In the summer of 2004, renowned Portuguese artist Paula Rego reached out to playwright Martin McDonagh with an unusual request - permission to name some of her paintings after his shocking play "The Pillowman." The 69-year-old grandmother and world-famous artist had been so moved by McDonagh's brutal exploration of art and life that she created her own life-sized pillowman doll as the centerpiece for a major exhibition at Tate Britain.
McDonagh's play, which featured two brothers under interrogation for the torture and murder of children, resonated deeply with Rego's own experiences growing up under António de Oliveira Salazar's dictatorship in Portugal. "The brutality and beauty and humor rang very true and like something I had known all my life," she wrote to McDonagh. "I am actually Portuguese, although I have lived in London for 50 years, and our stories are brusque and cruel like yours."
This initial connection sparked an enthusiastic correspondence between the mature artist and the young playwright. McDonagh, excited by Rego's interest, began sending her stories from his archives - tales he had written in his twenties as potential outlines for short films. "Now listen, they were written quite a few years ago and some are very young and silly and none of them are well written," he wrote in February 2005. "But some of them have interesting images, maybe, so if anything takes your fancy let me know."
Rego's handmade pillowman, with its bulging hippopotamus head and white wellington boots, still sits in her former north London studio, which has become her archive since her death in 2022. The bizarre figure seems to watch over the artworks inspired by McDonagh's stories, which are now being prepared for exhibition at London's Cristea Roberts Gallery. The show focuses on a remarkably productive three-year period from 2005 to 2007, when Rego developed her practice of creating elaborate studio scenarios with the help of her assistant, Lila Nunes.
During this period, Rego would construct detailed scenes using dolls she called "bonecos" - the Portuguese word for dolls - which served as models for her paintings and drawings. Though she didn't consider these constructions to be art themselves, she preserved them, and some will be displayed publicly for the first time. The process allowed her to explore the darkest corners of human experience through carefully staged tableaux.
Of the dozens of stories McDonagh sent, four particularly captured Rego's imagination, ranging from a typewriting monkey to a man with turtles for hands. However, one story struck at the heart of her own enduring obsessions - a tale involving a forest full of babies calling out to the conscience of the mother who had aborted them. "It is a very perverse story, against what I stand for, so I don't know why I did it," she wrote at the time.
The resulting paintings transformed McDonagh's forest setting into intimate bathroom scenes of devastating power. In one, a woman slumps in a bathroom with fancy floral wallpaper, a fetus in her lap. Another shows a young mother cradling a baby while sitting on a toilet, with the bloody remnants of an abortion in a bowl at her feet. These works drew from Rego's own experiences as an art student at London's Slade in the early 1950s, when she underwent several dangerous backstreet abortions before returning to Portugal to give birth to her first daughter.
Rego felt no guilt about her abortions, only anger about the unnecessary pain and danger women faced. This subject would become a recurring theme in her work, and her paintings would eventually play a crucial role in galvanizing Portuguese public opinion to overturn the country's abortion ban. When Portugal's decriminalization of abortion was rejected in a 1998 referendum, Rego was outraged. For the second referendum in 2007, she created eight powerful etchings for distribution to national and local press, works that Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio later credited with helping change public opinion.
The autobiographical elements in Rego's work extended beyond her political activism. The pillowman figure itself represented her affection for her industrialist father, who had raised his family on a quinta - a country estate - on the Portuguese riviera, where their neighbors included celebrities and royalty. The triptych containing the pillowman included references to Saint-Exupéry's "Little Prince" and to the exiled king of Italy, who was known for picking up young male sex workers on the beach.
Another McDonagh-inspired work dramatized the traumatic loss of the family estate after her father's death. Based on a story about a piglet's futile prayers to be saved from slaughter by a scarecrow it had rescued from wildfire, Rego created a haunting image of a crucified woman with a cow's skull towering above a decapitated pig's head, next to a sleeping girl against a burning sky. According to her son Nick Willing, who has made a documentary about his mother's work, the painting reflected both Rego's childhood trauma from witnessing the slaughter of a beloved pig and her guilt over the family's financial ruin - though the fault lay with her husband Victor Willing, not her.
Victor Willing, himself a former star student at the Slade, had disastrously attempted to run the family electronics business after her father's death. His failure forced the sale of the quinta and left Rego begging for grants to support their young family. This personal catastrophe would echo through her work for years, transformed through McDonagh's dark storytelling into powerful artistic statements about loss, guilt, and survival.
The most enigmatic work from the McDonagh collaboration features a man with turtles replacing his hands. Nick Willing believes this mysterious image relates to his mother's lifelong struggle with depression, inherited from her beloved father. "I think she was very drawn to the idea that the things that weigh you down - like depression or all your foibles and idiosyncrasies - they're part of you, but they're also living creatures that feed off you, like parasites," he explains. "They are a curse but also a privilege and, in getting rid of them, you perish."
The three-year period covered by the exhibition represents one of the most prolific phases of Rego's career, resulting in an enormous number of pastels and prints. "She had a particularly purple patch with the Martin McDonagh stories, and he gets a lot of credit for exciting in my mother perhaps her most accomplished work," says Nick Willing, who now manages his mother's extensive legacy, including overseeing 23 exhibitions worldwide this year and maintaining the Casa das Histórias Paula Rego museum, founded in 2009 near her childhood home.
The planned collaboration on a picture book between Rego and McDonagh sadly never materialized, as the playwright became increasingly busy with his Broadway and film career. "It would've been a dream, though I think that dream was mostly in my head," McDonagh reflects. "But to be a tiny part of the art of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century is mind-blowing to me. I still can't really believe it."
The current exhibition, "Paula Rego: Drawing from Life," runs at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London from November 27 to January 17, followed by "Paula Rego: Story Line" at Victoria Miro from February to March. These shows offer a rare glimpse into the creative process of an artist who transformed personal trauma and literary inspiration into some of the most powerful and disturbing artworks of the contemporary era, proving that the darkest stories can sometimes produce the most luminous art.
