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 and Paula Rego.
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’s work and career.
When Rego died in 2022, aged 87, it wasn’t widely known that, 71 years earlier, Munch’s paintings The Scream and Inheritance had deeply affected her when she visited a 1951 exhibition of his work at the Tate Gallery in London.
In a newly unearthed letter, 16-year-old Rego – who was attending a finishing school in Kent – recounted a school trip to the Tate to her mother, Maria, who was in Portugal. “What impressed me most was an exhibition there by a modern Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch,” she wrote in late 1951. Munch had died seven years earlier, aged 80.
“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.”
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.
Rego rediscovered the small 65cm by 22cm painting, which she titled Drought, in 2015, when she and her son, Nick Willing, were tidying Rego’s family home in Portugal.
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.
He showed it to Kari J Brandtzæg, an art historian at Norway’s Munch Museum, who immediately saw a connection to The Scream and Anxiety by Munch. “It 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,” Brandtzæg said.
The painting will be one of the stars of Dance Among Thorns, the first major museum exhibition in the Nordic region devoted to Rego, which opens at the Munch Museum in Oslo on 24 April.
When Brandtzæg was asked to curate the show 18 months ago, she had no idea Rego had encountered the work of Munch – who died in 1944 – during her formative years as an artist.
But as soon as she started choosing Rego’s paintings for the exhibition, she was struck by the similarities between the composition and themes of Rego’s The Dance (1988), and Munch’s The Dance of Life (1925), and 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,” said Brandtzæg.
Willing confirmed that his late mother admired Munch – but no matter how hard Brandtzæg looked, “we couldn’t find any traces that she went to Oslo or other possible places to see Munch”.
“There was no concrete evidence connected to when and how Rego might have experienced Munch’s work,” she said.
She had almost given up researching the relationship when the discovery of Drought in October convinced her that her hunch was right. “It was like working as a detective,” she said. “I got butterflies in my stomach. I was very excited.”
Knowing that the portrait was painted when Rego was a teenager, she decided to refine her research to the 1950s. “It was one of her first paintings and it was so visually connected to Munch.”
Willing and a Rego archivist, Eloisa Rodriguez, agreed to help her comb the artist’s 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’s papers, Brandtzæg felt as if she’d won the lottery. “It was electrifying,” Brandtzæg said.
Brandtzæg also uncovered an oral interview Rego gave to the British Library in 2004, for its National Life Stories project, in which Rego recalled attending “a big show” of Munch’s in the early 1950s in Paris. “In 1952, at the Petit Palais, she saw nearly the same touring exhibition with her parents,” Brandtzæg said. “That 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.”
Rego said she thought Munch’s paintings were “amazing” and “very emotional”: “I loved the life in them and all these things that were going on seem to me what I was trying to do, really.”
Brandtzæg thinks Munch “became a kind of idol for Rego, who triggered her own feelings and gave her courage and inspiration”.
“Munch became a friend in art she could look at and get ideas from,” Brandtzæg said. “Something deep within her resonates with Munch’s work, something that she wants to express. Both for Rego and for Munch, art is a way of finding and being yourself.”
