Culture

The exposition is as much a biographical narrative of Paula Rego’s life as a retrospective of her life-long work, for the former is inextricably bound up with the latter. In the background of her prodigious output is a personal life often filled with responsibilities and even outright burdens (such as caring for a husband with multiple sclerosis). But there is also the non-personal but undeniable dimension of life under a brutal dictatorship for the first four decades of a life that spanned 87 years and the fight for women’s rights of the later decades.

Born in Lisbon in 1937, Paula Rego, eventually moved to London, where she carried on her work until her final days and became recognized for outstanding achievement in several areas of artistic expression with several recurring thematic focuses.

The enfilade of nine major rooms in the Basel Kunstmuseum’s Newbau are organized with a view to both the unfolding of her life and the development of her art. The show is titled Machspiele – Power Games. This was inspired by a remark, “My favorite themes are power-games and hierarchies.” The tension inherent in each is apparent throughout an impressive number of her pictorial representations.

The exposition starts with Self-Portraits, giving a sweeping early-life-to-old-age overview where the dynamism of her youthful years contrasts ultimately with the fragility of her closing decades. The portraits often are composites of the artist and elements from her life or from her surroundings. Even those where she is the lone subject are anything but in line with classical portraiture, and in none of them does she paint herself as the “glamour girl” that many women artists might have been tempted to depict themselves as.

Family follows, and here we see intimations of the responsibilities that she shouldered as well as elements from children’s fairy tales. Love from 1995, done when she was almost sixty, shows a woman (herself?) lying on her back and leaning on her right side toward the viewer, sprawled on a red-cloth-covered surface. Her hands are crossed over her breast, and she is gazing into the distance as if in a trance. She is wearing a dress with small bright-colored printed designs on a navy blue background that contrasts vividly with her white legs and bare feet. The suggestiveness of the pose operates on several levels and is typical of the non-forthright (one might say poetical) aspect of many of her other human representations.

Staatsgewalt (State Power) covers primarily the years under the Salazar dictatorship, but “Madame Lupescu Has Her Fortune Told”, from 2004, has in the background both a Portuguese flag and a young scout wearing a beret, with his right hand raised in a Nazi salute. “Interrogation” depicts a barefoot person on a simple chair, bent over forward behind whom are can been seen the bodies – from the waist down – of two white uniformed men, one with an electric drill in his hand, the other holding a hypodermic needle.

“The Interrogator’s Garden” shows a burly man on a simple armchair, wearing shorts, the skin of his exposed legs, pale in spite of sporting considerable dark hair, emphasizing his heavy black jack-boots. His legs are wide apart, his hands, in bright (blood?) red gloves dangling between them, a long black bludgeon across his lap, his torso, covered by a camouflage military jacket, traversed diagonally by a wide leather strap. On his head is a peaked black cap with a high front bearing no insignia (typical of torturers requiring anonymity), on his face an expression of brutal smugness.

Next to him is a white lamb with a black face all of whose legs are attached to a rope. He is obviously in some sort of shelter, with a black wall covering three quarters of the background on which is painted a long green stalk ending in a big white flower. At his feet is a tiny flower pot with obviously dried out soil supporting a small plant, obviously dead. In the other quarter of the background where the black wall ends, one sees an outside setting where a woman is dressing or undressing, apparently before or after a “session” with him.

The brutal, casual complacency of “The Interrogator” is such as to send a chill down one’s spine – just one of many examples of the force of Paula Rego’s imagery.

Geschlecterkraft (Sex Power) contains remarkably subtle images of men VERSVS women and women with dogs, suggesting various forms of the feminine taming what is intended to represent the male. Perhaps the most striking is the painting on the cover of the catalog, The Cadet and His Sister, from 1988. The cadet, in uniform and white gloves, is seated on a stone bench at the foot of which, in the foreground, is a cock. His sister is crouched on her knees in front of him, his feet on her knees as she ties his boots. She is wearing a bright red skirt with a matching long jacket and a beret. Under the jacket is a white shirtwaist covering her entire neck and bearing a broach. Beside her is her handbag and a pair of dark leather gloves.

His face, turned upward and away from her, is visible only from the back quarter of his head; hers, eyes cast down, is fully visible. Behind her is an opening in a high wall, the entrance to a long avenue bordered by meticulously trimmed trees. The look on her face is mixture of careful attention and outright contempt. Again, the subtlety of male-female relations as depicted by Paula Rego.

Heldinnen (Heroines) takes us back to Portugal, drawing on classical and medieval mythology, Portuguese history and fairy tales with the woman very much highlighted. The whimsical here is mixed with touches of the ghoulish.

Roll-Playing takes us further into fantasy land. A double panel well over three meters wide presents 28 ballerinas in gray titled, “Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia”. While not fat, they are decidedly stocky, with legs that are far more brawny than what one sees even on most male dancers. Their feet are BIG. Again, no “glamour girl” allure any more than in the artist’s self-portraits, but, as in the latter, there is an assertive femininity that bespeaks dynamism if not outright power.

Unbewußt (Unconscious) moves back into the realm of the fantasy and fairy tales, tinged with the supernatural and the spiritual. In the midst of a creative crisis, Paula Rego started to undergo psychoanalysis after Carl Jung, which turned into an exploration of her own unconscious that she was to pursue for decades. This compelled her to examine the “shadow” – the unknown aspects of her own mental life – and led her to the dark side of human life and, from the 1970s, to Portuguese folklore and traditions.

In a pastel image, “Metamorphosing after Kafka” from 2002, she depicted a naked man on his bed, legs raised and arms outstretched and curved inward, absolutely helpless as he becomes a cockroach. Little Miss Muffet is shown accosted by a giant spider “who sat down beside her” with a body suggestive of a roach and the full face of a mask from classical Greek drama.

Auflehnung (Defiance) derives mainly from the last three decades of her life leading up to her death in 2022 with abortion as a constant theme, mostly depicted in drawings. The women are anguished, often sprawling in obviously uncomfortable if not outright painful positions. But most distressing is “War” from 2003, inspired by the United States assault on and destruction of Iraq and the death of so many Iraqi children.

About it, she wrote: “I thought I would do a picture about these children getting hurt, but I turned them into rabbits’ heads, like masks. It’s very difficult to do it with humans, it doesn’t get the same kind of feel all, and it seemed more real to transform them into creatures.”

Finally, there is Kampgeist (Fighting Spirit), a series of seven 150 by100 cm pastels on aluminium titled, “Possession”: a woman in a burgundy-colored dress and black stockings on an orange leather couch with no back or side, obviously intended to be used as a sofa bed. She is on her back in various positions, but in the next to last, her legs are over the side, apart, in a position similar to those of the women undergoing abortions in the drawings. In the last painting, she is sitting, braced by the long sofa cushion behind her, her legs drawn up toward her, knees together, with a triumphant look on her face.

On the way out, one passes “Angel”, a single full-length portrait (also pastel on aluminium) from 1998 a woman in a nineteenth-century hoop dress with a sword in her right hand and a very determined look on her face.

The exhibit runs through 2 February. The catalog, with sumptuous reproductions, runs some 230 pages with texts in German.

Robert James Pasons
25.10.2024