Paula Rego: Secrets and Stories

This programme contains some strong language

and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

When I'm doing a picture and I've got the story...

and I don't know where to put it -

like, you know, the background, the setting for it -

I go back to a place I knew as a child

and I remember the room.

I draw in the furniture and the room

and then put the story in there.

CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS

A Paula Rego painting goes to places of psychic and emotional experience

that had really been off limits.

The permission she gave to enter these areas,

it was a flinging open of the barricades.

It's terribly important to have what I call a story

and the transformations that it goes through are colossal.

You take the most enormous risks.

Paula's produced a body of work over 50 years

which stands right up with the best things that people have done.

She'll have a huge, lasting legacy.

I think that if you do pictures,

they are about what's inside you as much as what's outside you,

but that you've got secrets and stories

that you want to put out there in the pictures.

My mother has always been a bit of a mystery to me,

not only as an artist, but also as a mum.

Secretive and guarded.

Then, unexpectedly, after her 80th birthday,

she started telling me stories I'd never heard before

so I asked her if she'd make a film about her experiences,

the struggles that turned her into one of our most important artists,

and to my surprise, she agreed.

She was a good painter.

She was an amazing painter, that she could do anything.

I've got some pictures...

The room upstairs with ten legs

and peculiar tops and things

and she drew that in a flash, right away.

Even without looking too closely at it, she'd do it quickly.

I mean, sometimes I used to go behind her with an easel

when I was very little and do a picture,

but that was to be near her.

She didn't encourage me to paint, particularly.

She used to be knitting all the time for the soldiers

and when they had a sale, she used to ask me to decorate the walls.

It was a long time ago and I was very little,

but here she is, still at it, huh?

Good girl.

Naughty girl sometimes.

-Why?

-Well, she was... My mother was quite harsh.

You weren't close, were you?

-No.

-No?

-Not at all.

-No.

-You were always fighting?

-Yes, quite a lot.

She told me off and stuff.

Did she?

She didn't tell me anything.

Nothing, you know, like having babies and all that sort of thing.

Never, never.

When I had my first period,

she just said, "Now, you must be careful.

"You mustn't let any man come near you",

and I was very surprised,

but I didn't pay any attention to it, of course.

I didn't know what she meant.

My mother is really a casualty of the society she lived in.

That society was a deadly killer society for women

and I despised it for that.

You see, they encourage women to do nothing,

and the less they did,

the more they were admired for it.

That is women of a certain class -

the poor women had to do bloody everything.

Well, Portugal was a fascist country, actually,

and it was...

There was no freedom of speech.

There was censorship all over the place, you couldn't speak your mind,

so it was an immensely repressive society.

It didn't show

because people went about behaving themselves.

There were rebellions at times,

but most of them were put down, ruthlessly.

So, on the whole, on the surface, everything ran.

People talked about football a lot

and behaved themselves.

When they had lunch together,

when my father and my grandfather, or whatever it is,

went out to lunch in the cafe,

there would probably be a whorehouse next door or something.

They'd have lunch and then they'd go and fuck.

It was part of the life in Portugal.

It was...normal.

In fact, it was a good thing for your health.

My sister and I found many of these childhood pictures

rolled up in the basement of our grandmother's house.

Mum told us that although she started drawing when she was four,

it wasn't until her father began reading to her

that she became obsessed with painting the stories.

He would scare her with this book of Dante's Inferno...

..but also introduced her to the operas of Verdi

and Walt Disney movies.

Even as a little girl, Mum discovered that she could escape

her repressive middle-class upbringing

by painting whatever she liked,

acting out her fantasies and fears in her pictures.

My dad was a complete liberal.

He hated the politics that they had there.

In fact, he came away to England and left me

to be looked after by my grandparents

and came back when I was two-and-a-half,

so I didn't know them.

I didn't know my mother or my father until they came back.

But he also had a tough life in his own way.

-Yes.

-He suffered from depression quite a lot.

Yes, he did.

You see, he's got a crown of thorns.

Poor man, he had a bad time.

Didn't speak. He would come along, sit down to dinner,

have dinner without saying a word

and getting up and turning on the radio, the BBC,

to hear the news because we could hear what was really going on

in Portugal only from the BBC Overseas Service,

because it was all lies in Portugal.

My grandmother said to me once,

"You know, you must always obey your husband.

"You must never go against him or say anything against him

"and never cross him. Whatever he wants, you have to do."

But I just didn't take any notice of it,

but it must have sunk in because I was pretty obedient with my husband.

PAULA LAUGHS

It must've sunk in, you know?

So women get quite a raw deal in Portugal at this time?

They do. They do now, I'm sure.

That's what my father said -

"This isn't a place for women, you must go away."

-NEWSREEL:

-At the Slade School

in University College London,

about 400 students apply for admission every January.

We had to draw from sculptures,

old-fashioned sculptures like Michelangelo and so on.

We had a room full of them.

And we had to sit there copying them.

I didn't like doing that,

so I hid behind them and I did my own pictures.

So they allowed me to go to the life classes,

so I could draw from the model.

But at the same time as this,

I loved doing things from the imagination.

I always had a corner in the antique room

where I could put up an easel and a canvas,

and do a picture from my head.

And, of course, then one becomes very self-conscious

at art school, being a day girl, not being an intellectual,

the restricted way of teaching in those days,

the Euston Road method, which I could not do.

You lose your...

It's not so much your confidence you lose, you lose your...

You hide more.

Somebody said that women would have to marry

so they could support the men,

give the moral support as well as financial.

The smartest men's student, the cleverest,

wanted to go to bed with me,

and I think that came above everything else.

There were others that seemed to admire what I did.

But the elite, no.

And I wanted to be like them.

And I wanted to learn how to be like them.

You know, I wanted to be part of that.

