[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-1151392973.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tIn 1951, a 16-year-old Paula Rego wrote to her mother after visiting an Edvard Munch exhibition, the Guardian <\/em>reported Sunday, in a newly uncovered letter.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt\u2019s so impressive that you can\u2019t imagine,\u201d Rego wrote, years before she would emerge as the Iberian Peninsula\u2019s preeminent figurative painter, known for her searing visions of womanhood.<\/p>\n \n\tRego died in 2022 at 87, apparently never recounting to anyone besides her mother, Maria, the formative visit to the Tate Gallery in London she made while attending a finishing school in Kent. \u201cWhat impressed me most was an exhibition there by a modern Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch,\u201d she wrote, singling out The Scream<\/em> and Inheritance <\/em>among the works that struck her most.<\/p>\n \n\tThe letter goes on: \u201cI don\u2019t know if you are familiar with that quite famous painting The Scream<\/em>\u2014that\u2019s his\u2014and he paints almost everything in that genre; he also has many engravings and drawings. But it\u2019s so impressive, so impressive that you can\u2019t imagine. Above all, a painting called Inheritance<\/em>, which shows a seated woman crying with a skeleton child, all painted green, in her lap.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHis influence surfaced swiftly in her work. Roughly a year later, while her native Portugal endured a devastating drought, she painted a scene reminiscent of The Scream<\/em>: a pregnant woman, slack-jawed in horror, cradling an emaciated baby as she faced a blazing sun in a crimson sky. According to the report, Rego rediscovered the small painting, which she titled Drought<\/em>, in 2015 while cleaning the family home in Portugal with her son, Nick Willing. He brought the work to Kari J. Brandtz\u00e6g, an art historian at the Munch Museum in Oslo, who found its red-and-yellow color palette and expressionist brushstrokes reminiscent of Anxiety<\/em> and The Scream<\/em>.<\/p>\n Drought<\/em> will feature in \u201cDance Among Thorns,\u201d the first significant museum exhibition dedicated to Rego in Scandinavia. Curated by Brandtz\u00e6g, it opens at the Munch Museum in Oslo on 24 April. Brandtz\u00e6g told The Guardian<\/em> that the connection between Rego and Munch became increasingly apparent over the 18 months she spent curating the exhibition.<\/p>\n \n\tThe deeper she delved into their practices, the more striking she found the similarities in composition, color, and preoccupations\u2014both painters imbued with an intuitive sense of how to dramatize one\u2019s terrible, tremendous inner world. She noted, in particular, the visual resonance between Rego\u2019s The Dance<\/em> (1988) and Munch\u2019s The Dance of Life<\/em> (1925), as well as Rego\u2019s Time \u2013 Past and Present<\/em> (1990) and Munch\u2019s History<\/em> (1914).<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThere is a kind of dialogue with Munch\u2019s pictures. It is almost as though Rego is having a silent conversation with Munch\u2019s visual world,\u201d Brandtz\u00e6g told the publication.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/newly-unearthed-letter-reveals-edvard-munchs-influence-on-paula-rego-1234777505\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-1151392973.jpg?w=1024″] In 1951, a 16-year-old Paula Rego wrote to her mother after visiting an Edvard Munch exhibition, the Guardian reported Sunday, in a newly uncovered letter. \u201cIt\u2019s so impressive that you can\u2019t imagine,\u201d Rego wrote, years before she would emerge as the Iberian Peninsula\u2019s preeminent figurative painter, known for her searing visions of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1830007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1830007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1830007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1830007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1830007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1830007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1830007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}