Paula rego biography

Imogen Greenhalgh is Deputy Editor of the RA Magazine.

In the afternoon, the artist prefers fado, the plaintive music of her native Portugal.

Paula rego biography

Rego inherited her love of opera from her father, who would often take her to see performances in Lisbon while she was growing up.

Born in 1935, Rego had an upbringing that was "formal" but "mostly happy", she says, the only child in a well-off liberal family.

But the Regos, like the rest of Portugal, lived under the repression of fascist dictator Antonio Salazar until 1968; outside the home censorship was rife, and civil liberties, particularly those of women, ruthlessly circumscribed.

The young Rego was soon conscious of the confluence of violence and power – forces she faced through drawing, and which are an abiding theme in her art. What scares he