Dominating Paula Rego’s magnificent pastel drawing Angel (1998) is a broad-shouldered woman whose black hair has been tied back in a bun. Wearing a full, floor-length golden silk skirt and a long-sleeved black blouse, she stands assertively against a stark grey background. In one outstretched hand she holds a pale-yellow sponge; in the other she brandishes a glinting silver sword. Far from angelic, this provocative figure poses questions for the viewer – above all, why is she starting to smile?
Portuguese-born artist Paula Rego is well-known for telling darkly disturbing stories using paint and collage to create what she refers to simply as ‘pictures’. Taking inspiration from traditional folklore, myths, fairy tales, nursery rhymes and even Disney films, she recounts these narratives from a female perspective and with strong psychological force. Reclaiming passive princesses, Rego turns them into active heroines: Snow White straddles the Prince’s horse solo, Little Red Riding Hood’s mother kills the wolf, and a muscular mermaid drowns Wendy in a black lagoon – Neverland, this is not.
Rego stages each of her stories inside a large studio in London. As art critic John McEwen has pointed out, ‘For every artist the studio is a sanctuary, but for Paula it has special importance. Her studio is a playroom as much as a workplace.’ Inside this theatrical space, Rego collects costumes, fabric and stuffed toys, and assembles huge props which fill the room. However, this magic realm is only truly awakened through Rego’s collaboration with models who – dressing up as eclectic fictional characters – pose within the artist’s magical tableaux.
While many sitters have performed just once or occasionally for the artist, there is one model who since the 1980s has played many hugely significant roles for Rego: Lila Nunes. In 1985, then aged twenty-one, Portuguese-born Nunes moved to London to care for Rego’s sick husband, the artist Victor Willing, who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Rego had first met Willing during the early 1950s, when he was one of her painting tutors at London’s prestigious Slade School of Fine Art.
During the last few years of his life, Nunes not only attended to Willing’s medical needs, but helped him to work from his wheelchair by mixing paints, and also took him to see exhibitions around London. Nunes never modelled for Willing, but she recalled that Rego soon invited her to, and she gladly accepted: ‘I was happy about being involved in the work. It was a new experience. I was living with two artists, so I knew their work was very important for them… They considered me part of the family, in a way. Even when I left to do other things, I was always in contact, especially with Paula. There was obviously trust between us and a connection, because we’re both Portuguese. There were a lot of things we talked about that I understood because of that.’
One of the first series which Nunes both posed for, and directly inspired, is ‘Girl and Dog’ (1986–87). These boldly painted pictures feature one, and sometimes two, sturdy dark-haired girls who wear pretty, girlish dresses with long white socks. Nursing a sick, floppy dog, they hold, feed and water, dress and undress the poor creature. In one particularly poignant image the dog lifts his head trustfully, while resting its paws on the lap of the seated girl, allowing her to shave his chin and throat.
Rego was paying tribute to the daily care which Willing, represented as an anthropomorphic dog, received from Nunes, who appears as a little-girl version of herself. Refracting their caregiving relationship through the lens of fiction, Rego’s images evoke a colourful children’s storybook, making the uncomfortable reality somewhat more palatable. The physically and emotionally exhausting experience of looking after Willing bonded Nunes and Rego, to such an extent that when Willing died in 1988, Nunes remained with her as a studio assistant, primary model and muse.
Since then, Nunes has played a whole cast of characters, transforming from an ensemble of dancing ostriches in tutus and Jane Eyre to a Spanish bullfighter and Snow White. ‘She’s terribly important working with me. I like having her there with me,’ Rego has testified. Taking on such a diverse range of fictional characters, Nunes defines her involvement as ‘acting’; she finds the experience of dressing up and posing both ‘fun’ and ‘hard work because you’re up there for hours’. Assuming physically demanding positions, she kneels, crouches and, quite literally, bends backwards for the artist.
While given some direction from Rego, there is also an element of spontaneous improvisation to Nunes’s method of working, which comes close to play. ‘Playing is the most important thing of all,’ Rego has revealed, describing Nunes as both a ‘collaborator and playmate’ who helps her to shape stories. ‘She just takes a position, and I go with it, it grows from there.’ Inside the studio, it’s as if they are two young girls trying to make sense of the world, particularly as Rego, sitting on the same level as Nunes, will draw her from the floor of the studio as a child would do.
But modelling for Rego is no light-hearted matter, and Nunes has always been prepared to pose for artworks which border on activism. Since the start of her career, Rego has used her work to draw attention to the injustices which she perceives women experience, across personal and political spheres. This is understandable given her upbringing: Rego was raised under the fascist regime of Portugal’s dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, through which the state and the Catholic Church conspired to control their citizens, and especially women.
In 1998, a referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal failed, and Rego created one of her most notable bodies of work, the ‘Abortion Series’ (1998). For these pastel drawings, Nunes impersonated women kneeling and lying down in backstreet clinics, in order to highlight the fear, pain and dangers of making abortion illegal. In Untitled No.1 (1998) she sits, holding her bent legs apart, staring at the viewer, almost confrontationally. Rego has explained, ‘She is being humiliated and yet she is triumphant, completely triumphant.’ The effect of these visceral images was so powerful that they have been credited with helping sway public opinion to form a second referendum in 2007.
