{"id":537733,"date":"2026-03-15T09:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T09:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/537733\/"},"modified":"2026-03-15T09:41:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T09:41:07","slug":"edvard-munchs-formative-influence-on-paula-rego-revealed-in-unearthed-painting-paula-rego","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/537733\/","title":{"rendered":"Edvard Munch\u2019s formative influence on Paula Rego revealed in unearthed painting | Paula Rego"},"content":{"rendered":"

He is the towering modern artist of the Nordics; she the most influential figurative painter of the Iberian peninsula. But for decades, no one realised there was a line of influence between Edvard Munch<\/a> and Paula Rego.<\/p>\n

Now, the discovery of an early painting and a previously overlooked letter by the late Rego has revealed the formative role the Norwegian painter played in shaping the Portuguese artist\u2019s work and career.<\/p>\n

When Rego died in 2022, aged 87, it wasn\u2019t widely known that, 71 years earlier, Munch\u2019s paintings The Scream and Inheritance had deeply affected her when she visited a 1951 exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery in London.<\/p>\n

In a newly unearthed letter, 16-year-old Rego \u2013 who was attending a finishing school in Kent \u2013 recounted a school trip to the Tate to her mother, Maria, who was in Portugal. \u201cWhat impressed me most was an exhibition there by a modern Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch,\u201d she wrote in late 1951. Munch had died seven years earlier, aged 80.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if you are familiar with that quite famous painting The Scream \u2013 that\u2019s his \u2013 and he paints almost everything in that genre; he also has many engravings and drawings. But it\u2019s so impressive, so impressive that you can\u2019t imagine. Above all, a painting called Inheritance, which shows a seated woman crying with a skeleton child, all painted green, in her lap.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Skeleton child\u2019 \u2026 Edvard Munch\u2019s Inheritance (1897\u20131899). Photograph: Munchmuseet \/ Halvor Bj\u00f8rng\u00e5rd\/Edvard Munch<\/p>\n

About a year later, when families in her native Portugal were suffering from a severe drought, Rego used a colour palette reminiscent of The Scream to paint an open-mouthed pregnant woman carrying a skeletal infant and turning her face to the sun.<\/p>\n

Rego rediscovered the small 65cm by 22cm painting, which she titled Drought, in 2015, when she and her son, Nick Willing, were tidying Rego\u2019s family home in Portugal.<\/p>\n

It was placed in a portfolio and left in storage in her London studio until after her death. Last October, it was unearthed by Willing and the head of her estate, and has never been on public display.<\/p>\n

Visual dialogue \u2026 Munch\u2019s Anxiety (c1894). Photograph: Munchmuseet\/Ove Kvavik\/Edvard Munch<\/p>\n

He showed it to Kari J Brandtz\u00e6g, an art historian at Norway\u2019s Munch Museum, who immediately saw a connection to The Scream and Anxiety by Munch. \u201cIt was so obvious in the use of red and yellow and also how it was painted, very roughly, as Munch did in his 1890s paintings,\u201d Brandtz\u00e6g said.<\/p>\n

The painting will be one of the stars of Dance Among Thorns<\/a>, the first major museum exhibition in the Nordic region devoted to Rego, which opens at the Munch Museum in Oslo on 24 April.<\/p>\n

When Brandtz\u00e6g was asked to curate the show 18 months ago, she had no idea Rego had encountered the work of Munch \u2013 who died in 1944 \u2013 during her formative years as an artist.<\/p>\n

But as soon as she started choosing Rego\u2019s paintings for the exhibition, she was struck by the similarities between the composition and themes of Rego\u2019s The Dance (1988), and Munch\u2019s The Dance of Life (1925), and Rego\u2019s Time \u2013 Past and Present<\/a> (1990) and Munch\u2019s History (1914)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a kind of dialogue with Munch\u2019s pictures. It is almost as though Rego is having a silent conversation with Munch\u2019s visual world,\u201d said Brandtz\u00e6g.<\/p>\n

Willing confirmed that his late mother admired Munch \u2013 but no matter how hard Brandtz\u00e6g looked, \u201cwe couldn\u2019t find any traces that she went to Oslo or other possible places to see Munch\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was no concrete evidence connected to when and how Rego might have experienced Munch\u2019s work,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She had almost given up researching the relationship when the discovery of Drought in October convinced her that her hunch was right. \u201cIt was like working as a detective,\u201d she said. \u201cI got butterflies in my stomach. I was very excited.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knowing that the portrait was painted when Rego was a teenager, she decided to refine her research to the 1950s. \u201cIt was one of her first paintings and it was so visually connected to Munch.\u201d<\/p>\n

In step \u2026 Paula Rego\u2019s The Dance (1988), left, and Edvard Munch\u2019s The Dance of Life (1925). Photograph: \u00a9 The Estate of Paula Rego, Tate Images\/Edvard Munch<\/p>\n

Willing and a Rego archivist, Eloisa Rodriguez, agreed to help her comb the artist\u2019s archive for letters from the period, which Rego often wrote in Portuguese. A few weeks later, when the letter recounting the Munch exhibition in 1951 was found among Rego\u2019s papers, Brandtz\u00e6g felt as if she\u2019d won the lottery. \u201cIt was electrifying,\u201d Brandtz\u00e6g said.<\/p>\n

Brandtz\u00e6g also uncovered an oral interview Rego gave to the British Library in 2004, for its National Life Stories project, in which Rego recalled attending \u201ca big show\u201d of Munch\u2019s in the early 1950s in Paris. \u201cIn 1952, at the Petit Palais, she saw nearly the same touring exhibition with her parents,\u201d Brandtz\u00e6g said. \u201cThat gives you some understanding of how important and connected she felt to Munch, that she might have insisted on going to the exhibition and looking at many of the same pictures she had seen at the Tate a year before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rego said she thought Munch\u2019s paintings were \u201camazing\u201d and \u201cvery emotional\u201d: \u201cI loved the life in them and all these things that were going on seem to me what I was trying to do, really.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brandtz\u00e6g thinks Munch \u201cbecame a kind of idol for Rego, who triggered her own feelings and gave her courage and inspiration\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cMunch became a friend in art she could look at and get ideas from,\u201d Brandtz\u00e6g said. \u201cSomething deep within her resonates with Munch\u2019s work, something that she wants to express. Both for Rego and for Munch, art is a way of finding and being yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He is the towering modern artist of the Nordics; she the most influential figurative painter of the Iberian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":537734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-537733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=537733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/537733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/537734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=537733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=537733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=537733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}