And how was it that you met Dad? You met him at a party, didn't you?

Yeah, I met him. I'd seen him before.

And we were at a party in Seymour Place,

something to do with the Queen being crowned or something,

and I was keen on a guy - I don't remember, John something -

and he was there with his girlfriend.

So I left him and I went downstairs,

and I suddenly felt the feet coming down after me.

It was your father.

And he said, "Come in here."

It was a room,

an empty room belonging to another student,

and he said, "Take down your knickers."

I didn't even say, "What?"

I just did it.

I've done a picture of it called The Wedding Guest,

as a matter of fact.

That's why I can talk about it.

Only the wedding guest is a bit older than I was,

because I was very, very young.

I was a virgin, so you can imagine the mess that caused.

He could at least have taken me in a taxi,

or hailed a taxi or something.

Not at all. He stayed in there tidying up.

One day, I went to the movies in Chelsea,

one of those classic cinemas.

I never, in my life, have left a film, ever.

And some time during the movie, I said, "I've got to go."

And there, in the street, was your father.

Imagine? What a coincidence.

It was just strange.

And he said, "You come with me."

He took me down to his studio by the river

and he said, "Well, I really would like to do a picture of you."

And it was a wonderful picture.

I'm nude, of course, and he painted it for quite a long time.

There were quite a lot of intermissions.

Why? To make love?

THEY CHUCKLE

And I spent all my time there, you know?

Yeah.

-Were you a good model?

-Yeah.

I did as I was told, as always.

I still do!

And for him, of course, I did everything.

Everything he wanted.

He was the big star of the Slade when Paula was there as a student,

cos he had a show with the sort of leading gallery of the time

shortly after he left the Slade,

the Hanover Gallery, so, you know, it was very glamorous for Paula.

Did you fall for him right away?

Yes.

Because he was so intelligent

and he knew so much about painting.

# All for just the chance to love you

# Would I love you, love you, love you

# To take you away in my arms

# Has always been my goal... #

I thought he was so smart, so clever.

He was a friend of Francis Bacon and David Sylvester.

He drank at the Colony Room.

He was just...

an extraordinary man.

And he was a very good painter.

Although, he was married.

His wife was a ballet dancer and he painted her very well too,

but that didn't come into it because he lived in London

and his wife lived in Guildford.

Did he tell you that he was married?

-Yeah!

-Right away?

Yeah, of course, everybody knew he was married.

Yeah, sure.

But she never turned up at the Slade or anything.

She was always at home.

I never saw her. I only met her once.

I wasn't particularly jealous, which is strange, isn't it?

He seemed so different, so independent from other married men.

I had lots of abortions.

Not just me, but every girl...

at the Slade had them,

because, in those days, there wasn't any contraception or anything

and they didn't care, you know, the men didn't care

so you just got knocked up.

Knocked up.

"Oh, my God, I'm knocked up again, what am I going to do?"

"Oh, I'm going to talk to so-and-so,

"who will ask his friend if he can spare the time

"to come and see to you."

"Oh, good, thank you so much."

"You have to go to Soho and go to a pub and meet this guy -

"he was a doctor -

"and ask him if he can come and do it."

"Oh, all right, then, I'll be there on Tuesday."

And these were backstreet abortions,

-he'd come to your house and do it?

-Yeah.

That's how it was.

Everybody had one.

Did you ever think, "I'll have the baby"?

Eventually you did, but at that time, when you were young,

did you ever think, "I'll just have the baby",

or was it a time when it was too much of a shame?

I didn't dare come home with a baby.

My mother would kill me.

If she knew I was having an affair with a married man, can you imagine?

I never talked to my parents about it,

because I knew that I was very young.

If they'd found out that summer,

they would have kept me in Portugal, and I couldn't have done that,

because that would have been the end of me.

I wouldn't have been an artist, you see?

I would have been looked down on,

patronised as a single mother,

which now is fashionable,

but in those days in Portugal, you can imagine.

I would have to stay, I would never see Vic again.

My friend Teresa was in England.

She told Vic about it.

He said "Why can't she have the child? Why can't she?"

You know, it was perfectly all right for a young girl to have a child.

And Teresa said, "Look, you have no idea what it's like in Portugal.

"It's a very conventional society

"and she'd be outcast", you know, and all that.

Isn't that why you did the abortion pictures,

to help change the law in Portugal?

Yes. Because it was forbidden in Portugal.

And there was a referendum for people to vote

to have abortions legally and nobody went to vote.

Right. That was the first referendum in 1998, wasn't it,

when there weren't enough votes to change the law?

Yes. I did the pictures to make people go to vote

because I had to say, you have to have proper clinics to do it.

The stories we heard of, you know...

of fish wives doing it on the beach

and I knew of a cousin of mine

that aborted one of his girlfriend's,

and she turned up.

They threw her in the water and she turned up

with her belly all full of water, you know,

all swollen on the beach,

and everybody knew, but he wasn't arrested.

Everybody did it, it was just normal.

So he killed his girlfriend, basically?

Yes.

Yes, he did.

Oh, my God.

And what was the reaction to the pictures like in Portugal?

It was very good because they were shown at the Gulbenkian.

And women, when they came to see it...

..whispered and talked to each other and were surprised, you know?

It was quite a surprise.

I did prints too because I thought where the pictures couldn't go,

the prints would go, you see?

-Yes.

-Because they're easier to transport.

And did they go all over Portugal, the prints?

I think they went to several places, yes.

They were political things, you know,

that I wanted to show, that it wasn't fair.

The very harsh brutality of her pictures

at the time and the suffering of women

and how she expressed this,

even if it was, for many people, in an aggressive way,

it was an influence.

The echo she brought indirectly,

even if you liked the pictures or if you didn't like the pictures,

was a tremendous way to really show

that we cannot go on with this kind of stuff any more.

