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Lot Essay
‘The Ostriches are founded in very deep feeling. They are the result of going through a lot of feelings and getting to the essence of them’ (Lila Nunes)
A monumental drama spread across three panels, Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1995) is the largest work in Paula Rego’s celebrated series of the same name. A rare example of a triptych within her oeuvre, it captures the vivid interrogations of female experience that lie at the heart of her practice. The work is based on a scene from Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940)—a childhood favourite of the artist’s—in which a group of ostriches perform the ballet ‘Dance of the Hours’ from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda (1876). In Rego’s hands, Disney’s feathered prima donnas are transfigured back into real women, infused with power and grace, pain and longing. Eternally suspended in an empty backstage world, they rest, cavort and dream, each a virtuosic challenge to feminine stereotypes of youth and beauty. Light dances upon their flesh and ripples through their gowns, animated by Rego’s near-painterly use of pastel. Formerly part of the Saatchi Collection, the present work and its companions made their debut at the landmark 1996 exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film at the Hayward Gallery, London; they have subsequently graced major museums worldwide.
Rego made five works based on Fantasia’s ‘dancing ostrich’ sequence: a diptych, three single-panel works and the present triptych. Throughout her oeuvre, this magnificent tripartite format was reserved for some of her most ambitious creations, including examples held in the Kunstmuseum den Haag, Tate, London and Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal. With its deep blue backdrop and celestial lighting, the present work confronts the viewer like a towering religious altarpiece. Women in the outer panels turn inwards to the centre; unheard snippets of conversation drift across the divide. Ultimately, however, each figure seems locked in her own world, waiting interminably in the wings of her own reverie. The critic John McEwen has suggested that the various dancers—all primarily modelled on Rego’s great friend and muse Lila Nunes—could be seen to represent different expressions of a single internal monologue (J. McEwen, Paula Rego: The Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia, London 1996, n.p.). Elsewhere comparison has been drawn with the motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge, each dancer frozen as if in a split second of a moving reel. In this regard, the work also calls to mind the grand theatrical triptychs of Francis Bacon, which similarly spliced their subjects’ interior worlds like fleeting cinematic frames.
The aesthetics of film, indeed, ran deep in Rego’s blood. She grew up in António Salazar’s Portugal, where her father owned the country’s first private cinema. It was there that she encountered Walt Disney’s animations with her grandmother. She particularly loved Fantasia—a compilation of vignettes set to classical music—because it ‘was full of different stories’ (P. Rego, quoted in ‘Fantasia in Paint: How Paula Rego Made Disney Dance’, BBC Arts, 18 October 2016). Rego later came to regard Disney as one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists: his engagement with legend and folklore, as well as the tragicomic, anthropomorphic wit of his characters, would become a guiding light as she developed her practice throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was, ultimately, to his oeuvre that she would return in 1995 when the Hayward Gallery invited her to contribute to their major new exhibition exploring the relationship between art and cinema. As well as the Dancing Ostriches, Rego also made two works based on a similar scene from Fantasia featuring dancing hippos, as well as cycles inspired by Disney’s Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940).
The work is also a masterful early example of Rego’s use of pastel: the medium that would eventually come to be synonymous with the oeuvre. First adopted the previous year in her Dog Woman cycle, here it takes centre stage. Rego models flesh with the visceral fluidity of oil paint: rich skeins of marbled colour build up like impasto, capturing the flow of life beneath her subject’s skin. Like the Old Masters, writes the critic Jan Dalley, her layering of greens, peaches, pinks and browns ‘[gives] weight and solidity and dimension to her magnificent fashioning of muscle and sinew and fat and skin’, calling to mind the works of Goya, Rembrandt and Velázquez (J. Dalley, Paula Rego: Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ 1995, exh. cat. Marlborough Gallery, London 2016, n.p.). Highlights are sharp and piercing; there are hard lines and deep shadows. Yet there is softness, too, in the filigree detail of rustling gauze, the lustrous shimmer of silk ribbons and the textures of studio upholstery. Behind the figures, a dreamlike haze of pinks, purples and blues glimmers and sparkles, like smoke rising from the midnight blue horizon.
