Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic In 1988, the death of her husband Victor Willing “opened a whole corridor into the darkness, and I followed it”, Paula Rego recounted. The great Portuguese-British painter, then 53, finished “The Dance”, a tremendous nocturne of couples and a lone woman whirling by the sea, on which Willing had advised. Afterwards, she faced a blank.“Luckily”, as she remembered it, in 1989 the printer Paul Coldwell invited her to make prints “and I began doing my Nursery Rhymes, and everything that had been squashed in there, all the ideas and all the stuff, it all came pouring out . . . and Paul said, ‘It’s like a pizza parlour in here’. I’m holding all these plates, four at a time — and it was such a relief.”What tumbled out, like the teeming children in “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe” — staged as an underage brothel with a spanking madam — is violent, shocking, funny and irrepressible. Rego depicted her mother as a malevolent spider overwhelming the child in “Little Miss Muffet” and made “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” a huge sexy ram clasping a rapt teenager. “Hey Diddle Diddle” reprises the moonlit “Dance”: a little girl, leaping hesitantly, is imported from the painting to join the exultant animal cast led by the violinist cat, proud on its hind legs, fangs bared, tail upturned.The glory of mature Rego — the graphic brilliance and inventiveness, the blend of fantasy and acute naturalistic representation, sympathy and malicious glee, clarity yet mystery, that made her the unrivalled narrative artist of her generation — first found full expression with this series. That series’ importance is acknowledged in two major forthcoming exhibitions: Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya at Bath’s Holburne Museum and Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature, a Hayward Gallery touring show being launched at Nottingham’s Djanogly Gallery.Each exhibition shows — and, in different ways, contextualises — the Nursery Rhymes, celebrating how Rego was inspired by nonsense verse, with its carnival spirit and anarchic reversals. Inversion of power, the revenge of the weak on the strong, especially by women, were her abiding themes, played out in the surrealist games of scale that are key to children’s stories. Set in a doll’s house, “Polly Put the Kettle on” has a giant maid about to tip boiling water on to a group of tin soldiers. In “A Frog he would a’wooing go”, Rego portrays herself as the large vicious cat holding a rat in its mouth; the little amphibian courtier — modelled on her lover Rudi Nassauer — hastily exits, to be pursued by an immense goose.At the Holburne, the Nursery Rhymes will be shown alongside Goya’s etchings from Los Disparates, Los Caprichos and Los Desastres de la Guerra, including — displayed for the first time — the very prints Rego owned, hung around her bed, saw morning and night. Most of them concern women’s suffering: the rape scene “No quieren”, and “Madre infeliz”, a mother trying to shield her child from war’s atrocities; “El Amor y la Muerte”, a woman supporting her lover wounded in a duel, and “Tantalo”, about female sexuality — a young wife dying from frustration with her impotent husband. The juxtaposition emphasises Rego’s vital connection to Goya — shared interests in dreams, folklore, repressed desires — and to the whole Iberian tradition of grotesque, exaggerated realism. Her sinister “Ring-a-ring o’Roses” etchings, one a vortex of clinging, desperate figures, the other a dark group spinning around a pink-tinged pool, recall Goya’s “Disparate Femenino” — a circle of women tossing puppets from a blanket holding an unfortunate man and donkey. Rego’s hapless soldiers, white Napoleon-era uniforms illuminated as they march at dead of night in “The Grand Old Duke of York”, and the girls running down an avenue of gigantic candles in “How Many Miles to Babylon?”, are virtuoso stagings, bold drawing enhanced by inky aquatint dramas of light and shadow, recalling Spanish theatre of cruelty from El Greco to Picasso.The Hayward Gallery, by contrast, places the Nursery Rhymes with Rego’s print series Peter Pan (1992) and Jane Eyre (2002). Here, Rego is visual interpreter of a particularly British phenomenon: Victorian and Edwardian obsessions with the culture of childhood. Rego insisted that to “get reconnected with childhood, with the extraordinary” was fundamental to her art: “When you talk about your childhood, you come to realise you are the same person now as you were then.” JM Barrie’s Peter Pan, about the boy who never grows up, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, the first British novel narrated in part, harrowingly, by a child and fiction’s most potent dovetailing of realism and fantasy, were natural subjects for her.Her Peter Pan marvellously visualises the pull between flight and drowning. The Darling siblings soar across a limpid blue sky to freedom in the beautiful coloured etching “Flying Children”, partly based on Titian’s “Resurrection”. In “The Neverland”, a crocodile, swimming bull, skull-headed goat and other beasts follow Hook, curls twisting like “black candles about to melt”, wheeled in his splendid carriage into cavernous waters. Rego saw Barrie’s play, with its subterranean currents of sex and power, as “an underground world that has a sea in it . . . a child’s inferno”. In the final etching, a pregnant Wendy stirs a cauldron of blood and foetuses — heralding Rego’s 1999 Abortion series.Her “Jane Eyre”, which followed, is a feminist reading told through harsh expressive gestures within a chiaroscuro Gothic milieu. Rochester, ridiculed, swaggers like a Hollywood cad, seeking sly sexual encounters with Bertha the insane woman in the attic, who is drawn from the same model Rego used for Jane — twinning madness with (socially unacceptable) female desire. Thus Rego nuances the happy ending: “Come to Me”, Jane’s response to Rochester’s eerie cry summoning her back, portrays her in anguished indecision, against Thornfield Hall’s flames. “She does go to him,” Rego says, “but it’s not such a good deal, I put her doubting.”With the child Jane, Rego supremely empathises: as a crumpled ragdoll, terrified, thrown into the haunted red room; as a tiny puppet, rigid with fear, held up for the monster school torturer Mr Brocklehurst’s inspection. Best of all, in the erotic “Loving Bewick”, Jane opens her mouth to the beak of an enormous pelican who nourishes her literally, as Bewick’s History of British Birds consoled her imaginatively in the hostile Reed household. “Each picture told a story,” Brontë wrote. Later, to paint becomes for Jane “one of the keenest pleasures I have ever known”.In the sumptuous “Getting Ready for the Ball”, Rego satirises Thornfield Hall’s aristocratic ungainly girls in red and gold velvet — the inspiration is Velázquez’s “Las Meninas”. But in the corner she places “little Jane . . . making pictures so that she can get her own back on these posh people”. What a self-portrait: the artist as rebel storyteller, original, authentic and ruthless.‘Paula Rego: Visions of English Literature’, Djanogly Gallery, Nottingham, September 21-January 2025, then touring; ‘Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya’, Holburne Museum, Bath, September 27-January 5