And then they had another referendum in 2007

and voted in favour of abortion, didn't they?

Yes.

It was actually quite influential

and a lot of people were very cross at her,

those of them who were for the preservation...

Against abortion, and they were very mad at her,

because they realised that she had touched a nerve.

The pain, the physical pain and the erotic...

Those girls in the pictures are in the position

which could be either for penetration

of some kind of abortionist's hand...

..or penetration from her lover,

one or the other, they were both equal.

And the two things are deeply tied in those pictures

and they mean a great deal to me.

I think it's the best thing I've ever done,

because they're totally true.

The actual resolve to survive,

the kind of defiance

and the fact that you never feel guilt, ever.

And you don't, because guilt doesn't come into it.

It's not important. It's a form of survival.

It's the only thing that I will fight for,

because I think that it's atrocious that it's forbidden, I really do.

They have no idea, because it will go on always, you see, always.

Sacrifice is something she uses to prove her love, somehow.

"Look how much I love you,

"I will do anything for you.

"I will be butchered,

"I will get knocked up over and over again.

"I'll go through absolutely anything, this is my love.

"And you screw me, that is your love."

When I got pregnant with Cassie,

I decided, "This time, I'm not going to have an abortion."

And I was alone in the house...

..and Vic rang me up...

..and said to me,

"I'm afraid I'm going back to my wife."

Is this because he knew you were pregnant?

Yes, he knew I was pregnant, yes.

And the next thing I did was to ring up my dad.

And he said, "Don't worry, I'll be there in two days,

"and I'll bring you back with me."

And he did. In two days, he was in England from Portugal,

driving like anything and I had to tell him.

We went to Soho.

We walked around and he said, "Well, don't worry,

"I'll take you back to Portugal.

"We're going to buy some clothes because you're fat."

And he got me in the car...

and we spent all the way back, playing opera...

and eating wonderfully,

stopping at nice hotels.

We got there and he said,

"Don't worry about your mother,

"I've taken her to the beach and she screamed all she could."

And next thing I knew, Cassie was born.

What was it like, suddenly being a mum?

After you had had all those abortions

and you were back in Portugal alone with a daughter,

what was that like?

Well, I was a bit scared at first,

that people would treat me very badly,

and humiliate me, but in fact they didn't.

Almost like village people, they accepted it.

It was very, very, very common, but not in the middle-classes.

-No.

-And my mother, I think, must have been pretty distraught.

'Dad told me that being thought of as a future star of the art world

'couldn't make up for feeling hungry every day.

'He had to rely on his friend Francis Bacon to buy him breakfast,

'often the only meal of the day,

'and he said he couldn't stop thinking about Mum

'and the daughter he didn't know.'

So when did Dad eventually leave his wife?

Oh, weeks later, weeks later.

He wrote to my father and my father wrote back and said, "Come over."

Just like that.

He's a person that knew my work,

and certainly better than anybody else in the world.

And he could tell what I was about

just from looking at the work, really.

And there's nothing more special than that.

I mean if your work, if there is somebody

that actually understands your work really well,

then that person will understand you really well.

Well, we're living in this house that had been my grandparents' house

that I loved.

It was really marvellous to be there all year round.

When we got married, it was... I was so delighted.

My work became very exuberant...

..and very gutsy then, and I was very interested in a kind of energy.

So I was able to play again.

I felt that I was playing with all these paints

and it was a very exciting time for me.

Everything became very visceral and sexual,

and being pregnant, all stuffed up with things.

Either sex things or babies or food going in the other end!

The act of giving birth seemed to me to be separate

from the child being born,

and it had something to do with my own body and with Vic.

The outcome of it, which was the children,

were the outcome of it, not what it was for.

It was like having a great big screw, that's what it was.

That's what it was like.

A kind of general feeling

of sexuality and pain joined up together,

which was very interesting.

Dad was THE artist.

He was the main artist, he was the better known.

Mum was younger and he wasn't her tutor in any way,

he didn't tell her what to do, he just supported her.

Where they did affect each other, is that they painted in the adega.

She was on one side, he was on the other,

there was just a screen of rush matting that hung between the two.

But Mum just painted and painted and painted,

the productivity was just endless.

And on the other side of the screen, Dad couldn't work.

The critical voice in his head was catastrophic.

Completely crippled him.

The only reason some of the paintings in this room survive

is because Baba would steal them.

"Oh, this looks nice. I'll have it for my living room!"

You know, just take them away,

or else they would have been painted over.

MUSIC: Naufragio by Amalia Rodrigues

We had a dictator called Salazar.

And I was painting a picture against Salazar,

which is called, Salazar a Vomitar a Patria.

He's vomiting the nation.

And as I was painting it, I began to feel sorry for him.

You felt sorry for the dictator, Salazar?

Why?

I don't know.

It's one thing that happens in pictures,

-you never know what you're going to feel about them, you know?

-Yeah.

Of course, I didn't want to feel sorry for him, for heaven's sake,

he was a brute - a violent and sinister man.

Do you think that's what pictures do,

that they help you understand how you feel about something?

I think they certainly...

..manage to change your feelings.

I felt a feeling for him that wasn't allowed,

and it certainly wasn't even, in real life, true.

But in the picture, it was allowed.

So the picture actually allows you

to feel all sorts of forbidden things,

and that is why you do pictures,

because you get at things that you didn't realise, actually,

and you're allowed to do outrageous thing, and everything.

I looked at those old magazines of Blanco y Negro

that my grandfather had.

And I loved those because they had lots of people hitting people.

All cartoons, I loved cartoons, old cartoons,

because they were clear, the lines,

you could tell what they were doing and they were funny.

I started using the books, by tearing them up, you know,

and do what's called collages.

It was all a means to an ends, that is to say

it was all a way of discovering, in there, a figure,

the sensual pleasure, that's what it is.

A sensual pleasure of cutting.

I had so many dolls when I was little

and this particular baby doll felt like flesh.

It was supposed to.

I remember saying, "Look at this little baby, isn't it cute, Mum?"

And I remember then going and then cutting all of its fingers off.

Then I cried apparently, so my mother says, after having done it.

My mother used to say,

"You do things, and then you say you're sorry afterwards."

She said it to me just before she died.

But my pictures, meaning, "Well, of course you go and do these things

"and then you worry about it and then you reflected."

And the collages became...

associated to the politics of what was going on in the country.

For instance, they were all fighting the Angolans.

I thought of Angola. A picture I did, quite long.

I called it...

Because that's what they were doing there, in the time of Salazar.

The Portuguese establishment was horrified,

but impressed as hell.

They tried to sort of play her down, saying,

"Oh, she creates some monsters.

"Yes, I'm sure it's very good,

"but I couldn't live with that stuff."

I'm surprised she was not bothered directly by the establishment.

-And by the ministry for information.

-Yes.

Why do you think they didn't harass her more?

I don't know. To tell you the truth, that's a mystery. I don't know.

I think there is probably an element of respect,

but their respect is not genuine respect as we understand it,

it is something else.

"If we interfere with this person,

"goodness knows what's going to happen."

You weren't afraid that the government would come after you?

-No.

-Why not?

I wasn't afraid.

Oh, if I was taken to court, I'd explain to them what happens...

and tell them what goes on.

How women suffer. It's totally unfair.

The artists,

they formed a way in which many kind of messages were put across.

Don't forget we had a one-party system,

we had a terrible censorship,

there was no liberty of the press, there was no liberty at all.

We had a secret police, and we were a blocked country

so the way in which musicians, painters,

sculptors expressed themselves,

it was easier to pass that message

because censors were not so attentive to that kind of thing.

Although Dad wasn't painting very much,

he helped Mum with her work,

not only in the studio but also by writing about it.

I remember him talking about incredibly complex things

in a way that even I, as a child, could understand.

And by being able to explain to Mum,

what otherwise came unconsciously to her,

he gave her the courage to take bigger risks.

It wasn't like, you know, some men are jealous of their wives,

he never was.

"The time of the day in that place, of that climate,

"has the presence of an animal,

"a heavy, uneasy, sun-baked thing

"which twitters and whines in one's ear.

"One must tease it, humiliate it, gouge it, pity it.

"The picture becomes its face.

"If it can be described, it can be forgiven

"for being what it is,

"and made lovable, even.

"Such creatures fawning, violent, lethargic, illusive,

"rush about or wander, lost, singly,

"and even in packs.

"For Paula, painting is trapping them, breaking them,

"putting on brands and hanging them,

"groomed and pampered on the wall."

It's really very, very good, this.

This is... This...

It need not...no-one else to write after this.

This is fabulous.

And it's just true.

Then Vicky came along, right?

Yes.

And then there was me.

And suddenly you had a big family.

And you continued making political pictures like The Dogs At Barcelona.

That's a wonderful picture, one of my best pictures.

It's a true story.

In Barcelona, the Franco regime,

they wanted to poison the stray dogs,

and they threw meat into the streets that was poisoned,

and dogs ate them

and they all died.

And even starving people, who didn't realise, and kids

-picked it up and ate it, right?

-It was indiscriminate.

I thought it was like Portugal, you see, the indiscriminate killing.

But...I was doing this picture.

I did all this

but I didn't know what to put up here.

And then I went downstairs and we'd met recently a beautiful girl,

she looked like Claudia Cardinale, she was Italian,

and Dad really liked her, etc.

And I went down to the living room and there was Dad snogging her.

He was kissing this girl.

I just ran away, I didn't say anything.

I ran to my best friend and I was crying.

I said, "Oh, Vic was snogging with this woman."

And lo and behold, she started crying too.

I was very surprised.

Afterwards, I knew that she had been shagging Dad

and wanted him to leave me to go and live with her.

She was seeing him too?

She was in love with Dad.

And she...

But I had something to put on here,

which was the figure of the woman that he was snogging.

I put it up here with a tongue hanging out.

It doesn't look like a tongue, it looks like a willy.

And it was her figure, this monstrous creature there.

So she becomes the poison, in a way?

Yeah, she becomes the lewd monster with the tongue hanging out.

And then, interestingly, Dad wrote about this picture

for your exhibition in 1965,

that when the picture had reached the press, there was a girl

that was threatening the security of the family,

that the picture, itself, was a way of you figuring out

what you thought about yourself and the world and him and everything.

-You poured it all into this picture?

-Absolutely.

That is always the case.

Yes.

And it was right.

Obviously, I was terribly jealous.

I was desperately jealous.

Sick with jealousy, when I found out.

Sick. Sick with it, when he thought

that he should be allowed to do this and that, you know.

I never said anything

because I never, never want to put him off.

Because if I become demanding or something like that, he might go.

I just was there.

I was really just some kind of passive thing there for his use.

But never mind because later on in the work,

I could do something about it.

But personally, it's always difficult

to do things on a personal nature.

It is always easier to do it in pictures than to do it personally.

You know, one's so inhibited.

I always thought he might leave...

..but what had happened was that I tried not to care so much.

When he had his first heart attack, which he had very young...

..32, or something, I realised that I couldn't survive.

I'd better do something,

perhaps be interested in other men or something,

because if he died, I wouldn't survive.

And I did. I did.

And it was terrible then, because it was like a kind of amputation.

We were so tied. I was so tied to him, so bound to him.

MUSIC: Gimme Some Lovin' by Spencer Davis Group

# Hey!

# Well, my temperature's rising got my feet on the floor

# Crazy people rocking cos they want to some more

# Let me in, baby I don't know what you got

# But you better take it easy Cos this place is hot

# And I'm so glad we made it

# So glad we made it

# But won't you give me some lovin'?

# Gimme some lovin'

# Gimme some lovin' every day

# Hey! #

The '60s, the 1960s - very, very different.

Everybody was fucking around.

It wasn't...

I had a lover. Yes, I had a lover.

I had several, as a matter of fact,

but it was normal,

as my husband did.

He had them as well, lots of them.

That painting, The Hangman, that's her getting her revenge

on all her various lovers. Yeah, she thought,

"I can kill them in my painting."

Either because they were wary of continuing a relationship

where they also liked the husband,

or maybe it was not something that they wanted to continue.

They probably knew Dad,

so it was probably a bit awkward.

If she can face things head-on in the work

and she uses everything, and there's always sex in there.

Everything's erotic.

Work itself is erotic.

Doing work, that is to say drawing, is an erotic activity...

..actually.

She was so physically glamorous or seemed to be as a small child,

that you could only sort of stand

in the corner of the room and watch her,

you know, dressing up to go out or putting on her make-up or whatever,

and she was just so beautiful.

She was sort of like a film star.

I think I always felt

like we weren't really the main story, you know?!

We were the kind of bit-part players.

We were the subplot, very much a subplot.

It was brush or baby - that was always the case.

Doing pictures has nothing to do with having children.

You do the pictures, you have the children.

It's not part of the same life.

Painting pictures is like being a man, really.

It's the part of you that's the man.

Even the way you stand or sit, confronting the work like a man

and it has to do with the aggressive part.

It has the kind of push, the thrust,

which you must normally associate

with what being a man is, I don't know,

but I always thought that this kind of having babies,

playing at house,

it's like when you're little and you pretend cooking supper,

that sort of thing, there was a sort of play acting element in it

whilst when you were, like, doing a picture,

you were much more yourself.

I love my children, I'm not saying that, I do,

but it's just different.

They were never in the studio.

In Portugal, they were never allowed to come into the studio, never.

She is her work and her work is her.

There is no way to extricate yourself from that

and switch off and be a mother, a lover, a friend.

There was something that wasn't quite reachable with Mum.

So a lot of early childhood memories are about

wanting something I couldn't get.

Somehow I didn't feel the same about Dad,

because, I don't know, maybe he just seemed to be more available somehow.

Mum was really...

There was always some sort of wall between her and me

and probably all of us, I don't know.

Dad was more real, somehow.

It's interesting that there is so much emotion and power

and intensity in your pictures,

and yet in your personal life,

you're quite quiet and private and closed.

-Yes.

-Would you say?

-Yes.

-Shy?

I'm shy. I'm shy. I never...

When Dad would be speaking with his friends,

I remember once...

..people sitting around the fire and he was talking,

talking about art is this, that, the other.

I was just listening.

And suddenly he asked me, "What do you think?"

I tell you, I only wish the floor had opened out and swallowed me up.

I was so shy and so embarrassed that I had been asked what I think.

I didn't say anything.

So in a way you put all of those feelings into your pictures?

-Yes. In my pictures, I could do anything.

-Yeah.

If she hadn't been so shy,

if she had been able to talk about her work,

if she had been busting balls, or saying no, ever,

then, probably, she wouldn't have needed to get it out

in her painting, you know?

Was the shyness actually a symptom of depression?

I mean, did you always suffer from depression?

-I always suffered from depression.

-Even as a little girl?

Yes, I did. Yes, I remember.

I remember being frightened of everything,

being frightened of being in the garden,

being frightened of playing with Tony,

a little boy that was next door.

Alfredo, my teacher, who came to teach me at home,

a Portuguese teacher, I was terrified of him.

I was afraid of everything.

It's a wonder that I actually came to the Slade, but I did.

When you'd get depressed, did it stop you from working?

No, no. Working was good for it.

Working helped.

You told me that when you were having a particularly bad depression

in 2007, you did a series of pictures

which you locked away in a drawer and haven't seen since?

Yeah...

Lila stands in for me.

She's always...

She's me, really.

That's how I was feeling.

So that when you get depressed, it feels like your tied up?

Yes.

Well, you're kind of stuck, really,

and you hold on to things that make you more stuck.

Like she's holding this rubber thing, you see?

You hold on to the wrong things, thinking they will help,

-but on the contrary?

-Yes, exactly.

On the contrary.

I don't know good from bad.

And do you feel that you drew your way out of your depression?

It helped a little.

But you did say that when you finished them

that it helped you a lot.

Did I? Yeah?

But you've kept them and you won't show them, sort of like your secret?

They were to be put in a drawer and never seen again.

Why, do you think?

Because I was ashamed of them...

of being so depressed.

MUSIC: As Penas by Amalia Rodrigues

'66 was the year that Dad

got officially diagnosed with MS.

It only sunk in as Dad started getting more and more...

incapacitated. You know, he had the stick and then he had crutches.

And Mum went into a massive depression.

I mean, she just kind of shut down.

I mean you can only take things...

Sometimes it takes a long time

before you can actually accept things and take them on board.

And I think this was so with his illness, really.

I remember you feeling helpless.

I remember you drinking a lot.

Yes, I drank a lot.

It's true.

I used to drink a lot.

Always red wine.

So much so, that my father said,

"Look, I must tell you this,

"drop the bottle and pick up the brush."

He was worried.

When he died, I took him to hospital.

I watched him die.

Just before he died,

my grandfather told Mum that she should sell

his electronics business and move to London.

But I remember Dad thinking this was his chance to pay the family back

so he turned himself into a businessman,

started wearing a suit and convinced everyone

that, he, a painter with limited Portuguese,

should take over my grandfather's specialist

electrical engineering factory.

It was a disaster.

It was my fault. I should have stopped him.

But I didn't.

Well, you didn't stand up to Dad very often, though, did you?

-Never.

-You never stood up to him.

-So if he wanted to do something...

-He'd do it.

He was really suffering. He was suffering from the paralysis.

The business was going tits-up.

There was no money.

Everything was mortgaged because of him.

So, it's not as if this happened to Dad,

he caused this to happen.

He instigated it, he drove it forward.

He was going to make it good,

and actually, he was going to lose everything.

We lost everything.

We lost the Quinta, we lost everything.

Everything.

So, when we came to live in London,

we were completely broke, weren't we?

Yes.

MUSIC: Who Knows Where The Time Goes? by Fairport Convention

# Across the evening sky

# All the birds are leaving

# But how can they know

# It's time for them to go?

# Before the winter fire... #

I had a dealer in Portugal

who used to come and take away everything

I had on the floor of my studio,

and just the crappiest drawing, he took everything away and sold it.

-Did he give you good money?

-Well, he cheated.

He said the pictures sold for less money than they were.

And people used to say to me,

"Oh, your pictures are so expensive",

but I didn't think so, because I didn't get that kind of money.

Actually, being an artist during those years,

you did not expect to make money, not like you might do nowadays.

You didn't expect to be able to live off being an artist.

Between 1966 and 1979...

it was treading-water time.

Something must have got stuck.

I couldn't move on and I couldn't do things properly.

Images began to be influenced by pop art,

so I would draw things much more naturalistic,

out of comic books and things and cut them up...

..and the work went really badly downhill.

The world seemed to lose its reality.

My home, everything became a place you looked at,

not a place that you didn't take notice of.

That's what places are when they're real - you don't notice them.

It became a place I saw and walked in.

And then all this business with lawyers and Portugal and everything,

it was just incredible. It wasn't real.

The pictures suffer if it's like that.

You couldn't make anything real.

Dr Hoerder recommended I go to see a shrink,

because I was in a very bad way.

He said, "I think she must see somebody, she's not very well."

And then, of course, I had a Jungian analyst.

He helped a lot.

And it was my Jungian therapy that I started in 1973,

and that awakened a lot of need

for thinking that it was terribly important to go to the...

some kind of source, imaginative source.

The imaginative source that gave images

to what we've got inside but we don't know what it is.

And through the fairytales and folk tales,

there seemed to be a pretty good picture.

Sometimes there's God, you know,

and sometimes there's the folk tales.

All these things are the same thing,

that is to say they all give a reflection

of what the mind is and the imagination is.

It was also, I think,

possibly a reaction against the disruption in our lives,

with the business and all that side of living I hated.

We had terrible difficulties until I wrote to the Gulbenkian.

I said, "Look, I need a grant

"but I don't know what I'm going to have a grant for,

"I just have no money."

They said to me, "Well, we'll give you a grant,

"you go and do whatever you like",

and that's when I went to the British Museum,

in that round room as it was years ago,

and I began to read fairy stories.

And I did all these drawings,

which I then gave to the Gulbenkian thanking them for the grant.

I read Italian stories, French stories, Portuguese stories,

the Portuguese stories are the most cruel and the most close to me.

SHE SPEAKS PORTUGUESE

'Once upon a time, there was a woman who was crying

'and crying because she couldn't have a baby.

'And an old woman came up to her and said, "What's the matter?'

"You can't have a baby? Well, look, take this cake",

and she gave her a cake.

But the woman was afraid the cake was poisoned,

so she gave it to her husband.

And the husband suddenly started,

"Oh, my God, my tummy's getting big, my tummy's getting big.

"I can't fit into my trousers, I don't know what the matter is."

And suddenly, there was a big explosion,

and the trousers burst, and out comes a baby.

The baby is just in mid-air and the eagle comes down,

takes the baby to her nest

and looks after her as her daughter.

Gave her clothes, gave her food

and forbade her never to go out of the nest.

She must stay in there always.

Then there was a milkmaid who comes and does the washing

for the palace because there's a great big palace, of course.

And she says, "People say I'm ugly,

"and look, I can see now in the reflection in this water

"that I'm actually beautiful."

Of course, it's the girl being reflected

from the top that she can see, not herself.

I like the idea of the man having the baby and his gut bursting.

I like that he says, "Oh, my tummy is getting fat,

"I can't get into my trousers." I love that.

It kind of serves him right.

-I don't mean that.

-It serves him right because...?

Well, the men never have the babies, do they?

I remember Mum working really hard throughout the 1970s,

but her collages pictures didn't break through in London.

Dad, meanwhile, asked me to time him every day

as he walked to the lamppost and back,

and every day, he'd take a few more seconds.

No-one was making any money,

and it wasn't long before the Gulbenkian grant ran out.

It was only thanks to Rudy who kept me going, really.

I met him at a party in 1973,

and Rudy, for good or for bad, he was able to advise me.

He was a practical man, to do with businesses and things like that.

And Vic was mad by then because he was taking cortisone

and he sometimes had temper flare-outs, which would...

He was like a mad person, really, how the cortisone affected him.

Mad.

Rudy, would say, "Listen, you must just work", and I did.

He was a very, very strong influence.

A bit of a bully, but that's what I needed.

Dad knew about it and Mum and Dad came to some sort of agreement

so a deal was struck.

You can love someone very much, even if you're unfaithful to them.

It's not very nice, or even respectable,

but you love them just as much.

And I loved Vic just the same.

And I just had this other man who paid for things.

MUSIC: La Norma, Act I: 'Casta Diva' by Jana Jonasova

And I think it was only afterwards

when my private life came back into the work

that things began to get a bit better.

