The Brave Terror of Paula Rego

This article explores Paula Rego’s early work, that is her first creative experiments as a professional artist during the late 1950s and the 1960s. In this period, Rego faced with brave terror the political environment in Portugal, which was dominated by totalitarian rule, persecution, censorship, and war. Guided by the purpose of ‘giving fear a face’, the Portuguese artist transposed directly to her drawings and paintings the brutality and violence of Salazar’s dictatorship and its colonial policy by means of a creative experimentalism which included automatic drawing, collage, crude and visceral dissection of human and animal bodies and sarcastic comment. Besides emphasizing the exploration of individual creativity and personal histories, this text also highlights the expression of collective experiences and traumas. The community that Rego reimagined outside the normative discourse and propaganda of the Iberian dictatorships was not only affected by totalitarianism, but also by gender violence and discrimination. This article argues that Rego created an iconography of political resistance against totalitarianism and patriarchal rule and in doing so she subverted the traditional male/female roles by claiming the power to propose alternative visions of history and contemporary reality.