Art’s great storyteller has died at the age of 87. Our critic celebrates a woman of courage and freakish imagination
he wickedness of Paula Rego’s imagination shines like patent leather in her 1987 painting The Policeman’s Daughter. A young woman is polishing, as the title tells us, her father’s jackboot. He is nowhere to be seen, but the spectre of a man we take to be an authoritarian bully haunts the fetish object that is his boot.
Rego is a magic realist to the letter, mixing fact and fantasy, a connoisseur of fairytales. The cat in The Policeman’s Daughter seems to know something we don’t. In other paintings and prints Rego gives forceful life to classic stories, often with very harsh twists: in her 1995 painting Snow White and her Stepmother, a gawky, inelegant adolescent has her knickers forcefully pulled down by her stiletto-wearing custodian to check if she is a virgin who can be married to a prince.
I don’t think such a brave and searching artist can be summed up, as she was by some fans in her last years, including the curators of her 2021 Tate retrospective, as a political warrior pure and simple. That would make her a much narrower artist than she is. And before she is anything else, she is a painter who mixed the British eye for sharp reality with a sense of fantasy and theatre that reflects her Catholic heritage.