The moment I step into Paula Rego’s studio I feel I am being watched. Not by
Paula herself. She’s too busy having her make-up done for the photo shoot
ahead. But while Paula’s eyes are being blackened and her face turned
a shiny Portuguese beige, the other inhabitants of her studio seize the
opportunity to inspect me. The pig in breeches is definitely sizing me up.
So is the orang-utan. And the rubber heron. And the tree covered with
penises. And the stuffed dog. And the little black girl with the beckoning
hand. But the one who makes me feel least comfortable is the bug-eyed
brunette with the skewer embedded in her skull, whose skirt is being lifted
for inspection by an old hag with a head made of knotted pillows.
I recognise both of them from the new picture standing on an easel in Paula’s
studio. Skewer-head and bondage-bonce are giving me the eye.
It isn’t often one is granted an audience with Britain’s finest female
painter. Rego did not become a legendary art-world figure by opening her
atelier to every Dick and Harry. As it happens, I have known her casually
for a long time. Way back in 1981, when I was a tyro art critic seeking to
make my name in the Big Smoke, I wandered into a tiny gallery in Clerkenwell
called the Air Gallery, and found myself in the middle of a force-eight gale
thinly disguised as Paula Rego’s first London show. Frankly, she might just
as well have stood by the door and happy-slapped everyone who came in.
On one wall, a red monkey was beating up a defenceless baby while a naked
female kneeling at his feet pleaded with him to stop. On another wall, a
woman with a huge pair of scissors seemed to be cutting off the monkey’s
balls as the wretched simian vomited pools of blood onto the floor. Over
here, someone had grabbed the monkey by its neck and was shaking it silly.
Over there, they had shrunk it to the size of a voodoo doll, and were now
strangling it. As I too walked out of there suffering from shaken-monkey
syndrome, a few things were obvious: that this Paula Rego, whoever she was,
was an artist of brilliance; that nobody should ever allow her near a pair
of garden shears if there were monkeys or men in the room; and that I had to
have one of those pictures.
A few weeks later, I was pressing her buzzer outside an industrial unit in
Clerkenwell. Paula turned out to be almost exactly as I had imagined:
black-eyed, olive-skinned, small, sexy, explosive. The only surprising thing
about her was her age. I knew she’d been born in Portugal, and was now
living in London, but, lazily, I had not bothered to check her birth date,
and had come expecting an Iberian Young Turk who was letting everything hang
out. Paula was one of those – but 25 years down the line. She was in her
late-forties when I met her, an experienced older woman, still beautiful,
still explosive but, by the usual temporal rules of the art world, a little,
er, advanced to be filling her first show with this much teenage snippiness.
She had – and has – the air of an angry Lolita trapped in Mrs Robinson’s
body.
The monkey pictures were scattered around the studio for my inspection, and in
the end I bought the one in which the woman with the huge pair of scissors
cuts off the monkey’s balls and then watches it vomit. It seemed somehow to
say it all. But, having owned this astonishingly fierce image for a quarter
of a century, I still have no final idea what “it” might be. All I know for
certain is that my painting encourages you to nip under the safety cordon
around Paula Rego’s psyche, and rush straight down into her cellar. But then
all her art does that, doesn’t it?
There’s a new book out called Paula Rego Behind the Scenes. It’s full of
pleasing text describing how she goes about her work. But the chief delights
of this extra-thick tome are the heaps of photos it contains of Rego’s
studio. Having long ago given up the industrial unit in Clerkenwell, she
finally gathered enough cash to buy her own place, and moved into an old
artists’ supply shop in north London, which she has successfully turned into
an outpost of the London Dungeon. Finding somewhere conducive to work is, of
course, critical for any artist. But Rego’s studio is more than a place to
paint. It is a lair, a hideaway, which the police might break into in their
search for a serial killer. Located down an obscure cobbled mews in Kentish
Town, it’s so tricky to find that if it wasn’t for the helpful chap who runs
the garage next door, the borough of Camden might now be littered with the
slumped skeletons of those who never made it.
