In 1951, a 16-year-old Paula Rego wrote to her mother after visiting an Edvard Munch exhibition, the Guardian reported Sunday, in a newly uncovered letter.
“It’s so impressive that you can’t imagine,” Rego wrote, years before she would emerge as the Iberian Peninsula’s preeminent figurative painter, known for her searing visions of womanhood.
Rego died in 2022 at 87, apparently never recounting to anyone besides her mother, Maria, the formative visit to the Tate Gallery in London she made while attending a finishing school in Kent. “What impressed me most was an exhibition there by a modern Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch,” she wrote, singling out The Scream and Inheritance among the works that struck her most.
The letter goes on: “I don’t know if you are familiar with that quite famous painting The Scream—that’s his—and he paints almost everything in that genre; he also has many engravings and drawings. But it’s so impressive, so impressive that you can’t imagine. Above all, a painting called Inheritance, which shows a seated woman crying with a skeleton child, all painted green, in her lap.”
His influence surfaced swiftly in her work. Roughly a year later, while her native Portugal endured a devastating drought, she painted a scene reminiscent of The Scream: a pregnant woman, slack-jawed in horror, cradling an emaciated baby as she faced a blazing sun in a crimson sky. According to the report, Rego rediscovered the small painting, which she titled Drought, in 2015 while cleaning the family home in Portugal with her son, Nick Willing. He brought the work to Kari J. Brandtzæg, an art historian at the Munch Museum in Oslo, who found its red-and-yellow color palette and expressionist brushstrokes reminiscent of Anxiety and The Scream.
Drought will feature in “Dance Among Thorns,” the first significant museum exhibition dedicated to Rego in Scandinavia. Curated by Brandtzæg, it opens at the Munch Museum in Oslo on 24 April. Brandtzæg told The Guardian that the connection between Rego and Munch became increasingly apparent over the 18 months she spent curating the exhibition.
The deeper she delved into their practices, the more striking she found the similarities in composition, color, and preoccupations—both painters imbued with an intuitive sense of how to dramatize one’s terrible, tremendous inner world. She noted, in particular, the visual resonance between Rego’s The Dance (1988) and Munch’s The Dance of Life (1925), as well as Rego’s Time – Past and Present (1990) and Munch’s History (1914).
“There is a kind of dialogue with Munch’s pictures. It is almost as though Rego is having a silent conversation with Munch’s visual world,” Brandtzæg told the publication.
