Secrets of the Cow-Skull Scarecrow: Did cruel man’s tales inspire Paola Rego’s best paintings? | platform

IIn the summer of 2004, Paula Rego wrote to Martin McDonagh asking permission to name some pictures after his play The Pillowman. His shocking investigation into the relationship between art and life revealed two brothers under interrogation for the torture and murder of children. One is a writer whose stories the detective summarized as follows: “One hundred and one ways to mutilate a five-year-old.”

Rego, then a 69-year-old grandmother and an internationally acclaimed artist, was taken to see the play at the National Theater in London by one of her daughters, who she knew would resonate with her. “The brutality, beauty and humor seemed so real, like something I had known all my life,” she wrote to McDonagh. “I am actually Portuguese, although I have lived in London for 50 years, and our stories are as harsh and cruel as yours.”

The Pillowman is set in a totalitarian state where people’s imaginations are mercilessly monitored. When Rigo was growing up, Portugal was under the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, who controlled an ultra-conservative society for more than three decades with the help of his secret police. Her connection with the play was so strong that she went so far as to make her own ‘pillow’, a life-sized doll made from pillows stuffed into old stockings, as the model for the central panel of the triptych which was to be shown at Tate Britain that autumn.

Thus began an exciting, almost child-like correspondence, which culminated in McDonagh ransacking his basement in search of more stories she could use, while also floating the idea of ​​a more formal collaboration on a future picture book. “Finally, I’m sending you some stories,” he wrote in February 2005. “Now listen, they were written a few years ago and some of them are very small and silly and none of them are well written. But some of them have interesting pictures, perhaps, so if there’s anything you like let me know.” He added that he wouldn’t be able to do anything for a while, because he was heading to New York to rerun The Pillowman on Broadway.

Rigo Pillow, his swollen hippo-like head flopping across his chest over his white Wellington boots, is still reclining on a dingy sofa in the north London studio that has become her archive since her death in 2022. Under the spell of a place where so much great work was produced, it is as if he is watching as artworks inspired by McDonagh’s stories are assembled for display at London’s Christia Roberts Gallery.

The show focuses on a three-year period of Rigo’s production, from 2005 to 2007, when she developed a practice of drawing and painting from scripts she collected in her studio with the help of her assistant, Leila Nunes, who also acted in many of them. Although Rigaud did not consider these constructions to be art in themselves, she did not throw them away when her work was completed. Some of the dolls involved which she named com. bonecos — the Portuguese word for dolls — will be on display for the first time.

At the heart of this production was the “McDonagh Series”, based on stories that McDonagh himself explains were written in his twenties, more like outlines for a potential short film series than publishable works. The only time they had seen the light of day before was when he showed a few of them to the Plowman staff as examples of the types of stories under investigation in the play.

The imaginative relationship between the mature artist, playwright and young director – whose works have since gone on to win awards on both sides of the Atlantic – is astonishingly strong, ranging from a typing monkey to a man with turtles in his hands. It does not follow straight lines. But of the four stories Rigo chose from the dozens she sent her, one in particular led straight to the heart of one of her lifelong obsessions.

The story involved a forest full of children crying out for pity on the conscience of the mother who aborted them. “It’s a very skewed story, and goes against what I stand for, so I don’t know why I did it,” she wrote at the time. There is no forest in the paintings I made in response. In one, a woman is shown lying in a bathroom with floral wallpaper, and a fetus on her lap. In another photo, a young mother sits cradling her child on the toilet, with blood from the miscarriage in a bowl at her feet.

When Rego was an art student at the Slade in London in the early 1950s, she had several street abortions herself, before returning to her family home in Portugal to give birth to her first daughter, in a society determined to outlaw young women like her. She remembered that she did not feel guilty. Just anger at the pain, misery and unnecessary danger that is happening. It was a theme she would return to again and again, in works of art that would play a role in motivating the Portuguese people to overthrow their country’s ban on abortion.

In Secrets and Stories, directed by her son Nick Welling near the end of her life, Rigaud spoke of her anger after the refusal to decriminalize abortion in a referendum in 1998. When a second referendum was due to take place in 2007, she printed eight drawings to distribute to the national and local press. The Portuguese president at the time, Jorge Sampaio, was among those who bore witness in the film to the role of business in changing public opinion.

Although Rego rarely appears in her own paintings, the biographical content is there for those who know what to look for, according to Welling — whose responsibilities for his mother’s legacy include caring for an archive of several thousand works, curating 23 exhibitions around the world this year, and curating the Museo Casa das Historias Paola Rego, founded in 2009 near her old family home.

Despite its apparent eccentricity, Plowman captures Riju’s affection for her industrialist father, who raised his family as a family. Kenta – A country estate – on the Portuguese Riviera, where their neighbors included celebrities and royalty. The triptych contains references to the Little Prince of Saint-Exupéry, and to the exiled King of Italy, who was known for taking young sex workers to the beach.

After her father died, the family’s electronics business went bankrupt Kenta It had to be sold – a series of traumatic events depicted in another picture from McDonagh’s series. The story is based on a piglet’s futile pleas to be saved from slaughter by a scarecrow that he had previously saved from a conflagration. Rigo represents the scarecrow as a crucified woman with a cow skull, rising above the head of a decapitated pig, next to a sleeping girl. In the background the sky is burning. Welling says Rego was traumatized as a child when she slaughtered a pig she loved. The sleeping girl represents her guilt for allowing her entire inheritance to go up in flames, even though the fault was not actually hers but her husband’s. Victor Welling, who was an outstanding student at Slade when they met, disastrously believed he could run the family business himself. Her failure forced Rijo to beg for grants to keep their little family afloat.

The most mysterious image to emerge from McDonagh’s collaboration is the one featuring a man wearing turtles instead of his hands. Willing is reluctant to over-explain this, because Rego never explained it to him. But he believes it has something to do with the depression she has suffered from throughout her life, as her beloved father suffered from before her. “I think she was very attracted to the idea that the things that weigh you down — like depression or all your vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies — are part of you, but they’re also organisms that feed on you, like parasites. They’re a curse but they’re also a privilege, and if you get rid of them, you’re doomed,” he says.

The three years the exhibition focuses on were among the most productive of Rigaud’s life, Welling says, producing a vast number of pastels and prints. “She had a particularly purple patch in the Martin McDonagh stories, and he gets a lot of credit for stirring up my mother, and that was probably her most accomplished work.”

The picture book unfortunately never materialized. “It could have been a dream, although I think it was in my imagination,” McDonagh says. “But to be a small part of the art of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century is amazing to me. I still can’t really believe it.”