Paula seems pleased when I tell her that I find the huge cast of knocked-up
personages with whom she shares her studio a tad eerie. “It’s great having
these creatures,” she giggles squeakily, in that posh and entirely
un-Portuguese accent of hers. “You have to make up their stories. You feel
for them. But they don’t feel for you. So you can treat them as you like.
And you can treat them badly. You can poke them.” Dolls, it seems, are
better models than humans because they don’t complain when you torture them.
Although some of the inhabitants of her lair were brought along by passing
visitors – the heron was made by her son-in-law, Ron Mueck, a sculptor
famous in his own right, who was originally a model-maker for The Muppet
Show – the most fiendish-looking ones are Paula’s handiwork. The old crone
lifting up the skirt of the skewer girl was cruelly created by tying up
pillows with bondage knots. The papier-mâché heads were made by her
grandchildren. And her favourite model, Lila Nunes, the one who looks
exactly like a young Paula Rego, and who plays Paula in most of Paula’s
pictures, has recently trained as a podiatrist, so she now has access to
medical stuff. She brought along the skeletons.
Since our first meeting, Rego has ascended the art ladder remorselessly and is
now enthroned at the top as the nation’s best-loved female artist. Tell
people – women – you are going to meet her and their faces light up with
happy envy. She’s a bona-fide feminine heroine, whose pictures get stuck up
on the bedroom walls of schoolgirls. Why, even Germaine Greer worships her
work. “It is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting,”
the great Australian eunuch-maker once admitted. “Still less to see their
private world, their dreams, the insides of their heads, projected on such a
scale and so immodestly.” Women adore Paula Rego. She talks their language.
But how exactly are men supposed to feel when they tiptoe into this noisy
nursery full of skewered rag dolls and accusatory pillow hags?
Although I cannot speak for all of my gender, I’m confident I speak for a
chunk of it when I confess to feeling as if I should cross my legs. Paula
and I might be casual friends of old, but from the moment I met her I sensed
in my waters that she was after me. When I say me, I don’t mean just me. I
mean every man who has ever allowed his eye to drift up the tight uniform of
a checkout girl, every bloke who has ever craned his neck in the office for
a better look at a passing derrière, or in any other way allowed a soupçon
of machismo to flavour the relationship between a man and a woman. Any
woman.
When Paula first moved into the studio, she made do with a few props here and
there, and managed most of the transformations she needed in her art with
some modest changes of costume. The very first group of pictures that she
produced here – the famous Dog Woman series, in which Lila rolls around on
the floor like a dog and snarls up at you as if you have come to burgle her
house – was strikingly sparse: all it consisted of was Lila and 100,000
years of pent-up feminine darkness. Only last month, an example from this
fantastic series popped up at Sotheby’s and made half a million pounds, the
new going rate for a good Rego.
But sparseness is not Paula’s natural condition. She’s a hoarder and gatherer
by instinct, and her studio soon filled up with props, oddments and
beasties. There are now several racks of costumes: wedding dresses she’s
been lent, things her mother left behind, stuff from junk shops, Portuguese
outfits she took a shine to. Fans of her art will recognise most of them
from the paintings they appeared in. As the studio filled up with props, so
the props began exerting an ever-greater influence on her art, until they
seemed, in the end, to take it over.
The cushion-faced crone and the skewer girl appear in a new series, Human
Cargo, in which Rego imagines the plight of women sold into slavery or
prostitution in a world “where the men make the rules and the women have to
obey”. It’s a typical Rego amalgam of fairy tale, Bible scene and nightmare,
where the home-made muppets take the lead roles while poor Lila gets the
human bit parts, tortured by dolls twice her size, or collapsed on a sofa
from the effort of dealing with these terror Barbies. Human Cargo isn’t just
about prostitution. It’s about every situation in which the wishes of the
girl are outweighed by those of the men.