Rego’s use of pastel also owes much to the ballerinas of Edgar Degas: works that, in their own way, similarly sought to reveal the human spirit beneath the costume. His dancers, too, linger backstage, captured in moments of private repose. Yet unlike Degas, whose lithe, youthful subjects embody centuries of balletic ideals, Rego’s women rage against such archetypes. Echoes of their ostrich predecessors shift in and out of focus: from bodies that spill out of black feathery garments, to the figure on the right who poses like a bird mid-air. Ostriches are, of course, flightless: the comedy of Disney’s original conceit. Rego’s women, too, have left their pirouetting days long behind them. Some have relinquished their shoes in quiet surrender; others continue to bury their heads in the sand, dreaming of long-lost moments in the spotlight. Where Disney’s animators had drawn their original characters from a ‘very tall, very ostrich-like girl’ who ‘performed the routine to perfection’, Rego strips away all sense of coquettish caricature (J. Cluhane, quoted in J. McEwen, ibid.). The ostriches are rehumanised—and thus re-empowered—as women, in all their imperfect glory.
Here the work takes on a profoundly self-reflective quality. While the dawn of Rego’s seventh decade marked the very height of her artistic career, she was nonetheless deeply aware of what it felt like to mourn the loss of one’s younger self. ‘The Ostriches couldn’t have been done if I hadn’t been the age I am’, she explained. ‘A younger woman wouldn’t know what it was like, longing for things that are not gone’ (P. Rego, quoted in J. McEwen, ibid.). Nunes, too, was keenly aware of this aspect. ‘The Ostriches are founded in very deep feeling’, she explains. ‘They are the result of going through a lot of feelings and getting to the essence of them. I have these feelings but I’m younger and they’re mixed up. Paula concentrates many feelings’ (L. Nunes, quoted in ibid.). Nunes, who had known Rego since she came to care for her dying husband Victor during the 1980s, often inhabited her pictures as a kind of alter-ego. The present work, in this regard, might be read as a complex, multi-faceted self-portrait.
For all its nostalgia and existential pathos, however, the series was a time of great enjoyment for both artist and model. ‘It was loads of fun’, recalls Nunes, who names it as a personal favourite (L. Nunes, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego: Behind the Scenes, London 2008, p. 36). The two shared fond memories of shopping at a specialist dance shop in Covent Garden, where they sourced a tutu and ballet shoes. Back in the studio, Nunes recalls, she sat on the chair that lived in the centre of the room: ‘Paula asked me to put my arms up and she did a drawing’ (L. Nunes, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego: The Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia, ibid.). The artist made a few initial sketches of Nunes in a variety of awkward positions, often using cushions to support her body. Thereafter, she worked directly in pastel with no preliminary sketches, completing the works over a period of several months. Other models occasionally joined the ensemble. Rego purposefully avoided rewatching Fantasia, relying instead on her memory of the ostrich ballet sequence, as well as John Cluhane’s illustrated history of the film.
Disney’s choice of music for his ‘dancing ostrich’ sequence also spoke to Rego’s aesthetic sensibilities. She loved nineteenth-century French and Italian opera, and in 1982 had made a series based on works including Aida, Carmen, Faust, La Traviata and La Bohème. Nunes would later describe the Dancing Ostriches as the most theatrical of Rego’s works: indeed, the emotional drama they enact is decidedly operatic in spirit. The artist has written that her dancers possess a ‘very ancient’ storytelling power, with a number of critics likening them to the Harpies of Greek mythology (P. Rego, quoted in J. McEwen, ibid.). Other readings have posited Rego as the enchantress: ‘like a sympathetic Circe’, writes Marcia Pointon, ‘she transforms Disney’s animals (with their human attributes) into humans who retain their animality’ (M. Pointon, ‘Paula Rego’, in Spellbound, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 1996, p. 110). Grand narratives of metamorphosis, exile and unrequited longing seem to play out across the panels, all seemingly channelled through the psyche of a single woman.
Ultimately, however, the spirit of these works remains strikingly contemporary. ‘Rego’s point is, after all, a powerfully feminist one’, wrote the critic Donald Kuspit: ‘ballet takes the natural female body, in all its imperfections, and constrains it until it seems artificial and perfect. She revolts against this distorted measure of formal beauty, which in fact reflects a male ideal imposed on the female body’ (D. Kuspit, ‘Paula Rego’, Artforum, April 1997, p. 91). From a seemingly glib folly of dancing ostriches, Rego reveals a set of fictions far more powerful: the fables and fantasies that punctuate female experience. Her dancers are universal symbols of the realities that surpass the superficial promises of youth and beauty. In their defiance, they find hope and elegance of a new kind: raw, enigmatic and alive. Here they wait behind the curtain, poised to tell their stories to the world.
