Newly Unearthed Letter Reveals Edvard Munch's Influence On Paula Rego

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Newly Found 1951 Letter Shows How Edvard Munch Shaped a Teenage Paula Rego

A newly uncovered letter written in 1951 reveals that Portuguese British artist Paula Rego (1935–2022) left a visit to London’s Tate Gallery shaken and exhilarated by the work of Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863–1944) - an encounter she appears to have shared only with her mother, Maria.

Rego was 16 and attending a finishing school in Kent when she saw an exhibition of Munch’s work at the Tate. In the letter, first reported by The Guardian, she described the experience in breathless terms:“It’s so impressive that you can’t imagine.” She singled out“The Scream” and“Inheritance” as the works that struck her most deeply.

Rego’s description of“The Scream” underscores how quickly she grasped Munch’s emotional register, noting that he painted“almost everything in that genre,” and that the exhibition also included engravings and drawings. But it was“Inheritance,” she wrote, that lingered with particular force:“a seated woman crying with a skeleton child, all painted green, in her lap.”

The letter adds a new, intimate piece of evidence to a connection that curators and scholars have increasingly traced between the two artists: a shared instinct for staging psychological intensity through charged color, compressed space, and figures caught in states of dread, grief, or uneasy revelation.

That influence surfaced in Rego’s work almost immediately. Roughly a year after the Tate visit - as Portugal endured a devastating drought - she painted“Drought,” a small composition that echoes the existential alarm of“The Scream.” Rego’s scene centers on a pregnant woman, her mouth slack with horror, holding an emaciated baby beneath a blazing sun set against a crimson sky.

According to the report, Rego rediscovered“Drought” in 2015 while cleaning the family home in Portugal with her son, Nick Willing. Willing brought the painting to Kari J. Brandtzæg, an art historian at the Munch Museum in Oslo, who noted the work’s red-and-yellow palette and expressionist handling as resonant with Munch’s“Anxiety” and“The Scream.”

“Drought” will now take on a prominent role in“Dance Among Thorns,” described as the first significant museum exhibition devoted to Rego in Scandinavia. Curated by Brandtzæg, the show opens April 24 at the Munch Museum in Oslo.

As Brandtzæg developed the exhibition over 18 months, she said the parallels between Rego and Munch became harder to ignore - not as a simple story of influence, but as a sustained visual kinship. She pointed to the compositional and thematic rhymes 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,” Brandtzæg told The Guardian.“It is almost as though Rego is having a silent conversation with Munch’s visual world.”

For an artist celebrated for her unsparing depictions of womanhood and power - and for narratives that feel both theatrical and brutally private - the letter offers a rare glimpse of Rego as a young viewer, encountering an older master’s language of anguish and carrying it, quietly, into her own.

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