Salazar’s boots: Paula Rego and the road to disorder

Abstract

In 1961, Paula Rego painted a picture that marked the year of the uprisings in Angola and the beginning of the struggles by the Portuguese colonies in Africa for independence. In When We Had a House in the Country, bodies are dismembered into fragmented pieces, and the pictorial division of black and white ground gives lie to the Lusotropicalist claims of racial integration in what Salazar’s government claimed were Portugal’s provfncias ultramarinas (overseas provinces). Although Rego left Portugal permanently for England in 1974, after the Revolution of April 25, her work has never veered from the troubling issues that marked the Estado Novo: questions of patriarchal and dictatorial authority, surveillance, racial division, gender violence, and repression.