TROUBLING TALES: (L to R) The Dance (1988) and The Policeman’s Daughter (1987)
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
JONATHAN TAYLOR is fascinated by the philosophical problems that permeate the art of life-writing
GORDON PARSONS steps warily in between the lines of Britain’s most famous diarist
SIMON DUFF recommends a recording of Arvo Part that takes the listener on a pilgrimage through seemingly distant times and events of the Bible
Paula Rego
Tate Britain, London
FIGURATIVE art has become fashionable again, apparently.
Yet the extraordinary Paula Rego probably couldn’t care less. Pushing on through the fashionable Young British Artists era of the 1980s, she has always drawn and painted what she needed to.
Born in Portugal in 1935, she was brought to England by parents opposed to the fascist Salazar regime — God, Homeland and Family was one of its guiding slogans and the Female Portuguese Youth was set up to train girls for domesticity.
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
JOHN GREEN welcomes a remarkable study of Mozambique’s most renowned contemporary artist
Reading Picasso’s Guernica like a comic strip offers a new way to understand the story it is telling, posits HARRIET EARLE
