Uncanny Visions: Rego and Goya review – it’s Little Miss Muffet vs the horrors of war

The Holburne Museum, Bath
Goya’s disturbing etchings, full of terrors plucked from the edge of the abyss, leave Rego’s mildly subversive Nursery Rhymes looking like superficial sketches

Paula Rego hung her small collection of Goya prints in her bedroom, facing her bed. One in particular caught my eye in this attempt to set these two Iberian artists side by side. It’s Love and Death, from Goya’s series Los Caprichos. A woman who is wild and haggard with grief cradles the corpse of the man she loved: in doing so, she holds him up, willing him to stand like a living body. It reminds me of Rego’s disturbing masterpiece The Family, in which a woman holds up the doll-like form of her paralysed husband, her face ambiguous and musing.

The Goya print she owned is surely a source for this painting that autobiographically dissects Rego’s marriage to artist Victor Willing, who had MS. Looking at Goya’s Love and Death through Rego’s eyes, you feel the genuine connection between these artists. If only it were evident elsewhere, in a show that does a disastrous job of setting a modern master against a past one.

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