“Family honour is very important, and if the girls disgrace the family honour,
they sometimes get done in. As you know,” she says. “There are all these
honour killings. Not just Muslim ones. There are Portuguese ones.”
Rego was born in Lisbon in 1935, the only child of an electronics engineer who
worked for Marconi and a fashionable mother who liked clothes just as much
as Paula does. It’s clear to me, and to her, that her studio is a modern
version of the playroom in which she spent so many lonely hours growing up
in fashionable Estoril, just up the coast from Lisbon. Left alone by her
parents, she spent her days in the den fussing with the dolls they bought
for her to make up for her missing siblings. Once, she picked up a favourite
baby doll and snipped off all its fingers one by one, as carefully as a mum
cutting her kid’s nails. It gave her a deliciously transgressive thrill.
Naughty Paula has been seeking to repeat this ever since. She still starts all
her drawings on the floor. And when she works she still makes the
instinctive “raahh” sounds she has always made.
While she was growing up, Portugal was ruled by the dictator Antonio Salazar.
Women were second-class citizens in his aggressively Catholic Portugal. To
travel abroad, they needed written permission from their husbands. Voting
restrictions for women were only lifted after an army coup in 1974 finally
deposed Salazar’s party.
When Paula was 17, her father dispatched her to England, because, as he put
it, “This is no country for a woman.” She enrolled as an art student at the
Slade, and quickly met a dashing but married artist called Victor Willing,
who became her lover. When Paula got pregnant, the terrified Willing fled
back to his wife in Guildford, and Paula returned to Portugal, heartbroken
and abandoned. A few months later, he showed up in Estoril asking for
forgiveness.
On the surface, at least, she gave it to him. They moved back to London in
1976 – by which time he had already been ill for a decade with
multiple sclerosis. The nasty neural affliction also turned him into human
cargo, utterly incapable of looking after himself. Lila Nunes appeared in
the household’s life around this time. Her first job was mixing
Victor’s paints.
Willing was a fabulous artist in his own right. These days his work, too, is
precious and in demand. But it is as Rego’s male muse, and a recurring
presence in her art, that he remains best known. It was pretty obvious, for
instance, that he was the red monkey being manhandled by the women in the
first series of Paula’s paintings I saw. Willing was still alive then, and I
remember encountering him at openings, being wheeled helplessly in and out
of the art. Rego has already admitted elsewhere that she was not cut out for
looking after invalids.
There are dark aspects of her relationship with Willing that are best left
private. I ask her how it felt to be under his thumb, and she replies
instantly that she loved being there. “I didn’t know where else to put
myself. Except under him. And that was a very pleasurable place to be. I
loved him. That is it.”
So when I first encountered her in 1981, she wasn’t actually starting out on a
new career, but returning to one she had put down a couple of decades
earlier to bring up three children and an afflicted husband. Every summer
she returns to the house in Estoril where the playroom was, but she hates
going there alone, so her family always comes too. Interestingly, she has
somehow managed to remain Portugal’s leading female artist, as well as
Britain’s, as famous there as any football star. If Paula Rego clicked her
fingers in Portugal, Jose Mourinho would come running. Why, only recently,
the president asked her to paint his official portrait, which she
reluctantly did. “It was so awful. I gave it to them. And when I came back,
I dressed up Lila as the president, and put a Portuguese flag in her back.
It was much better. Much more fun.”
To be the leading painter in one country is impressive enough. To manage it in
two countries simultaneously is unique. But to be the leading painter in two
countries while also making every bloke in every country feel as if they are
in the wall as Eusebio prepares to take a free kick is downright miraculous.
In a free-kick situation, as you know, the first instinct is to cover your
crown jewels.
Paula Rego Behind the Scenes (Phaidon Press, £39.95) is available at the
BooksFirst price of £35.95, including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165
8585
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM BROOMBERG AND OLIVER CHANARIN
