Paula Rego, The Cake Woman

Completed in 2004, this major work by Paula Rego conjures an ambiguous tale from sun and shadow, illuminating illicit encounters and power struggles under the watchful eye of The Cake Woman.

Drawing upon details of her extraordinary life, on politics and art history, literature, folk legends, myths and fairy tales, Paula Rego’s art is an unflinching exploration of human relationships, her piercing eye trained on the established order as well as the codes, structures and dynamics of power that embolden or repress the characters she depicts.

In this key 2004 work, these themes are woven around wartime memories from Rego's childhood, triggered by a meeting in 2003 with her former dance teacher, Miss Cook. Recollections of life in Estoril during the Second World War, when Portugal was neutral under Salazar's regime and the seaside town became a hub for exiles, spies and refugees, were entangled with Rego's present-day concerns during the making of this extraordinary work.

‘The women in her art always know more…’

– Adrian Searle, The Guardian
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Artworks

Paula Rego, The Cake Woman, 2004

Pastel on paper on aluminium
150 x 150 cm
59 x 59 in
‘This familiar character on Portugal’s beaches in the 1940s has been transformed into a menacing Sibyl. With her ambivalent smile and androgynous, mighty form, she is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s oracles in the Sistine Chapel.’

– Skye Sherwin, The Guardian
Throughout her career, Paula Rego was never afraid to confront the strange, difficult or sinister and, as with many of her works, The Cake Woman was triggered by a personal experience with which a complex mixture of feelings, memories, present day desires and fears became fused.

In this instance, the initial springboard was a meeting in 2003 with Rego’s former dance teacher, Miss Cook, a figure from the artist’s childhood in Estoril during the Second World War. Rego grew up in a house close to the casino, at that time a meeting place for Allied and Nazi spies. Miss Cook played the piano in the casino and, encountering her many decades later, the artist was spurred to conduct further research into Estoril during the war.
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Baba and Estefania, Rego’s mother and aunt, on Tamariz Beach, Estoril, in the 1940s.
© Estate of Paula Rego
‘I went to the Imperial War Museum library to study what had happened in Portugal during the war… What people went through, what the atmosphere was like. It was fascinating, because I actually lived there. I remember my parents going out in the evening to the Wonder Bar. I remember when Paris fell – my mother cried, and she went to the station, weeping, to catch the train. A German family that lived on the next road were doing the Hitler salute in front of her. It was like that. You would go to the casino, and one table would have German spies, and another would have English spies.’

– Paula Rego interviewed by Marco Livingstone, 2006
In The Cake Woman, Rego assembles a cast that, rather than illustrate a specific narrative, alludes to the currents of the times, their strange atmosphere, with Estoril becoming a hub for European royalty, spies and political exiles, earning it the nickname ‘The Coast of Kings’, while also becoming home to refugees from Poland and elsewhere, many of whom brought with them harrowing stories of their experiences.

The central figure, dominating the image in her white dress and pinafore, casts a knowing eye on the unfolding scene around her while proffering a tray of delicacies. To her right, we see a figure that at first might be considered a bather but is thought likely to be a refugee. To her left, Rego creates a troubling encounter between a man and a child-size figure, while the macabre figure of Death, wearing a striped bathing robe, enjoys the sun and the cakes of the Portuguese Riviera.
Yet, at the same time there are intimations of contemporary life, even of history repeating itself, with The Cake Woman becoming a prophetic, Sibyl-like figure, as noted by Skye Sherwin in The Guardian. A work on paper from the same period, entitled Tamariz AKA The Beach in Estoril, depicts scenes of people unworriedly, perhaps obliviously, enjoying life on the Portuguese Riviera. For Rego, there were troubling echoes of comfortable bourgeois life in Estoril in the 1940s in the situation in London at the time, with life going on as usual while so many were suffering in the Middle East.

As noted by Nick Willing, ‘The Cake Woman cannot be seen as a simply nostalgic picture that Rego created to revisit childhood memories. Placed within the context in which it was made – with the violence of the Iraq War at the centre of media coverage – the work transcends its historical setting, reminding us that we continue to overlook state-sponsored violence and suffering…’

‘The Cake Woman cannot be seen as a simply nostalgic picture that Rego created to revisit childhood memories. Placed within the context in which it was made – with the violence of the Iraq War at the centre of media coverage – the work transcends its historical setting.’

– Nick Willing
Paula Rego, War, 2003
Pastel on paper on aluminium
Collection Tate
© Estate of Paula Rego

War was at the forefront of Rego's mind at this time. Deeply concerned by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, she had recently completed War, 2003 (Collection Tate), a work triggered by a news photograph of Iraqi refugees.

