Paula Rego and Salette Tavares:
Mapping Feminine Creativity in the
70s
5 November 2022 to 21 May 2023
In 1969 and 1970 Paula Rego begins an illustration
process around her
memories of childhood and family, with their
underlying psychological
analyses of the relations of "domination" being
expressed in a number
of ways. They are the "everyday stories", as the
artist calls them, registered
in a series of drawings in Indian ink. They are set
in a defined area, Estoril,
which is narrowed down to the domestic space in
which the most formative
experiences of early life take place: birth, play
with other children, tantrums,
family visits and relationships, and in which the
dominance of the paternal
figure in patriarchal Portuguese society is, in a
number of works, brought
to the fore. These everyday instances are, however,
filtered by an oneiric
configuration which is frequently eroticised and
connects to psychoanalysis,
at times close to a surrealist aesthetic. Political
events are also brought under
Rego's critical and occasionally caricaturing gaze,
with drawings such
as The Candidate, Simulacrum and The Race to the
Polls, October 1969, depicting
the atmosphere which reigned during the National
Assembly elections
of October 1969, the first such elections to have
occurred during the period
known as the Marcelist Spring (Room 1).
Paula Rego (1935-2022) and Salette Tavares (1922-1994) met in
around 1964 and in addition to being friends in their private
lives, they were also close colleagues in the art world. Another
detail shared between them has come to be added to this
commemoration of their friendship and their artistic collaboration
in the present year of 2022, however, and it casts a shadow over
this little celebration: the centenary anniversary of the birth of
Salette Tavares coincides with the year of the death of Paula
Rego.
This exhibition commemorates their relationship and reveals the
distinct yet overlapping paths that they carved out in the
Portuguese context during the 1970s, and especially after the
Revolution of 25 April 1974. The focal figures of this exhibition
had very different lived experiences of the events that followed
the fall of the dictatorship in Portugal.
Following the Revolution of the 25th April 1974,
and the end of the
dictatorship in Portugal, Paula Rego's family
encountered serious financial
difficulties as a result of the bankruptcy of the
business inherited from
her father and which, since 1966, had been managed
by her husband,
Victor Willing, whose illness was getting
increasingly worse. Though the
period following the Revolution was a very
difficult one, her work would
continue to be shown in national and international
exhibitions, as a notable
example of the quality and originality of
contemporary Portuguese art.
Paula Rego lived through this period with a certain pessimism.
Not only did she face financial difficulties and a creative block
that had started to make itself felt at the beginning of the
decade, but also she quickly became disenchanted with the direction
that the country was taking, as it seemed to be heading towards
another type of dictatorship: there was even talk immediately after
the revolution of the promotion of an official form of art.
Salette Tavares, for her part, devoted herself to art criticism
in the 1970s and in 1974 she became the president of the Portuguese
section of the International Association of Art Critics (PS/AICA) -
a role that she held until 1977. She was very active in the years
following the revolution, and she was a fierce champion of the role
of art and culture, and also of interventions by the PS/AICA to
support both the move away from the conservative and colonialist
ideology of the New State dictatorship and the consolidation of the
process of democratisation.
In spite of the negative outlook that Paula Rego always
maintained on the decade of the 1970s, the artist received the
distinction of the Soquil Prize in 1971, which confirmed her
importance on the Portuguese artistic scene at that time. Beyond
this, her work achieved wide visibility in this period, through its
circulation in several exhibitions both in Portugal and abroad.
Curatorship: Catarina Alfaro and Leonor de Oliveira