Art’s great storyteller has died at the age of 87. Our critic celebrates a woman of courage and freakish imagination
The wickedness of Paula Rego’s imagination shines like patent leather in her 1987 painting The Policeman’s Daughter. A young woman is polishing, as the title tells us, her father’s jackboot. He is nowhere to be seen, but the spectre of a man we take to be an authoritarian bully haunts the fetish object that is his boot. His daughter has her arm sunk into it, right down to the sole, as if she is being swallowed, or willingly immersing herself in a dubious sensual communion with an image of brutality. It is a painting of compromise, corruption and the squalor of power.
Rego refused to waste her life like this woman, lost in the dusty perversions of an authoritarian regime, or in the more polite claustrophobia of the English middle-class family.