It was around this time that Rego began making 3D creatures – or Bonecos (Portuguese for dolls) as she called them – to cast alongside life models in sculptural tableaux constructed in her studio. For War, Rego chose to depict bloodied rabbit-headed marionettes and other hybrid creatures, recalling the subversive tradition of folk and fairy tales and their exploration of themes of violence. War contains a visual reference to Miss Cook, who appears as a saviour-like figure wearing a soldier's uniform in the bottom right-hand corner of the image. The dolls featured in The Cake Woman are human rather than animal but aren't intended to be likenesses, more to take on a life of their own.

Works from this period foreground Rego's command of pastel, which she began using instead of oil and acrylic paints in the mid-1990s. For the artist, using pastel connected to the more tactile processes she had employed earlier in her career, also allowing her to build up figures through layering. As Rego stated in the catalogue for her 2007 exhibition at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 'Process is part of it, I don't want to get exactly what I want the first time, because, you see, the changing it, the pushing it around, shoving it, makes it come alive…'
‘Process is part of it, I don’t want to get exactly what I want the first time, because, you see, the changing it, the pushing it around, shoving it, makes it come alive…’

– Paula Rego
The Cake Woman has featured in significant institutional exhibitions of Rego's work, including the artist's landmark 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain, and the widely acclaimed 2019-2020 exhibition Obedience and Defiance, which travelled to venues in the UK and Ireland.

‘… pastel, favoured by Rego from the 1990s… plays to her graphic strength, and ends ideas about the medium’s ladylike delicacy… She obtains from it a tough, soft shimmer that makes her surfaces as purely memorable as their subjects: …the Velázquez frothy white costume of the huge Cake Woman…’

– Jackie Wullschläger, The Financial Times

Jackie Wullschläger, reviewing Rego's Tate retrospective in the The Financial Times praised her use of pastel, commenting '… pastel, favoured by Rego from the 1990s… plays to her graphic strength, and ends ideas about the medium's ladylike delicacy… She obtains from it a tough, soft shimmer that makes her surfaces as purely memorable as their subjects: …the Velázquez frothy white costume of the huge Cake Woman…'

Adrian Searle, in a five-star review of Obedience and Defiance, wrote 'Pastel fuses painting and drawing and also slows down her racing thoughts. Her works now have to be built, layer on layer, colour on colour, contours fusing together…'
‘Her work is all an exorcism.
Life – ours as well as hers – courses through it.’

– Adrian Searle, The Guardian
Paula Rego

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About the artist

Paula Rego in her studio, 2021. Photograph © Nick Willing

An artist of uncompromising vision and a peerless storyteller, Paula Rego (1935–2022) brought immense psychological insight and imaginative power to the genre of figurative art. She is especially celebrated for works that forcibly address aspects of female agency and resolve, suffering and survival, such as the Dog Women series, begun in 1994, the Abortion series, 1998–99, which is considered to have influenced Portugal’s successful second referendum on the legalisation of abortion in 2007, and the series Female Genital Mutilation, 2008–09.

Rego’s art transcends the art world. She is heralded as a feminist icon and is a household name. In her native Portugal the government commissioned the celebrated architect Eduardo Souto de Moura to design and build a museum dedicated exclusively to her work – Paula Rego’s House of Stories, situated in Cascais, which opened to the public in 2009. In the UK, where she attended the Slade School of Fine Art from 1952–56, her first major solo exhibition in London was held at AIR Gallery in 1981, followed in 1988 by an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. She was appointed the first National Gallery Associate Artist in 1989–90. She has been the subject of numerous books and TV programmes, including Paula Rego, Secrets & Stories, a BBC documentary directed by the artist’s son Nick Willing, which won the Royal Television Award for Best Arts Program in 2018, and The Southbank Show in 1992 and 2007. Her art continues to have an enduring influence upon younger generations, who are introduced to her work through the GCSE syllabus. In 2010 she was made a Dame of The British Empire by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

The largest and most comprehensive retrospective of Rego's work to date was held at Tate Britain in 2021, and travelled to Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands (2021–2022) and Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain (2022). Works by the artist featured in the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022).

Other recent major solo exhibitions include Paula Rego: The Personal and The Political, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany (2025); Paula Rego and Adriana Varejão: Between Your Teeth, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal (2025); Paula Rego: Power Games, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland (2025); Paula Rego: Manifesto, Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais, Portugal (2024); Paula Rego: Crivelli's Garden, The National Gallery, London, UK (2023); Paula Rego: The Story of Stories, Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2023).
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