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Lot Essay
‘The Ostriches is still my favourite’ (Lila Nunes)
Formerly part of the Saatchi Collection, Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ is an exceptional work from Paula Rego’s celebrated series of the same name. Unveiled in the Hayward Gallery’s landmark group exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film in 1996, this virtuosic cycle of works would go on to become an icon of the artist’s practice. The series is based on a scene from Walt Disney’s 1940 animation Fantasia, in which a group of ostriches perform the ballet ‘Dance of the Hours’ from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda (1876). Rego, who first watched the film as a child, translates Disney’s witty caricatures back into women, furnishing them with real bodies and raw emotions. In the present work, three dancers wait in the wings, suspended in a twilit backstage world. They stretch, gaze and dream, languorously awaiting their long-forgotten call. Rego wields her signature pastel with the dexterity of paint, bringing light and life to their flesh and costumes. Included in many of the artist’s major exhibitions over the past three decades, it is a masterpiece of storytelling, capturing the poignant examination of female experience that lies at the heart of Rego’s art.
Organised in collaboration with the British Film Institute, Spellbound was a major exhibition celebrating a century of cinema in Britain. Rego was one of ten artists approached to contribute to the show, including Damien Hirst, Fiona Banner and Eduardo Paolozzi. Film ran deep in her veins: her father owned the first private cinema in Antonio Salazar’s Portugal, and the young Rego would regularly attend screenings with her grandmother. She particularly loved Fantasia—a suite of animations set to famous pieces of 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). Over the years Rego would come to recognise Disney as one of her most important influences, sharing his fascination with myths and fairy tales as well as his flair for anthropomorphism and tragicomic pathos. The present work is one of five based on the film’s ‘dancing ostrich’ sequence: Rego made two further single panel works as well as a diptych and a triptych. She also made two works based on a similar scene from Fantasia featuring dancing hippos, as well as cycles inspired by Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940).
The work is an early example of Rego’s exquisite treatment of pastel. First adopted the previous year in her landmark series Dog Woman, the medium would come to define her subsequent practice. Working directly onto paper without preliminary markings, the artist relished its metamorphic properties, explaining that it combined the best of painting and drawing simultaneously. At times Rego’s surface crackles with graphic precision: the intricate detail of gauze tutus, the shimmer of light upon satin ribbon or the crinkle of leather cushions. The dancers’ flesh, meanwhile, is rendered with the visceral fluidity of oil paint, approximating the rich textures of impasto. 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.). The work’s midnight backdrop, meanwhile, evokes the shimmering colour fields of Mark Rothko, oscillating between tones of mauve, grey and blue.
Rego’s use of pastel also prompts comparison with the ballet dancers of Edgar Degas. He, too, sought to lift the curtain upon the inner life of his subjects, capturing them off duty and at rest. Rego, however, goes one stage further, positing her dancers in deliberate opposition to balletic stereotypes of feminine youth and beauty. The trappings of the stage are stripped away: the women retreat into the theatre’s shadowy hinterland. Like Disney’s flightless ostriches—echoes of which abound in the women’s black feathery garments—these prima donnas remain resolutely earthbound. They know that their days in the spotlight are over, yet they continue to dream in hopeful defiance, their limbs going through the motions of bygone routines. Though Rego herself—by contrast—was at the very height of her career, she nonetheless identified with these feelings of yearning as she entered her seventh decade. ‘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, Paula Rego: The Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia, London 1996, n.p.).
The dancers, in this regard, might be understood as extensions of Rego herself. The majority were modelled by her friend and longstanding muse Lila Nunes, whom she often viewed as a kind of alter-ego. The two shared fond memories of shopping at a specialist dance shop in Covent Garden, where they sourced a tutu and ballet shoes. After completing a few initial drawings of Nunes in her studio, using cushions to support her in deliberately awkward positions, Rego executed the works over several months. The artist purposefully avoided rewatching Fantasia, relying on her memory of the ostrich dance sequence as well as occasionally referring to images in John Cluhane’s illustrated history of the film. The extraordinary range of poses achieved calls to mind the motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge, and—by extension—the animated frames of the original film. The figures, each locked in their own worlds, might be interpreted as different expressions of the same internal monologue. The central figure’s eye, curiously reminiscent of Rego’s own, gleams brightly, like a window onto the artist’s soul.
Nunes has said that the Dancing Ostriches are ‘still my favourite … They’re the pictures I like most, as a group’. The dancers, she explains, ‘pretend and they believe. They’re waiting for whatever is coming, which is wonderful’ (L. Nunes, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego: Behind the Scenes, London 2008, p. 36) From Disney’s whimsical cartoon, Rego reveals a set of fantasies more potent: the stories that we tell ourselves. For all its nostalgia and longing, the present work is ultimately an image of empowerment—a rejection of archetypes and a celebration of the dreams we dare to entertain. The women may have left their dancing days behind them, yet in Rego’s hands they are more alive than ever, infused with raw grace and enigmatic beauty.
