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Women, Other Animals, and the Genetic Imagination of the Fairy Tale: Paula Rego’s Hans Christian Andersen Pastels

2019; Oxford University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/isz066

1759-1090

Daniela Kato,

Science Education and Perceptions

Specifically in the case of artistic production, there is reason to conclude that work that does not contest, destabilize, subvert, or otherwise “ruin” dominant regimes of representation can only represent the way things are and therefore forecloses even the imaginative or utopian possibility that things might be otherwise. –Abigail Solomon-Godeau (8) I always want to turn things on their heads, to upset the established order, to change heroines and idiots. If the story is “given,” I take liberties with it, to make it conform to my own experiences, and to be outrageous. –Paula Rego (qtd. in McEwen 138) Let us no longer be regarded as the preservers of the species. We give children to no one, neither to man nor to the state. We give them to themselves and give ourselves back to ourselves. –Carla Lonzi (52; my translation) There is no more fitting primer for the imagination of the Portuguese-born, London-based painter Paula Rego (Lisbon 1935) than the first shots of Secrets & Stories, the documentary that her filmmaker son Nick Willing made about her life and work in 2016. The shots consist of theatrical images of Rego’s studio, populated by life-size rag dolls and disembodied papier-mâché heads reminiscent of the gigantones and cabeçudos that parade up the streets during carnivalesque festivals in Portugal, and whose origins hark back to the giants and forest gnomes of medieval German mythology. As the ominous opening of Verdi’s opera La forza del destino echoes across the studio, the camera pans to the huge pastel paintings on the walls, some of which recreate scenes from classic European fairy tales and hair-raising Portuguese folk tales Rego heard as a child, such as The Goat-Footed Lady/A Dama Pé-de-Cabra. In one of the paintings at a corner, a female bullfighter clad in red appears to gesture toward an audience outside the frame: half a dozen naked dolls with saggy breasts, flanked by a pony, an ox, and a cow’s head on a wooden pole. The camera pans to yet another set of discombobulated stuffed animals sitting on armchairs and plastic containers, and then to drawing boxes of pastel sticks near which lie two books: Who’s Who on the Bible and Iconography of Christian Art. In voice-over, the cultural critic Marina Warner expounds: “A Paula Rego painting goes to places of psychic and emotional experience that have really been off-limits. The permission she gave to enter those areas, it was a flinging open of the barricades” (Paula Rego: Secrets & Stories).