In 1951, 16-year-old Paula Rego wrote a letter to her mother after visiting an Edvard Munch exhibition, guardian This was reported in a newly discovered letter on Sunday.
“It was impressive, beyond your imagination,” wrote Rego, who a few years earlier had become the Iberian peninsula’s preeminent figurative painter, known for her searing visions of women.
Rego, who died in 2022 aged 87, apparently never told anyone except her mother Maria about her visit to London’s Tate Gallery while attending a finishing school in Kent, an experience that had a profound impact on her life. “What impressed me most was the exhibition of the modern Norwegian painter Edvard Munch,” she wrote, noting scream and heritage One of her most impressive works.
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The letter continued: “I wonder if you are familiar with that famous painting?” scream– that’s his – he painted almost everything in that genre; he also had many engravings and drawings. But it is so shocking, so shocking that you can’t even imagine it. Most importantly, there is a painting called heritagewhich shows a seated woman crying with a skeletal child painted all green in her lap. “
His influence was soon apparent in her work. About a year later, when her native Portugal suffered a devastating drought, she painted a scene that evokes scream: A pregnant woman, facing the blazing sun in the crimson sky, holding a emaciated baby, her mouth wide open in horror. Rego reportedly rediscovered the small painting, which she named droughtIn 2015, she was cleaning her home in Portugal with her son, Nick Willing. He brought the work to art historian Kari J. Brandtzæg of the Munch Museum in Oslo, who found its red-yellow color palette and Expressionist brushstrokes reminiscent of anxiety and scream.
drought will be on display in Dance of Thorns, the first major museum exhibition in Scandinavia dedicated to Rego. Curated by Brandtzæg, the exhibition opens on April 24 at the Munch Museum in Oslo. brandzeger told The Guardian During the 18 months she spent curating the exhibition, the connection between Rego and Munch became increasingly apparent.
The deeper she delved into their practices, the more she discovered similarities in composition, color, and focus—both painters had an intuitive sense of how to dramatize a person’s terrifying and vast inner world. She particularly noted the visual resonance between Rego’s work dance (1988) and Munch’s dance of life (1925), and Rego’s Time – past and present (1990) and Munch’s history (1914).
“There is a dialogue with Munch’s paintings. It’s almost like Rego is having a silent dialogue with Munch’s visual world,” Brandtsegger told the publication.
