Estimate

180.000 - 250.000

Session

14 November 2024

Hammer Price

Description

Pastel on paper

84x67 cm

Category

Modern and Contemporary Art

Additional Information

Exhibitions:
"Paula Rego", Exposição Antológica, Museu de Serralves, Porto, 2004-2005, Cat. p. 201; "Family Sayings", La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, 2017; "All the Better to See You With: Fairy Tales Transformed", The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2017-2018; "Paula Rego: Folktales and Fairy Tales", Casa das Histórias, Cascais, 2018.
Literature:
Deryn Rees-Jones, "Paula Rego The Art of Story", Thames&Hudson, il. p. 251; "Paula Rego Retrospective", Tate Britain, London, il. p.44.

Catalogue Essay

The Manipulative Mother

This painting is part of a series depicting – or rather playing around with – the European fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, the young girl who is tricked into revealing the way to her grandmother’s house by a wolf who promptly beats her to the house and devours first the grandmother then Little Red Riding Hood herself. The tale in its best-known versions (written down in the seventeenth century from several oral sources by Charles Perrault and in the nineteenth century by the Brothers Grimm) is a cautionary one, warning us to be careful about talking to strangers in the wood. In the Grimm version, both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother survive, cut from the wolf’s belly by a huntsman who wants the wolf’s skin. The story has been multiply told and re-told, with many a variation and interpretation, most notably by novelist Angela Carter whose ‘Company of Wolves’ reworks the story as one of puberty, sexual awakening and feminist agency.

Rego’s series of pastels gives us six moments from the story: ‘Happy Family: Mother, Red Riding Hood and Grandmother’; ‘Little Red Riding Hood on the Edge’; ‘The Wolf’; ‘The Wolf Chats Up Red Riding Hood’; ‘Mother Takes Revenge’; and this picture, ‘Mother Wears the Wolf’s Pelt’. Rego’s Little Red Riding Hood veers between innocent young girl (though ‘on the edge’ – of what, sexual maturity as in the Carter story?) and sceptical adolescent, arms folded in the face of the ‘wolf’, clearly a man, his likeness that of one of Rego’s most persistent models. Rego’s grandmother appears only once, fading into the background of the ‘happy family’ but the artist inserts a mother into the tale, first embracing her daughter as part of a traditionally imagined maternal hierarchy cruelly disrupted by the wolf; next laying into the wolf with a pitchfork, and finally alone and triumphant in this painting.

In Rego’s version of the story, condensed into this picture, female power and rivalry are to the fore. If Little Red Riding Hood may be interpreted as a fable to do with sexual awakening and coming of age, then there is something about it of the Electra complex; that developmental stage identified by Carl Jung to match the male Oedipus complex, in which a girl experiences her developing sexuality as a psychosexual competition with her mother for the attention of her father. Rego was interested in Jung’s theories, and saw a Jungian analyst throughout her life. Equally, she was interested in traditional children’s tales, making prints and paintings inspired by them throughout her career, and seeing them (like psychoanalytic theories) as capacious, elastic vehicles for individual imagination and collective recognition.

In ‘Mother Wears the Wolf’s Pelt’, the mother sits smartly dressed in a red velvet dress on a swivel, office type chair. She wears a hat and a fur stole, the shaggy end of which she clutches in one hand like a handbag. Her other hand hovers protectively – suggestively – over her stomach. In the narrative dynamics of the series to which the painting belongs, she has clearly dispatched and skinned the wolf, overpowering him and beating her daughter in any psycho-sexual power game they might be playing. Tender in ‘Happy Family’, determined in ‘Mother Takes Revenge’, in this painting she is both smug and sly. She has taken her revenge, but on who? And who or what is in her stomach? The wolf? Her daughter?

Mothers are part of Paula Rego’s regular cast of characters. Rarely straightforward, they can be loving; are sometimes shy, retiring and browbeaten (I am thinking, for example, of the mother fading into the background in ‘Pregnant Rabbit Telling her Parents’, 1981, or re-imagined as a defeated vegetable in ‘Rabbit and Weeping Cabbage’, 1982); but can also often be scheming, competitive and manipulative. The mother in this painting seems of the third type. She has about her something of the mothers in the large painting ‘Betrothal’, one of three panels in the triptych ‘After ‘Marriage à la Mode by Hogarth’, 1999. The painting shows two mothers engaged in some kind of bridal negotiation. One – the mother of the girl ¬– perches on the arm of a chair, dressed in high heels, tight skirt and a power jacket. The other, her son cowering nervously behind her, wears and fondles a fur stole uncomfortably suggestive of the wolf’s pelt of the later painting. With its psycho-sexual complexities and ambiguities (the girl, for example, seems to flirt with the viewer as she gazes straight out of the painting while fondling her dog with her feet but it is in fact the gaze of her father, looking at her in a mirror, that she is returning), this painting seems to take something from Rego’s work with the tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

This painting is made in oil pastel, Rego’s signature medium. Working in pastel allowed her to make paintings with a looseness, freedom and immediacy more normally associated with drawing. Rego’s mastery of pastel is to the fore in this painting, her mark making both fluid and descriptive, the surface of the painting alive with a materiality and dynamism that complements the narrative while elevating the painting from the realm of illustration into the kind of original storytelling for which Rego is justifiably admired.

Fiona Bradley

Director Fruitmarket, Edinburgh
Curator ‘Paula Rego’, Tate Liverpool, 1996-1997