A monumental drama spread across three panels, Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1995) is the largest work in Paula Rego’s celebrated series of the same name. A rare example of a triptych within her oeuvre, it captures the vivid interrogations of female experience that lie at the heart of her practice. The work is based on a scene from Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940)—a childhood favourite of the artist’s—in which a group of ostriches perform the ballet ‘Dance of the Hours’ from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda (1876). In Rego’s hands, Disney’s feathered prima donnas are transfigured back into real women, infused with power and grace, pain and longing. Eternally suspended in an empty backstage world, they rest, cavort and dream, each a virtuosic challenge to feminine stereotypes of youth and beauty. Light dances upon their flesh and ripples through their gowns, animated by Rego’s near-painterly use of pastel. Formerly part of the Saatchi Collection, the present work and its companions made their debut at the landmark 1996 exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film at the Hayward Gallery, London; they have subsequently graced major museums worldwide.
Rego made five works based on Fantasia’s ‘dancing ostrich’ sequence: a diptych, three single-panel works and the present triptych. Throughout her oeuvre, this magnificent tripartite format was reserved for some of her most ambitious creations, including examples held in the Kunstmuseum den Haag, Tate, London and Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal. With its deep blue backdrop and celestial lighting, the present work confronts the viewer like a towering religious altarpiece. Women in the outer panels turn inwards to the centre; unheard snippets of conversation drift across the divide. Ultimately, however, each figure seems locked in her own world, waiting interminably in the wings of her own reverie. The critic John McEwen has suggested that the various dancers—all primarily modelled on Rego’s great friend and muse Lila Nunes—could be seen to represent different expressions of a single internal monologue (J. McEwen, Paula Rego: The Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia, London 1996, n.p.). Elsewhere comparison has been drawn with the motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge, each dancer frozen as if in a split second of a moving reel. In this regard, the work also calls to mind the grand theatrical triptychs of Francis Bacon, which similarly spliced their subjects’ interior worlds like fleeting cinematic frames.
The aesthetics of film, indeed, ran deep in Rego’s blood. She grew up in António Salazar’s Portugal, where her father owned the country’s first private cinema. It was there that she encountered Walt Disney’s animations with her grandmother. She particularly loved Fantasia—a compilation of vignettes set to classical music—because it ‘was full of different stories’ (P. Rego, quoted in ‘Fantasia in Paint: How Paula Rego Made Disney Dance’, BBC Arts, 18 October 2016). Rego later came to regard Disney as one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists: his engagement with legend and folklore, as well as the tragicomic, anthropomorphic wit of his characters, would become a guiding light as she developed her practice throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was, ultimately, to his oeuvre that she would return in 1995 when the Hayward Gallery invited her to contribute to their major new exhibition exploring the relationship between art and cinema. As well as the Dancing Ostriches, Rego also made two works based on a similar scene from Fantasia featuring dancing hippos, as well as cycles inspired by Disney’s Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940).
The work is also a masterful early example of Rego’s use of pastel: the medium that would eventually come to be synonymous with the oeuvre. First adopted the previous year in her Dog Woman cycle, here it takes centre stage. Rego models flesh with the visceral fluidity of oil paint: rich skeins of marbled colour build up like impasto, capturing the flow of life beneath her subject’s skin. Like the Old Masters, writes the critic Jan Dalley, her layering of greens, peaches, pinks and browns ‘[gives] weight and solidity and dimension to her magnificent fashioning of muscle and sinew and fat and skin’, calling to mind the works of Goya, Rembrandt and Velázquez (J. Dalley, Paula Rego: Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ 1995, exh. cat. Marlborough Gallery, London 2016, n.p.). Highlights are sharp and piercing; there are hard lines and deep shadows. Yet there is softness, too, in the filigree detail of rustling gauze, the lustrous shimmer of silk ribbons and the textures of studio upholstery. Behind the figures, a dreamlike haze of pinks, purples and blues glimmers and sparkles, like smoke rising from the midnight blue horizon.
