. One then thinks intensively about a thing, and this leads to something taking shape. The thing is either something which has lain as an undeveloped sheet, pushed back till such time as when one begins to develop a feeling for it. Or the thing begins in a more indeterminate manner, something only with a gesture that one sees internally – or something more defined, which expresses itself in a feeling … In drawing, there comes by and by the phase where the real “thing” displaces and replaces that which was internally “seen”. That no longer holds interest. Different versions have been tried out and the technical questions have been passed on.’9

NOTES

1. The White Review, January 2011: http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interviewwith-paula-rego/ 2. Quoted in John McEwen, Paula Rego, London 1992, p.52 3. ‘My Last Year at the Slade’ no.45 of Web of Stories, a series of video clips of Paula Rego: https://www.webofstories.com/playAll/paula.rego 4. Paula Rego, ‘What I was and what I am still’, Conversations with Marco Livingstone, November 2006 to March 2007 in Marco Livingstone, Paula Rego, exhibition catalogue (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paolo, Brazil 2010), 2010, pp.192–93 5. McEwen op.cit. p.123 6. Ibid. p.156 7. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/ feb/20/paula-rego-painting-all-too-human-tatebritain-germaine-greer 8. Marina Warner, An artist’s dream world. Paula Rego, 1 December 2003: https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/ an-artists-dream-world-paula-rego 9. The original letter is in the archive of the Wiener Library, London, which has also provided the translation as part of a display on London 1938: Defending ‘Degenerate’ German Art, 13 June – 14 September 2018: https://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/ London-1938

Frances Carey is an independent curator and consultant, formerly Deputy Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum

List of Works

[ 1 ] Study for ‘Opera’ series II , 1982

[ 11 ] Mother Christmas, c.1980

Ink and watercolour on paper 21 x 14.5 cm Signed lower centre

Watercolour and pencil on paper 29.7 x 41.9 cm Signed lower right

[ 2 ] Study for ‘Opera’ series VI , 1982

[ 12 ] Study for Untitled (‘Girl and Dog’ series), 1986

Ink and watercolour on paper 21 x 14.5 cm Signed lower centre

Pencil on paper 24 x 32.5 cm

[ 3 ] Study for ‘Opera’ series’ IX , 1983 Pencil and wash on paper 21 x 15 cm Signed lower right

[ 4 ] Study for ‘Opera’ series’ X, 1982 Ink and watercolour on paper 18 x 14.5 cm Signed lower right

[ 5 ] Happy Christmas with Love, Paula, c.1980 Ink, pencil and wash on paper 28.5 x 25.5 cm Titled and signed upper centre

[ 6 ] Two Girls Sawing, c.1984–5 Ink and wash on paper 42.6 x 54.7 cm

[ 7 ] The Visitors, 1983 Ink on paper 42 x 28 cm Initialled lower right

[ 8 ] Untitled (Girl with Giraffe), 1985 Indian ink on paper 40.3 x 54.9 cm Inscribed lower centre: Para mi querido Alberto con grandeadmiracion e profunda amizade de sempre

[ 9 ] Mephistopheles, 1983–4 Ink on paper 38.5 x 56.4 cm Signed lower right

[ 10 ] Macaco (Monkey), 1985 Ink on paper 35.7 x 25.4 cm Signed lower right, titled upper cenre

[ 13 ] Study for ‘Prey’, 1986 Pencil and wash on paper 29.6 x 37.3 cm

[ 14 ] Untitled (‘Girl and Dog’ series), 1986 Ink and wash on paper 25.5 x 25 cm Signed lower right

[ 15 ] Study for ‘Girl and Dog’ series, 1986 Ink on paper 21 x 26.5 cm Signed lower right

[ 16 ] Study for ‘Snare’, 1987 Charcoal on paper 28.7 x 32 cm

[ 17 ] Three Girls, 1987 Ink and watercolour on paper 25 x 35.5 cm Signed lower right

[ 18 ] Study for ‘The Policeman’s Daughter’, 1987 Ink and wash on paper 42 x 29.7 cm

[ 19 ] Life study for ‘The Cadet and His Sister’, 1987 Pencil on paper 42 x 29.5 cm

[ 20 ] Study for ‘The Cadet and his Sister’, 1987 Ink and wash on paper 38 x 29 cm

[ 21 ] Study for ‘The Maids’, 1986 Pen and wash on paper 29.6 x 42 cm

[ 22 ] Study for ‘The Maids’ (Girl looking down), 1986 Pencil on paper 42 x 29.6 cm

[ 23 ] Study for ‘The Soldier’s Daughter’, 1987 Pencil on paper 40 x 28.5 cm

[ 24 ] Study for ‘The Soldier’s Daughter’, 1987 Pencil on paper 32.5 x 23.8 cm

[ 25 ] Study for ‘The Soldier’s Daughter’, 1987 Ink and wash on paper 29 x 39 cm

[ 33 ] The Dinner Party I, c.1992 Pen and watercolour on paper 29.6 x 41.8 cm

[ 34 ] The Dinner Party II, c.1992 Pen and watercolour on paper 29.6 x 41.8 cm

[ 35 ] The Dinner Party III, c.1992 Pen and watercolour on paper 29.6 x 41.8 cm

[ 36 ] Study for ‘Caritas’ I, 1993 Pen and watercolour on paper 23.5 x 32 cm

[ 37 ] Study for ‘Caritas’ II, 1993

[ 26 ] Study for ‘The Soldier’s Daughter’ II, 1987

Pen and watercolour on paper 25.7 x 27 cm

Charcoal on paper 52.5 x 38 cm

[ 38 ] Study for ‘Caritas’ III, 1993

[ 27 ] Study for ‘The Mother-in-Law’, 1987

Pen and watercolour on paper 29 x 40.2 cm

Ink and wash on paper 29.5 x 42 cm

[ 39 ] Study for ‘Caritas’ IV, 1993

[ 28 ] Study for ‘Departure’, 1988

Pen and watercolour on paper 29.6 x 42 cm

Pen and wash on paper 42 x 29.6 cm

[ 40 ] Study for ‘The Artist in her Studio’ I, 1993

[ 29 ] Study for ‘Bullfighter’s Daughter’, 1989 Pencil on paper 29.6 x 42 cm Initialled lower right

