The Anthony Rudolf Collection: Works given to him by Paula Rego

Introduction

Ben Uri is the country’s leading art museum and research centre on the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900. Our distinctive cultural and academic assets include a collection of over 900 works by artists from over 40 countries and over 3,300 researched profiles published (buru.org.uk & diaspora-artists.net) with another 1,800 candidates under study from over 120 countries of birth.

Museums tell stories but we focus as much on the creators as we do on their creations. This exhibition is about two internationally recognised and accomplished creators and storytellers, Anthony Rudolf and Paula Rego, and their 26 year long relationship which endured until Paula’s death in 2022. We tell their story through the art Paula gave to Anthony and his family, as her close companion and principal male model juxtaposed with Rudolf family photographs. Exhibiting the collection, never seen before in public, is a rare opportunity to glimpse sensitive and loving asides inscribed on a great many of the works.

Paula Rego; an immigrant artist, was fearless, thought provoking and taboo-breaking in the stories she told through her art. Born in Portugal in 1935 she first moved to England in 1951. She married the artist Victor Willing in 1959 and together they had three children. They moved back to Portugal in 1966 on the death of her father but relocated back to London in 1974. Her individuality, talent and sense of purpose were soon widely recognised. In 2009 a museum in Cascais, outside Lisbon, opened in her honour. In 2010 she was appointed a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 2022. 

Anthony Rudolf; whose grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, was born in war-torn London in 1942 . He read Modern Languages and Social Anthropology at Cambridge. He founded The Menard Press in 1969 and published the first English translation of Primo Levi’s poetry. A writer, poet, autobiographer, translator and literary critic, his own translations include works by Yves Bonnefoy, Claude Vigée, Edmond Jabès and Yevgeny Vinokourov. He was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Ben Uri is grateful to Anthony Rudolf for his writing of the texts accompanying the images and honoured to have been selected to present this exhibition.

David Glasser,
Executive Chair and, on this occasion, Curator.

PAULA

BY ANTHONY RUDOLF

This is largely a documentary show. Rightly, regular posthumous shows of Paula’s major work are being held around the world. The present show lays no claim to presenting Paula’s finest and/or grandest work, but all are precious to me. The whole is more important than the sum of the parts. It is a collection with a unique raison d’être and all previously unseen, apart from some of the prints and the painting ‘Perch’. All the works were gifts from Paula to me over more than a quarter of a century plus the few to my sister. The crown jewel of the group, ‘Perch’, has been bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

I am not the main reason why the show should be of interest to the many people who are fascinated by Paula Rego, a great artist and glorious personality. The collection’s intellectual interest and organic coherence derive from the peculiar and yet normal circumstances of its ownership: the works were gifts from Paula to me in my privileged capacity as close companion and principal male model for the last twenty-six years of her life, almost to the day. About three weeks before she died, she made her last sketch of me, as Branwell Brontë, a character of great interest to both of us. Perhaps not an outstanding work but precious to me. I was in my own clothes, and the only prop was a bottle.

And so began a collaboration, Paula liked to say complicity - which lasted twenty-six years. I’m not sure how many pastels, sketches and prints she did with me cast as a character in different stories. Surely several hundred; and of Lila, no doubt several thousand. I am proud to have been her principal male model for all those years. Having a male model always available, and knowing me inside and outside the studio, enabled her to centre her work more on the male figure than previously. We both believed that our meeting in 1996 led to a major turning point in our lives that developed and stood the test of time.