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拍品專文
A woman in a brightly patterned dress sits in three-quarter profile against a backdrop of deep maroon in Paula Rego’s 1957 portrait. Evocative and enigmatic, the work was painted when she was just 22 years old, and is one of only a few early works by the artist to have recently come to market. Held in the same private collection for 65 years, it gives the viewer an insight into the foundational years of Rego’s practice and is an accomplished early example of her distinct figurative style, marking the beginning of the artistic language which would define her career.
The work was painted during a particularly tumultuous year in the young artist’s career. A recent graduate from the Slade School of Art, Rego was romantically involved with fellow artist Victor Willing, whom she had met during her studies. Pregnant with the married artist’s child, Rego had left Willing in the United Kingdom and returned to her native Portugal, where he came to join her. The reverse of the work reveals another female figure: a drawing by Willing of a standing nude half in shadow, evocative of some of his early portraits of Rego. Created in the studio they shared in Ericeira at the time, this remarkable double canvas is a rare insight into their world as artistic comrades and lovers; the couple married two years later.
Throughout her long career, Rego used allegory and myth to depict an uncensored version of the female experience. Working from her imagination, the human form, and props and puppets, Rego’s later practice would come to demonstrate her refusal to shy away from the truth of the sometimes gruesome world in which she lived, a world ravaged by inequality, dictatorship, and loss of life. Never one to idealise, Rego depicted victims and perpetrators alike, balancing love and aggression, reality and fantasy. Here, her solemn portrait is a poignantly psychological depiction of a woman in flux, caught between convention and desire. The work speaks vividly to the meeting of cultures that defined Rego's early years in London: while her subject's vibrant attire stands in contrast to the conservative fashions of the Salazar regime in Portugal at the time, her demure body language and posture seem to cleave to the social constraints to which women were beholden in Portuguese society during this period. As Marina Warner observed in the catalogue for the artist’s largest and most comprehensive retrospective at Tate Britain in 2021, ‘her vision of the person before her is not portraiture, nor does she paint nudes in the fine art tradition. She breaks with both lineages: her focus on the figure takes her into symbolising inner states, which her models interpret in symbiosis with her promptings’ (M. Warner, quoted in Paula Rego, exh. cat. Tate Britain, London 2021, p. 36). This approach is vividly captured in Rego’s current exhibition at Victoria Miro in Venice, Secrets of Faith, which features a series of works depicting episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary.
The work was painted during a particularly tumultuous year in the young artist’s career. A recent graduate from the Slade School of Art, Rego was romantically involved with fellow artist Victor Willing, whom she had met during her studies. Pregnant with the married artist’s child, Rego had left Willing in the United Kingdom and returned to her native Portugal, where he came to join her. The reverse of the work reveals another female figure: a drawing by Willing of a standing nude half in shadow, evocative of some of his early portraits of Rego. Created in the studio they shared in Ericeira at the time, this remarkable double canvas is a rare insight into their world as artistic comrades and lovers; the couple married two years later.
Throughout her long career, Rego used allegory and myth to depict an uncensored version of the female experience. Working from her imagination, the human form, and props and puppets, Rego’s later practice would come to demonstrate her refusal to shy away from the truth of the sometimes gruesome world in which she lived, a world ravaged by inequality, dictatorship, and loss of life. Never one to idealise, Rego depicted victims and perpetrators alike, balancing love and aggression, reality and fantasy. Here, her solemn portrait is a poignantly psychological depiction of a woman in flux, caught between convention and desire. The work speaks vividly to the meeting of cultures that defined Rego's early years in London: while her subject's vibrant attire stands in contrast to the conservative fashions of the Salazar regime in Portugal at the time, her demure body language and posture seem to cleave to the social constraints to which women were beholden in Portuguese society during this period. As Marina Warner observed in the catalogue for the artist’s largest and most comprehensive retrospective at Tate Britain in 2021, ‘her vision of the person before her is not portraiture, nor does she paint nudes in the fine art tradition. She breaks with both lineages: her focus on the figure takes her into symbolising inner states, which her models interpret in symbiosis with her promptings’ (M. Warner, quoted in Paula Rego, exh. cat. Tate Britain, London 2021, p. 36). This approach is vividly captured in Rego’s current exhibition at Victoria Miro in Venice, Secrets of Faith, which features a series of works depicting episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary.