InSight investigates the subtexts of an important pastel by Paula Rego currently displayed on Piano Nobile’s stand at Frieze Masters.
InSight No. 198
Paula Rego, Mouth Organ, 2003
Images can accrue meaning in different ways. In the twelfth century, Abbot Suger described four levels of meaning: the literal (material), allegorical, tropological (moral) and anagogical (spiritual). More recently in 1934, writing of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, the art historian Erwin Panofsky perceived a kind of ‘disguised’ symbolism. ‘Significant attributes’ realised as ‘ordinary pieces of furniture’ created a suspicion that there was ‘a hidden significance in all and every object’. Although Panofsky was factually mistaken to describe the Arnolfini Portrait as the depiction of a marriage contract, he inadvertently described a feature of Paula Rego’s (1935–2022) work several decades later: the transformation of real people and props into an imaginative drama, in which gestures and objects grew from strong but veiled emotions and scenarios.
Rego sometimes operated in the same realm of visual puns as her spiritual forbear Francisco de Goya (1746–1828). Musical instruments appear in both artists’ work and the interaction between player and instrument is necessarily intimate. Music has traditionally been employed as a metaphor for sensuality, even hedonism, and certain instruments become somatic like extensions of the body. In Goya’s late etching of a blind singer, strumming his guitar on the streets of Bordeaux, there is considerable pathos as his music rises to meet the absence of sight. An earlier brush drawing on paper is charged with allegorical satire. A singing, guitar-playing ghost menaces a nun, but she fights to resist temptation. Her narrow devotion to religion precludes for her the pleasures of music (and of other things too), and this is apparently one more of the faults that Goya targeted in the religious practices and institutions of his day.
In the early years of the new millennium, Rego made several pictures of women playing musical instruments. They blow on the harmonica, squeeze the accordion or strum the ukelele. They were partly inspired by her invitation in 2003 to participate in an exhibition called La Fête at Espace Bellevue in Biarritz, which explored ‘the art of la fête’ — the party, the celebration — ‘from the nineteenth century to the present day’. Many musical instrument subjects were also exhibited together in Rego’s exhibition, Jane Eyre and Other Stories, held directly after the Biarritz exhibition. Notwithstanding the exhibition title, Charlotte Brontë’s novel was just one layer of Rego’s fiction and related only to some pictures included in the show (Jane, Edward and Bertha, for instance, which evoke Brontë’s protagonist Jane Eyre, her prospective husband Mr Rochester and his incarcerated wife).
Many of the stories told by Rego’s work have yet to be interpreted, and the narrative of Mouth Organ is opaque. A clue to its meaning is provided by the title of a closely related lithograph called Apres la Fête, which was made in the same year as Mouth Organ and treats the same figure subject in reverse. The yellow of the dress is retained in the lithograph, but the background has been erased and instead there stands behind the chair a pinto calçudo — a baby chick with its legs covered in feathers. The phrase evokes an awkward juvenile growing into adolescence, while ‘pinto’ is Brazilian Portuguese slang for male genitalia. In this context, the phrase ‘Apres la Fête’ might imply a post-coital moment: her partner has departed; the woman is left to her thoughts.
As such, in some contexts ‘la fête’ might be an oblique reference to sex. Another pastel called La Fête depicts a woman playing the accordion or squeeze box, which instrument has often been used as a convenient and colloquial visual metaphor owing to its rhythmic extensions and contractions. However, as in Panofsky’s notion of disguised symbolism, these points of reference remain hidden, and Rego kept them out of sight for a reason. The women in these pictures have a fierce psychological presence; they burn with powerful emotions. Whatever the subtext for their invention, they are redolent of rich and complex lives. For the time being, one can only surmise whether or not their lives echo with aspects of Rego’s own.
Images:
Francisco de Goya, A nun frightened by a ghost playing a guitar, c. 1812–20, brush and ink and black chalk on paper, 20.5 x 14.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Francisco de Goya, Blind Singer, c. 1826–28, etching, acquatint, drypoint, burin on laid paper, 19 x 12.2 cm (plate), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
