I saw Paula Rego’s paintings in person for the first time. A retrospective at Tate Britain gathered seven decades of work, room after room dense with colour, discomfort, and narrative control. I had known many of the works from reproductions, but the experience of standing in front of them altered their intensity. In The Family and The Maids, and in those quieter images from later years, the unease does not dissipate. The gesture remains unresolved, and the surface holds more than it permits to be named. I remembered, not for the first time, the rooms that hold Goya’s black paintings in Madrid. It was not the content that returned to me, but the sensation of standing before something that refuses to release the viewer.
That same afternoon I went to the Royal Opera House, the first time in two years. The performance was Jenůfa, Leoš Janáček’s opera, which I first encountered on a CD when I was a teenager. I no longer remember what drew me to it then, but hearing it now, in a live setting, clarified its force. The staging held together with restraint, and Karita Mattila’s performance as Kostelnička was exact and unsentimental. The music did not comfort. Its sharpness remained, and I left with the sense that something had been offered without mediation or ease.
Later, I read Geoffrey Hill’s poem Ovid in the Third Reich. The lines stayed with me: “God is distant, difficult. Things happen.” The voice does not explain and does not demand. It remains quiet, composed, and almost unbearable in its poise. What I encountered in Rego’s paintings, Janáček’s opera, and Hill’s poem was not a theme but a kind of atmosphere. Each held a structure shaped by intensity, aftermath, and a refusal of sentimentality. None of them offered release, and none proposed repair. They remained, each in their form, with the residue of what cannot be undone.
By the end of the day I did not feel elevated. I did feel more precisely awake.
Please state more about yourself. Very self-serving in fact to state you are less interesting than your reading, no mystery intended. We are useful for you to increase your concentration and attention…
I haven’t been brave enough to go to the opera yet (I went to the cinema and the Royal Albert Hall once each since July 19th and was disconcerted to find everyone maskless and no checks at all about Covid situation at the entrance), but would have loved to see Jenufa. And the exhibition sounds like a must-see.
The Tate Britain are diligent about asking visitors to wear masks, and most followed that advice. The Rego exhibition ends at the end of October. I’m pleased that it’s so popular, so do book ahead. Mask-wearing at the opera house was minimal, so you may not feel comfortable there.