But this was already 1979, you see, so things were changing.

You didn't have to do art any more.

It was so disgusting to do art, there's nothing worse.

So, it was like freedom again.

Then I became more down to earth and came to the monkey and the bear

and the unfaithful wife,

which was a really personal story.

It was Vic's story.

He had the theatre when he was a boy,

with a dog with one ear, a monkey and a bear.

He would entertain soldiers doing little puppets with them,

and I thought, "God, that's fantastic."

And I drew that down and I realised that the monkey was him

and the bear was Rudy, and then I introduced...

The dog with the one ear disappeared very quickly,

and a woman came in, which was myself.

And all these...

Then, of course, variations on this took place.

It was great fun.

Of course, I can say that now

but I wouldn't have said so at the time.

No-one knew, except Vic.

In this picture, the monkey beats his adulterous wife,

and then the next one, where the wife cuts off the monkey's tail.

I realise that what she's doing is not cutting off his tail,

she's cutting herself off from him.

She's separating, that's what she's doing in the picture,

what I did unconsciously.

I called it that at the time cos I didn't realise what was going on,

but that's what was going on in my life.

I was trying to cut myself away from Vic...

in order to survive.

I think Dad probably thought that was it.

And the only thing he could do -

end of act two, lose your house, lose your wife, dog dies, you know?

Act two, turning point, you bloody get on with it.

So, after a lifetime, so far, for him, of having painter's block,

if you will, when things couldn't be at their worst, he starts to paint?

Yes. When it really took off

was when he had nothing else to fall back on.

All was lost, pretty much.

He was incredibly brave.

He went to SPACE studio got himself a studio.

He bought these canvasses,

which were a mile long...

He was already limping from MS, with crutches,

and he moved into these crappy studios

and started painting these big paintings.

I thought, "Who on Earth is going to buy

"these big pictures? He must be crazy."

It's when he risked everything and he went for it

that he got there.

And it made a big impact.

Like Nick Serota giving him a show

at the Whitechapel.

Because it made Vic's life, you know?

It did, it made Vic's life.

They both became successful in the '80s.

But the sort of exhibition that really did the trick for Paula,

was that show in 1978, which was mostly about looking after Vic.

He was the dog, wasn't he, or the fox?

She couldn't do any of that caring stuff.

She couldn't do it with her children and she couldn't do it with Dad.

And Dad didn't want it either,

because it was humiliating,

and he didn't want their relationship to be about that.

She observed the feeding of the doggie,

but that wasn't her doing it.

And she wouldn't have made him take his medicine,

she couldn't make anybody do anything, literally, like that.

When you feed medicine into a dog,

you have to open his mouth by force, like this,

and then put in the medicine.

I thought there is both tenderness and aggression

so I thought that all those things together

were what it was like at the time, you see?

Because there are so many mixed feelings

about somebody who was very ill.

No matter how much you love them,

you resent them dreadfully for being ill.

It was so liked...

..the girls and dogs...

..that I got a call from the Marlborough.

Marlborough was a business that was founded just after the war,

and we got a reputation for representing important artists -

Francis Bacon, Henry Moore,

Barbara Hepworth, Lucien Freud.

We had galleries in New York, we had galleries in Madrid,

so we could offer someone like Paula a place on the international stage.

And the first pictures that we got from her were,

up to then, her greatest paintings, I felt.

The Family was about Vic.

They're trying anything to get their father to come alive,

rubbing themselves against him and everything.

I used to bring all my pictures and hang them up in front of his bed

-for him to see.

-In this room, right?

-This room, yeah.

-He would be lying there...

Here, the light's up there. Yeah.

And I'd say, "What do you think of this, then?"

"Just paint it all out."

He said, The Maids, I had it here.

He said, "Look, you've got some beautifully painted figures there,

"and you've got rubbish furniture behind it.

"It's killing the picture. Paint it all out."

So I went back and painted it all out.

Did he also help you with the subject matter,

the content of the pictures?

No.

No, that was nothing to do with him. It didn't...

But I mean how it's made is important, isn't it?

Despite being very incapacitated

by the stage I met him,

and very frail, he still seemed intensely present and sharp.

You could see him appraising everything

that was going on around him.

She painted Departure, which is this saying goodbye to Dad.

There he is with his trunk, packed.

She's combing his hair, he's going off.

"That's the best", he said.

That's the best, because he knew it was himself.

I went to see Dad, gave him a big kiss on the cheek and said,

"I've got the most terrible cold",

and he went... "Thanks."

But he was grateful and he was furious at the same time

as if he wanted to die,

but he hadn't anticipated that this was the way he was going to do it.

Anyway, he got my cold and then he died a week later,

because he'd refused any...

I think he refused antibiotics or anything to clear his lungs,

so his lungs filled up with fluid and he died.

She suddenly broke down.

I mean, she wailed.

She'd been with him when he died.

We were all sleeping on the floor in various rooms in the flat,

and she started yelling,

"Who's going to help me with my work now?!

"Who's going to help me with my work?!

"He didn't even say goodbye! He didn't even say goodbye!"

I actually told mum this story recently, and she was horrified.

She said, "What a selfish cow I am."

And then dad's best friend John Mills turned up

at 8.00 that morning and said,

"Vic's left a message, a goodbye message for you.

"It's in a secret file called 'Adieu.' "

"Paula, I'm uncomfortable now all the time.

"Most of me is gone already.

"It only remains for me to dispose of the other little bit

"while I still can.

"I don't want to know what the bitter end is.

"This will be a lonely moment, I imagine.

"Sell my things slowly and wisely.

"I know you will paint even better.

"Trust yourself and you will be your own best friend.

"As well as sadness, you may also feel relief.

"Don't feel badly about that.

"Enjoy life, it's all there is.

"The kids are great.