Rego’s use of pastel also owes much to the ballerinas of Edgar Degas: works that, in their own way, similarly sought to reveal the human spirit beneath the costume. His dancers, too, linger backstage, captured in moments of private repose. Yet unlike Degas, whose lithe, youthful subjects embody centuries of balletic ideals, Rego’s women rage against such archetypes. Echoes of their ostrich predecessors shift in and out of focus: from bodies that spill out of black feathery garments, to the figure on the right who poses like a bird mid-air. Ostriches are, of course, flightless: the comedy of Disney’s original conceit. Rego’s women, too, have left their pirouetting days long behind them. Some have relinquished their shoes in quiet surrender; others continue to bury their heads in the sand, dreaming of long-lost moments in the spotlight. Where Disney’s animators had drawn their original characters from a ‘very tall, very ostrich-like girl’ who ‘performed the routine to perfection’, Rego strips away all sense of coquettish caricature (J. Cluhane, quoted in J. McEwen, ibid.). The ostriches are rehumanised—and thus re-empowered—as women, in all their imperfect glory.
Here the work takes on a profoundly self-reflective quality. While the dawn of Rego’s seventh decade marked the very height of her artistic career, she was nonetheless deeply aware of what it felt like to mourn the loss of one’s younger self. ‘The Ostriches couldn’t have been done if I hadn’t been the age I am’, she explained. ‘A younger woman wouldn’t know what it was like, longing for things that are not gone’ (P. Rego, quoted in J. McEwen, ibid.). Nunes, too, was keenly aware of this aspect. ‘The Ostriches are founded in very deep feeling’, she explains. ‘They are the result of going through a lot of feelings and getting to the essence of them. I have these feelings but I’m younger and they’re mixed up. Paula concentrates many feelings’ (L. Nunes, quoted in ibid.). Nunes, who had known Rego since she came to care for her dying husband Victor during the 1980s, often inhabited her pictures as a kind of alter-ego. The present work, in this regard, might be read as a complex, multi-faceted self-portrait.
For all its nostalgia and existential pathos, however, the series was a time of great enjoyment for both artist and model. ‘It was loads of fun’, recalls Nunes, who names it as a personal favourite (L. Nunes, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego: Behind the Scenes, London 2008, p. 36). The two shared fond memories of shopping at a specialist dance shop in Covent Garden, where they sourced a tutu and ballet shoes. Back in the studio, Nunes recalls, she sat on the chair that lived in the centre of the room: ‘Paula asked me to put my arms up and she did a drawing’ (L. Nunes, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego: The Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia, ibid.). The artist made a few initial sketches of Nunes in a variety of awkward positions, often using cushions to support her body. Thereafter, she worked directly in pastel with no preliminary sketches, completing the works over a period of several months. Other models occasionally joined the ensemble. Rego purposefully avoided rewatching Fantasia, relying instead on her memory of the ostrich ballet sequence, as well as John Cluhane’s illustrated history of the film.
Disney’s choice of music for his ‘dancing ostrich’ sequence also spoke to Rego’s aesthetic sensibilities. She loved nineteenth-century French and Italian opera, and in 1982 had made a series based on works including Aida, Carmen, Faust, La Traviata and La Bohème. Nunes would later describe the Dancing Ostriches as the most theatrical of Rego’s works: indeed, the emotional drama they enact is decidedly operatic in spirit. The artist has written that her dancers possess a ‘very ancient’ storytelling power, with a number of critics likening them to the Harpies of Greek mythology (P. Rego, quoted in J. McEwen, ibid.). Other readings have posited Rego as the enchantress: ‘like a sympathetic Circe’, writes Marcia Pointon, ‘she transforms Disney’s animals (with their human attributes) into humans who retain their animality’ (M. Pointon, ‘Paula Rego’, in Spellbound, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 1996, p. 110). Grand narratives of metamorphosis, exile and unrequited longing seem to play out across the panels, all seemingly channelled through the psyche of a single woman.
Ultimately, however, the spirit of these works remains strikingly contemporary. ‘Rego’s point is, after all, a powerfully feminist one’, wrote the critic Donald Kuspit: ‘ballet takes the natural female body, in all its imperfections, and constrains it until it seems artificial and perfect. She revolts against this distorted measure of formal beauty, which in fact reflects a male ideal imposed on the female body’ (D. Kuspit, ‘Paula Rego’, Artforum, April 1997, p. 91). From a seemingly glib folly of dancing ostriches, Rego reveals a set of fictions far more powerful: the fables and fantasies that punctuate female experience. Her dancers are universal symbols of the realities that surpass the superficial promises of youth and beauty. In their defiance, they find hope and elegance of a new kind: raw, enigmatic and alive. Here they wait behind the curtain, poised to tell their stories to the world.