Revealed: The story behind Paula Rego's Pillowman

News that Paul Rego is to have a show at the Calouste Gulbenkian Fondation in Paris (amazingly, her first ever in the city) this month (January 26 – April 1) sent us flicking through Phaidon’s Behind The Scenes, an utterly enthralling peak into the working methods and motivations of the Portugese born, UK-based artist.

The Paris show, billed as a representative exhibition – the curators are at pains to point out it’s in no way a retrospective - concentrates on a selection of the themes which have contributed most to Rego’s originality. These themes explore the complex fields of human relations, the dark and emotional side of their nature and the ambiguity of their actions all filtered through a militant, feminine awareness. One of our particular favourite examples of this series is her evocative work The Pillowman, which she first exhibited in 2004-5.  Behind The Scenes gives a fascinating insight into the work that went into creating the piece. The title was taken from the play by Martin McDonagh which tells the story of an author accused of child murder on account of his gruesome fairy tales. Rego saw it at London’s National Theatre and was bowled over. “It was amazing. I just couldn’t believe someone else knew these things,” she said at the time.

The play is a series of stories. In the principal tale, The Pillowman, a sad doll stuffed with pillows, compassionately smothers children to death to spare them the misery of adult life. As the brutal paradoxes of life are the mark of Rego’s art, it is no wonder the play impressed her. As the book’s author John McEwen points out: “Perhaps no paradox has so exercised her as that, regardless of age, we remain to some extent children. It is not life’s tragedy that we grow old, but that we never grow up.”

In the play there is a girl who wants to be Jesus and is duly crucified. In Rego’s version the cross is carried by the girl as a sign of redemption, hence the dangling babies’ teething rings, symbols of comfort. The doll seen propped against the pillowman’s leg is the ‘little prince’ from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic children’s story, the airman writer having briefly lived in Estoril (Rego’s hometown) during the Second World War.

Much preliminary work went into setting up the piece, as Lila Nunes, her principal model, recalls. “The head was a duvet she had in the studio which she started sewing to make a face and a nose. She sewed and she sewed and she pulled a sock over it, then she painted the mouth. The body was made with cushions and with stockings and all different things. The apples (on the floor in the right hand panel) actually have scalpel-blades in them. This is again a story from The Pillowman about someone giving someone apples that have blades inside. So that when they eat them the get cut and bleed to death.” Carmen Mueck (Rego's eldest granddaughter) carved and pinned together the apples to make dolls and filled them with the blades. The Pillowman reappears in Rego's tryptich The Fisherman, by which time he had turned into her father. But that’s another story and one you can read here. 

The Paris show takes place at Calouste Gulbenkian Fondation - French Delegation, 39, Boulevard de la Tour Mauberg 75007, Paris.