[ 30 ] The Lesson, 1989 Ink and wash on paper 29.5 x 42.1 cm Signed lower right

[ 31 ] Study for ‘Peter Pan and Other Stories’, 1992 Ink and watercolour on paper 29.2 x 29.4cm Signed lower right

[ 32 ] Woman and Bird, 1992 Ink and watercolour on paper

Pen and watercolour on paper 29.6 x 41.8 cm

[ 41 ] Study for ‘The Artist in her Studio’ II, 1993 Pen and watercolour on paper 29.6 x 41.8 cm

[ 42 ] Study for ‘On the Hill, Children’s Crusade’, 1996–98, Pencil on paper 38 x 21 cm

[ 43 ] The Butler, 1994 Pencil ink and watercolour on paper 29.4 x 32.6 cm Signed lower right

[ 44 ] Study for ‘Target’, 1994 Pencil on paper 42 x 29.6 cm

[ 45 ] Study for ‘Dog Woman’ – Wary, 1994 Pencil on paper 29 x 40.5 cm Signed and dated lower right

[ 56 ] Untitled (Study for ‘The Abortion’ series V), 1998 Pencil on paper 46 x 39 cm

[ 46 ] Study for ‘Sleeper’, 1994

[ 57 ] Study for ‘Convulsion’ II , 2000

Pencil on paper 29.6 x 42 cm

Pastel on paper 75 x 56 cm

[ 47 ] Study for Girdle (Mary of Egypt), 1994

[ 58 ] The Recruit, 2000

Pencil on paper 60 x 52.5 cm

Pastel on paper 103 x 77 cm

[ 48 ] Study for ‘Dog Woman’, 1993

[ 59 ] Comfort, 2001

Pencil on paper 45 x 52 cm

[ 49 ] Study for ‘Love’, 1995

Pencil on paper 40 x 29 cm Titled and signed

Pencil on paper 29.5 x 42 cm Inscribed lower centre: Para mi querido Alberto con amor (study for love), Paula / Londres 1 Marco 1995

[ 60 ] Embarrassment, 2001

[ 50 ] Study for ‘The Cell’, 1997

[ 61 ] Repugnance, 2001

Graphite on paper 40 x 58 cm

[ 51 ] Study for ‘The Ambassador of Jesus’, 1997 Pencil on paper and tracing paper 50.5 x 42 cm

[ 52 ] Untitled (Study for ‘The Abortion’ series I), 1998 Pencil on paper 41.5 x 29.5 cm

Pencil on paper 42 x 29.7 cm Titled, signed and dated

[ 62 ] Scorn, 2001 Pencil on paper 42 x 29.7 cm Titled, signed and dated

[ 63 ] Disgust, 2001

[ 53 ] Untitled (Study for ‘The Abortion’ series ), 1998

Pencil on paper 42 x 29.7 cm Titled, signed and dated

Pencil on paper 31 x 42 cm

[ 64 ] Girl Playing Guitar, 1996

[ 54 ] Untitled (Study for ‘The Abortion’ series), 1998 Pencil on paper 31 x 42 cm

[ 55 ] Untitled (Abortion series), 1998 Pencil on paper 31 x 42 cm

Pencil on paper 37.5 x 28.5 cm Signed lower right

[ 65 ] St Dympna, 2001 Pencil on paper 42 x 29.7 cm Titled, signed and dated

[ 1 ] Study for ‘Opera’ series II, 1982

[ 2 ] Study for ‘Opera’ series VI, 1982

Ink and watercolour on paper 21 x 14.5 cm Signed lower centre

[ 3 ] Study for ‘Opera’ series IX, 1983

[ 4 ] Study for ‘Opera’ series X, 1982

Pencil and wash on paper 21 x 15 cm Signed lower right

Ink and watercolour on paper 18 x 14.5 cm Signed lower right

[ 5 ]â&#x20AC;&#x201A;Happy Christmas with Love, Paula, c.1980 Ink, pencil and wash on paper 28.5 x 25.5 cm Titled and signed upper centre

[ 6 ] Two Girls Sawing, c.1984–5 Ink and wash on paper 42.6 x 54.7 cm

[ 7 ]â&#x20AC;&#x201A;The Visitors, 1983 Ink on paper 42 x 28 cm Initialled lower right

[ 8 ]â&#x20AC;&#x201A;Untitled (Girl with Giraffe), 1985 Indian ink on paper 40.3 x 54.9 cm Inscribed lower centre: Para mi querido Alberto con grandeadmiracion e profunda amizade de sempre

[ 9 ] Mephistopheles, 1983–4 Ink on paper 38.5 x 56.4 cm Signed lower right

[ 10 ]â&#x20AC;&#x201A;Macaco (Monkey), 1985 Ink on paper 35.7 x 25.4 cm Signed lower right, titled upper centre

[ 11 ] Mother Christmas, c.1980 Watercolour and pencil on paper 29.7 x 41.9 cm Signed lower right

[ 12 ] Study for Untitled (‘Girl and Dog’ series), 1986 Pencil on paper 24 x 32.5 cm