The same year that Nunes modelled for the ‘Abortion Series’, she also transformed into Rego’s Angel. The idea for this artwork came from José Maria de Eça de Quierós’s controversial nineteenth-century Portuguese novel, The Crime of Father Amaro, which shocked original audiences for its unforgiving commentary on the hypocrisy of the Church – a subject which resonated with Rego. Father Amaro, a handsome, charming priest, enters into a sexual relationship with his landlady’s daughter, Amélia, whom he gets pregnant. Soon after their son is born, Amaro arranges for the baby to be killed, and Amélia dies due to complications during the birth. While mother and son are framed as disgraced victims, the priest moves to a new parish where he progresses in the Church, having suffered no consequences for his actions.
For Rego’s disconcerting drawing, Nunes adopted the role of a new, invented character: an avenging angel. ‘I prefer a heroine to a victim any day,’ Rego once declared, and here has drawn one into the story. Carrying the Christian symbols of a sword and a sponge, Nunes is posed with reckoning force, having arrived to punish the priest for the wrongs he has done to Amélia and their son. As she fixes viewers with a defiant gaze, there is no doubt that she will exact retribution and take pleasure in it – this is why she is smiling.
Given the care which Nunes took of Willing, this image of her as a guardian angel also resonates with reality: ‘They’re all personal stories,’ Rego has conceded. Portuguese-born Nunes, who grew up as a ‘tomboy’, recognises herself in images such as Angel, in which the female characters have decidedly masculine facial features, thick limbs, olive skin and dark hair. However, she also acknowledges a disparity between many of the subjects portrayed and her own appearance: ‘The finished work does surprise me – especially the expressions. When I get up and have a look, I think: “Oh my God, that expression was… Where did that come from?” It doesn’t feel like it was me.’
There is a very simple explanation for the chasm which Nunes perceives between herself and the completed characters: each of the pictures is not just of Nunes; these women are also a reflection of Rego herself. As the artist’s son, Nick Willing, has explained, ‘Mum sees herself as Lila. She doesn’t see herself in any other of her models. But it’s an image of Mum from another time, so it’s more accurate than a self-portrait, because she’s able to invest in Lila a role that she once played – so she can put her in the 1950s or 1960s, and that’s more important than what Mum looks like now.’
Rego has affirmed this reading: ‘She is really myself. I don’t like doing self-portraits but she’s like a self-portrait.’ It’s not just in looks or the shared heritage that Rego identifies with Nunes; of equal if not more importance is the fact that Rego feels that Nunes ‘understands’ what she is trying to say in her work, and can therefore pose suitably. ‘She knows exactly what to do, she can read my mind. She knows what I want, and she does it.’
Nunes recognises this crucially important connection too: ‘I’m also a woman, so I understand a lot of things. When you’re talking to a woman, and you mention something, you don’t even need to go into detail. You know what that person means… Sometimes it’s frustrating because Paula can’t get what she wants; she keeps working until she gets there. Things come out that she didn’t expect. I think, in a way, that’s because I’m relaxed: she can go through me and find whatever she’s looking for.’
Rego has expressed her need for Nunes to ‘stand in’ for her. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the ‘Dog Woman’ (1994) series, which features women behaving like dogs; drawn in the wake of Willing’s death, they express Rego’s grief at her loss. For these pastel pictures, Nunes bowed down on all fours, performing and channelling the artist’s pain for her through demanding poses and even sounds. As Rego remembers, ‘I don’t know why, I just said to her: “Now crouch there, and growl.” And she did.’ In these charged images Nunes, whose head is thrown back, relays Rego’s pain and anger in the form of a dog’s guttural call.
Nunes even assumes the role of a sculptress sitting smoking her pipe in The Artist in Her Studio (1993), surrounded by strange objects, drawings and an assortment of cabbages. This picture clearly alludes to Rego’s own fantastic studio space; but again, it is not a self-portrait in the traditional sense, since Nunes posed for it. Although it could be argued that Nunes is simply a body double onto which Rego can cast her own self-image, is there not also a great honour in being entrusted with this role? Just as Rego forever blurs fantasy and reality, so too there is a conflation of artist and muse here, indicating the intimacy between the pair. As Rego once said, ‘You have to become the figures you’re drawing.’ Here, she seems to be paying a fitting tribute to Nunes, the protagonist of her pictures, who brings her world to life.
Like all great storytellers, Rego uses fiction to tell great truths, including those that are uncomfortable and taboo. As the artist’s trusted co-conspirator and leading lady for more than three decades now, Nunes has performed roles which broadcast women’s experience in unflinching terms and reclaim femininity as something quite ferocious. Channelling anger into action, Nunes is Rego’s imaginary angel, playmate and real-life ally. Moreover, as the artist’s constant muse, she holds up a magic mirror to Rego herself – a fearless artist who paints to avenge all women who have been wronged.