‘It’s so impressive that you can’t imagine,’ wrote a 16-year-old Rego to her mother after seeing a Munch exhibition in London in 1951
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.
