Painter whose powerful images of women disrupted the male gaze
The artist Paula Rego, who has died aged 87, once said that she liked “to work on the edge”, and her many series of paintings and drawings, about the subjugation of women, abortion and the marriage market, cut across social perceptions of the role of women, and disrupted the male view of women and their sexuality.
The anger that built up in her years of subjection to the men in her life – even her husband, Victor Willing, who took up years of her life as she nursed him – enabled her to deploy her art as a political weapon. One of her most famous paintings, The Policeman’s Daughter (1987), needs no interpretation: in it, a scowling young woman cleans her father’s jackboot with one hand while she shoves the other arm up inside it.
