Paula Rego: Secrets & Stories 2017

Dame Paula Rego stands as one of the most influential figurative artists of the post‑war era, and this intimate documentary invites viewers into the life behind the powerful images. Directed by her son, the film pairs a deeply personal portrait with a sweeping survey of her work, showing how life, memory, and emotion fuel the stark, dream‑like stories that populate her pictures. It is not only a biography but a rigorous examination of the forces that shaped an extraordinary mother and artist, and it treats the relationship between filmmaker and subject as a source of revelation that sharpens the film’s emotional impact.

The documentary traces a life marked by international achievement and private vulnerability. Rego’s career flourished to the point where she established her own museum in Cascais near Lisbon, received honorary doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, earned a damehood, and inspired countless books and major exhibitions. Yet the profile remains grounded in the woman behind the canvas, whose life stories and the experiences that fed her work had often stayed tucked away until now. In this candid, mother‑to‑son conversation, the viewer learns how the figures and narratives that populate her works are drawn from real memories, fears, and desires, turning private moments into public art.

The film opens with a vivid portrait of Rego’s childhood in Portugal, a society described as stifling and male‑dominated, where women were often “encouraged to do absolutely nothing.” The narrative then moves through a life of contrasts: a shy girl who discovered through drawing a way to act out fantasies, a father who encouraged her to read great storytellers and to tell her own stories through image, and a younger self who could not always reconcile fantasy with the world around her. Her early talent led to the Slade School of Art in London, where a rigorous, traditional method clashed with her imagination. There, she met Victor Willing, a painter who would become a central figure in her life, even as their relationship confronted moral and social complications.

As a teenager in London, the pressures of being a foreign woman in a male‑dominated art scene collided with intense personal choices. The film recounts her fears about pregnancy and the risk of losing her ambitions—choices that lead her to a back‑street abortion. This period is rendered with stark honesty and emotional resonance, showing how such experiences later resurfaced in her work. The documentary touches on the 1998 abortion referendum in Portugal and its political significance, illustrating how Rego’s powerful images helped galvanize public opinion and bring about change. It is a moment the film emphasizes to show how art can intersect with social reform.

Back in Portugal, Rego’s life takes a turn that blends love, motherhood, and professional renewal. She becomes pregnant again and, despite the fear of social ostracism, decides to keep the baby. Victor returns to Portugal to live with her, and the couple marries, producing more children and a surge in artistic vitality. The film threads these personal milestones with ongoing creative energy, revealing how her personal life repeatedly fed her art, and how the shadows of fear and dread—themes that recur in her pictures—persisted even as she found new strength.

The documentary does not shy away from the darker chapters. Rego discusses long‑standing depression, including a painful spell in 2006–7 during which she attempted to “draw her way out.” A private moment later captured on camera shows how those twelve large pastels, created during that period, encapsulated the emotional storms she endured. The film respects these memories as essential to understanding her work, not exploiting them for sensational effect.

Financial and personal upheaval also shape the narrative arc. After her father’s death in 1966, Willing took over the family electronics business, mortgaging the home to invest in it, only to suffer a brutal bankruptcy that left the family precarious. Victor Willing’s diagnosis with multiple sclerosis intensified the strain, and the family’s move to London coincided with a further downturn in Rego’s mental health and creative reception. Yet the artist continued to work, stubbornly maintaining a daily practice even when the market offered little encouragement.

The turning point arrives in 1980, when Rego’s work undergoes a dramatic transformation. She begins weaving her private life—her relationships, her fears, her fantasies—more openly into her imagery, a shift that revitalizes her practice. In 1986 Marlborough Fine Art signs her, and the momentum culminates after Willing’s death in 1988 with a major retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The retrospective cements Rego as a leading figure of her generation, and the film traces how this period of renewed visibility brought even deeper exploration of themes that would come to define her most celebrated bodies of work.

Throughout the narrative, the film emphasizes the evolving relationship between the filmmaker and his subject. It presents Nick Willing’s effort to rediscover his mother, understand the meanings behind her panels, and connect with the person beneath the public persona. The closing moments offer a quiet, moving revelation about what Paula Rego herself values most—an answer that emerges not as a grand statement but as a personal measure of pride and fulfillment.

The documentary remains both a comprehensive life study and a vivid art history, showing how Rego’s experiences—childhood, motherhood, love, grief, and resilience—inform her most powerful pictures. It respects the complexity of a life lived under the pressure of public achievement and private struggle, presenting a portrait that is at once intimate and expansive, challenging yet accessible, and always anchored by the remarkable clarity of its subject’s vision.