PAULA REGO'S THE POLICEMAN'S DAUGHTER

Paula Rego's The Policeman's Daughter

Paula Rego's The Policeman's Daughter

In the late 1980's Paula Rego made a succession of painting to investigate close family relationships. All the bonds look like to some extent dysfunctional, mostly those between the fathers and the daughters. The Policeman's Daughter is incensed, her hand rammed into her father's boot as she cleans it, a drawing for the painting presentations its genesis in a bond that is a little more guiltless - a less old girl, cradling the boot as she cleans it, a game mansion symbolising security at her feet. In the painting, the mansion has become a mistrustful feline mammal, and the create of the girl, taken from a sexually-explicit Robert Mapplethorpe photo, any kind but innocent.

A loathing of political persecution still coverings in her work, as in her 2000 pastel succession, The Interrogator's Garden, which came, she declares, scowling with swift fury, out of "contempt for bullies: when the surprise police officer interrogate a sufferer on their own, they can perform no matter what they like". But she in addition uncovers the bullying and power play in families, and women's collusion in them. As she said in a 1993 South Bank Show : "I was being repressed and constrained by my mother, not Salazar. Maybe the authoritarian thing draws close right through to the juvenile, who takes it out on the dog or the doll." In The Policeman's Daughter (1987), a girl polishes her nonexistent father's jackboot. Ruth Rosengarten, co-curator of a Rego public display at the Serralves Museum in Oporto from October, says: "The daughter is saying, 'up yours' to the male parent by fastening her hand up his boot, but she's in addition performing what's required."

After an "awful" closing school in Kent at 16, she went to the Slade in 1952-56 ("In the women's life room, the men had their sex covered"). It was a "good time; there were very highly developed population, though I not ever said anything; I'm getting better at chatting my mind." Rego, who won trophies for painting and portraiture, plunged in love with Willing, who was six years older and married. Pregnant at 20, she returned with the infant to Portugal. "Going back was like going back to detention centre, to a bourgeois life I detested; I sensed I was not ever going to escape," she says. "I wasn't incensed with Vic; I wanted him." In 1957 Willing left his wife and united Paula and their daughter Caroline in Ericeira. They were wedded in 1959. "Vic said 'draw', and I commenced to draw again. He collected me." In 1963 they paid for a home in London's Camden Town, paying out summers in Portugal.

After the Slade, Rego declares, "I snatched up and got into a appalling depression. I couldn't retain subsequent the rules; I had to smash out. But I not ever lost the love of drawing out of my head, not making a reproduce from ...