Formerly part of the Saatchi Collection, Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ is an exceptional work from Paula Rego’s celebrated series of the same name. Unveiled in the Hayward Gallery’s landmark group exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film in 1996, this virtuosic cycle of works would go on to become an icon of the artist’s practice. The series is based on a scene from Walt Disney’s 1940 animation Fantasia, in which a group of ostriches perform the ballet ‘Dance of the Hours’ from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda (1876). Rego, who first watched the film as a child, translates Disney’s witty caricatures back into women, furnishing them with real bodies and raw emotions. In the present work, three dancers wait in the wings, suspended in a twilit backstage world. They stretch, gaze and dream, languorously awaiting their long-forgotten call. Rego wields her signature pastel with the dexterity of paint, bringing light and life to their flesh and costumes. Included in many of the artist’s major exhibitions over the past three decades, it is a masterpiece of storytelling, capturing the poignant examination of female experience that lies at the heart of Rego’s art.
Organised in collaboration with the British Film Institute, Spellbound was a major exhibition celebrating a century of cinema in Britain. Rego was one of ten artists approached to contribute to the show, including Damien Hirst, Fiona Banner and Eduardo Paolozzi. Film ran deep in her veins: her father owned the first private cinema in Antonio Salazar’s Portugal, and the young Rego would regularly attend screenings with her grandmother. She particularly loved Fantasia—a suite of animations set to famous pieces of 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). Over the years Rego would come to recognise Disney as one of her most important influences, sharing his fascination with myths and fairy tales as well as his flair for anthropomorphism and tragicomic pathos. The present work is one of five based on the film’s ‘dancing ostrich’ sequence: Rego made two further single panel works as well as a diptych and a triptych. She also made two works based on a similar scene from Fantasia featuring dancing hippos, as well as cycles inspired by Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940).
The work is an early example of Rego’s exquisite treatment of pastel. First adopted the previous year in her landmark series Dog Woman, the medium would come to define her subsequent practice. Working directly onto paper without preliminary markings, the artist relished its metamorphic properties, explaining that it combined the best of painting and drawing simultaneously. At times Rego’s surface crackles with graphic precision: the intricate detail of gauze tutus, the shimmer of light upon satin ribbon or the crinkle of leather cushions. The dancers’ flesh, meanwhile, is rendered with the visceral fluidity of oil paint, approximating the rich textures of impasto. 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.). The work’s midnight backdrop, meanwhile, evokes the shimmering colour fields of Mark Rothko, oscillating between tones of mauve, grey and blue.
Rego’s use of pastel also prompts comparison with the ballet dancers of Edgar Degas. He, too, sought to lift the curtain upon the inner life of his subjects, capturing them off duty and at rest. Rego, however, goes one stage further, positing her dancers in deliberate opposition to balletic stereotypes of feminine youth and beauty. The trappings of the stage are stripped away: the women retreat into the theatre’s shadowy hinterland. Like Disney’s flightless ostriches—echoes of which abound in the women’s black feathery garments—these prima donnas remain resolutely earthbound. They know that their days in the spotlight are over, yet they continue to dream in hopeful defiance, their limbs going through the motions of bygone routines. Though Rego herself—by contrast—was at the very height of her career, she nonetheless identified with these feelings of yearning as she entered her seventh decade. ‘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, Paula Rego: The Dancing Ostriches from Disney’s Fantasia, London 1996, n.p.).
The dancers, in this regard, might be understood as extensions of Rego herself. The majority were modelled by her friend and longstanding muse Lila Nunes, whom she often viewed as a kind of alter-ego. The two shared fond memories of shopping at a specialist dance shop in Covent Garden, where they sourced a tutu and ballet shoes. After completing a few initial drawings of Nunes in her studio, using cushions to support her in deliberately awkward positions, Rego executed the works over several months. The artist purposefully avoided rewatching Fantasia, relying on her memory of the ostrich dance sequence as well as occasionally referring to images in John Cluhane’s illustrated history of the film. The extraordinary range of poses achieved calls to mind the motion photography of Eadweard Muybridge, and—by extension—the animated frames of the original film. The figures, each locked in their own worlds, might be interpreted as different expressions of the same internal monologue. The central figure’s eye, curiously reminiscent of Rego’s own, gleams brightly, like a window onto the artist’s soul.
Nunes has said that the Dancing Ostriches are ‘still my favourite … They’re the pictures I like most, as a group’. The dancers, she explains, ‘pretend and they believe. They’re waiting for whatever is coming, which is wonderful’ (L. Nunes, quoted in J. McEwen, Paula Rego: Behind the Scenes, London 2008, p. 36) From Disney’s whimsical cartoon, Rego reveals a set of fantasies more potent: the stories that we tell ourselves. For all its nostalgia and longing, the present work is ultimately an image of empowerment—a rejection of archetypes and a celebration of the dreams we dare to entertain. The women may have left their dancing days behind them, yet in Rego’s hands they are more alive than ever, infused with raw grace and enigmatic beauty.