"All my love, Vic."

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mum has carried that note with her ever since,

often close to her heart.

It seemed to give her the strength to trust herself.

Well, it was very odd. It was like the baton being passed on.

It was very odd, because your father had the Whitechapel show

and then she had the Serpentine show.

Her career took off with that, his career...

That was the climax of it.

One of the last things he said to her

was that she should do The Dance,

and The Dance was a very moving farewell.

A sort of memory, I suppose,

of their lovely time in Portugal.

-But he's dancing...

-He's dancing with someone else.

With another girl.

Yes, but then there's this

"Liberty Leading the People" type of figure on the left.

That's what she's got to do -

to go into the future, bold as brass.

-Alone.

-Alone.

You feel she could knock out everyone flat.

She sort of arrived with this kind of...

important show.

The body of work that comprised the Serpentine show

told a very particular story.

A story that had a trajectory

that people could understand and empathise with.

For the Serpentine show, it was a tremendous success for her

in so many ways.

But we didn't realise at that time

what an effect she was going to have.

MUSIC: Havemos De Ir A Viana by Amalia Rodrigues

The first time I met Paula was actually at her one-man show

at the Serpentine in Hyde Park.

And in those days, it was rather unusual

for a woman to have a one-man show.

I had been part of the first post-war feminist movement

in which we were looking for exceptional figures, examples,

and models for us to emulate,

and Paula is really part of a generation

that enabled all those women artists now,

who in spite of continuing difficulties

are nevertheless in a very different place.

This is when Charles Saatchi comes into the equation.

I mean one forgets how important he was

as a force in the art world in those days.

He rang me, I remember, saying I had just been to see the Rego show

at the Serpentine and I was absolutely blown away

by the new paintings.

That was a relationship which lasted for 20 years,

something like that.

At last, I could live without having to worry,

paying bills and stuff like that -

that was the biggest thing of all, to be able to have money.

Fantastic.

And you know, there is an element also of relief

that somebody is not suffering so much.

My dear, it is dreadful, that.

And in the house, they are so sick, so sick.

Oh, no.

I was there, involved in the thing we always had together,

which was the painting, as I still am.

Except now he doesn't speak to me.

I missed him and I wanted to do something for him,

not for him but about him.

I didn't know how.

I mean it was difficult.

So I did Dog Woman.

The Dog Women are being told what to do by him.

Bad Dog is a girl being kicked out of the bed

because she's pissed the bed.

There is one which was the woman

sleeping on her owner's coat,

which was his blazer.

She's helping to be shot.

Yes.

Did making these pictures help the grief?

Well, yes.

It did because I liked them.

They were what I felt.

Usually she's trying to get that twist, that perversity,

that other thing that's going on between people.

It's not love, hate...

It's love and hate, you know?

It's stroking and hitting.

She's using me, you know, as her...

but I have never felt like your mother

was really painting me.

It's someone else she sees through me -

either herself or another person.

Somebody once was looking at a woman...

..and said to her...

"That's you, Lila", and she said,

"No, that's Dog Woman."

THEY CHUCKLE

Do you remember in the Saatchi collection?

THEY SPEAK IN PORTUGUESE

THEY LAUGH

SONG: La Gioconda: Act III 'Dance Of The Hours'

There's the young ostriches

and the old ostriches, which are saggy.

-They're sad.

-Are they?

Yes. They're lying there, asleep,

and one of them is waiting for a kiss, like that.

They had no boyfriends, they had nothing.

There weren't any male ostriches and they were just on their own,

prancing around and just being silly

and waiting for a kiss, waiting for love.

They don't have anybody, they're lonely.

Lonely ostriches!

She chose Disney films as a theme

and then put her own spin on them all

so she did the Ostriches from Fantasia.

Did she do Snow White?

And one of the stories she wanted to illustrate was Pinocchio.

And she knew I was a model maker

and she asked me to make a Pinocchio,

because she liked to have props to work from.

And Saatchi came to my studio

and he looked at that little boy,

Pinocchio, and he said, "What's that? Who did that?"

I said, "My son-in-law, Ron Mueck."

"Oh", he said, "we'll call him a new British artist."

I said, "But he's Australian."

"Never mind."

And Charles Saatchi said,

"Make some more stuff and I'll buy it",

and that meant I could stop my commercial work

for a period of time.

He purchased all those things that I made,

and one of them was Dead Dad.

EMOTIVE MUSIC

Paula has some sort of magic power.

I know people who sit for Paula are sort of scared stiff,

because she sort of casts spells on people and things, doesn't she?

Quite consciously. If she doesn't like you

and she puts you in a picture, you'd want to watch out!

She often talks about how you can change the past in a painting,

you can do something that you maybe didn't have the guts to do,

but you might have wished you had done at the time.

That's why I did my guardian angel.

That guardian angel I did, she exists, my God, she does,

that guardian angel.

I did her after the Amaro pictures,

you know, from the book.

When you're doing a book like that,

you go into the book,

you're part of it, you're actually in there.

And you can go to places where even the author doesn't go.

And you can bring some justice where justice is needed.

I know this sounds awful,

but there is some revenge sometimes necessary,

and I can provide that.

It was a big, big statement

and it was terribly important to do them.

I think it's the most ambitious thing I've ever done, actually.

I did them with a kind of wanting to

because it had all sorts of things brought together.

It was to do with my father, because it was the book he liked,

it was to do with Portugal, obviously,

it was to do with a love story, a forbidden love,

but it was a love story.

Anti-clerical or not, it was a love story,

and the fact that the girl gets pregnant and she's abandoned

and then she's sent somewhere to have a child...

In one of the versions of the book, the priest kills it.

He drowns the child,

strangles it and drowns it.

And at the end, I did The Angel,

because The Angel was going to punish

everybody that had done that.