Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The monumentality and psychological drama of Paula Rego's paintings have established her as one of the most important figurative painters of our generation. She was born in Portugal in 1935 and trained as an artist there, but has worked in England since 1976. In 1988 a retrospective of her work at the Serpentine gallery, London, was one of the best-attended and most widely reviewed exhibitions ever held there. Her powerful imagery explores the pressures, obsessions, fears and terrors of childhood, and the way these have come to bear on her adult view of the world. This book brings together the paintings, prints and drawings from all periods of Rego's career. The text is illustrated with over one hundred colour plates and many documentary photographs.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This is the first monograph to treat the complete works of important figurative painter Paula Rego. Through a strong combination of respect for tradition and an intensely female viewpoint, Rego created a body of work that is disarming in its seeming simplicity while containing private, secret worlds. The female form, drawn frequently from images of Rego's childhood in Portugal, appears in a variety of aspects--e.g., realistic, distorted, convoluted--but always as the artist's expression of her own experiences as a woman. The bold, bright exhilaration of depicting the secret world of feminine imagination and dreams dominates the works, and viewers are invited to share the novel experience of entering into this world. McEwen has written a thoughtful commentary on the personal, psychological, and creative life of a provocative contemporary woman artist.-- Paula Frosch, Metropolitan Museum of Art Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Born in Portugal in 1935, her girlhood spent under the dictatorship of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, London-based painter Paula Rego fiercely expressed her revulsion at a repressive patriarchal regime in Salazar Vomiting the Homeland. Her continually evolving style echoes Arshile Gorky's free-floating forms, Jean Dubuffet's naive spontaneity and Miro's pendulous sexual imagery, yet she turns her varied sources to her own ends. Fairy tales and Jungian archetypes pervade the childlike yet menacing Two Men Separated by a River of Blood. As British art critic McEwen notes in this lavishly illustrated monograph, many women see themselves and their predicaments in Rego's art--for example, in The Bride's Secret Diary , which gives palpable form to the emotional subtext of a marriage, or in the vibrant, delightful Opera and Red Monkey series, which caricature people in the form of animals. Rego's latest paintings speak of maternal loss and hope, of wisdom won with age, of private dreams projected onto an uncaring external world. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

McEwen's monograph of the Portuguese artist Paula Rego is the first comprehensive study of the artist's life and work. McEwen employs biography to explain the artist's subject matter and explores the numerous artistic and literary influences that helped shape her work. McEwen discusses Rego's career from her student days in England through her mature work in Portugal and the UK. With 120 color illustrations and dozens of black-and-white reproductions, all phases and aspects of Rego's work are abundantly illustrated. The reproductions are excellent; lavish in their color and number and true to life. The author has included a recent interview with the artist and two essays by her late husband Victor Willing. Included in this text is a chronology of the artist's life, a list of her exhibitions, and a well-organized and comprehensive bibliography. This is a beautiful, well-written and well-researched, book about an artist who is receiving serious critical attention of late. Recommended for any collection striving for a comprehensive represention of contemporary artists. R.J. Merrill; University of Southern California