posted on 23 Apr 2016

Nursery Rhymes illustrated by Paula Rego

Paula Rego was born in 1938 as a Portuguese citizen but her Anglophile parents sent her to school in the UK during the 1950s and she has adopted the UK as her home ever since. Rego is a prolific artist and her style has changed many times - she has experimented with abstract painting and collage before settling for the pastels that have defined her career.

She has consistently experimented with the reworking of folk tales and nursery rhymes and the architypes they represent. Rego saw the possibilities that folk tales with their elemental ambiguities created to help her uncover the nature of patriarchy. As a feminist her imagary became bolder, with drawings that became increasingly uncomfortable and challenging - some of her later work is genuinely startling and quite hard to look at without genuine physical and emotional distress.

In this collection of nursery rhymes we can see the way in which she uses these old cultural constructs to explore the nature of gender and the way in which women have been associated with a kind of supernatural or elemental power. Rego has also been up front about the inherent eroticism to be found in the nursery and there are unsettling images of naked men being washed in a tub and tiny soldiers seated on the laps of matronly women. Alongside this latent sexuality is the idea of metamorphosis - animals transform into half humans or take on human tasks - and this creates a sense of of shifting, uncertain world of the Freudian dream.

Rego's work is always stimulating and never ever predictable. For me, some of this works and some doesn't but when it does come off it does so to spectacular effect and that more than compensates for the less convincing ideas. This edition published by Thames and Hudson in 1994 has an introductory essay by Marina Warner which is also a lovely addition - her writing is always insightful and worth the purchase price in its own right. You can pick up a copy of this book for well under £10.00 - so it's a bargain!

Terry Potter

April 2016