By Emily Friedman.
In 1998, the artist Paula Rego produced a series of ten pastels, “The Abortion Series”, although Rego herself opted to leave them untitled. A referendum on abortion rights had recently failed in Portugal, her home country, and Rego, a graduate of the Slade School of Art and long-time resident of London, felt compelled to respond. Shortly after the pastels were produced, she issued prints after the original paintings so that the images might circulate more widely. Prints also offer a permanence that pastel—a dusty, difficult, ephemeral medium—does not. Working with her friend and collaborator, the printmaker Paul Coldwell, she published eight etchings in 1999. The popularity of this series in Portugal was such that when the next referendum was passed in 2007, many credited Rego with influencing public opinion.
Rego and Coldwell tended to use a mixture of etching and aquatint, sometimes with hand-colored details. For this series, however, Coldwell worked exclusively in etching. A method of printmaking that dates back to the sixteenth-century, etching relies on additive and subtractive processes: a metal plate (the matrix) is first smoothed before being treated with an acid-resistant ground, usually a varnish or a wax. The artist uses an etching stylus in order to incise the ground-covered plate, a form of mark-making that is similar to drawing in both gesture and effect. In contrast with engraving, which requires the careful manipulation of a burin to carve away at the metal plate, the etching stylus moves fluidly, almost silkily, across the surface, thus capturing the inconsistencies and particularities of each draftsman’s hand. After the composition is finished, the plate is then submerged into a corrosive mordant, which bites away at the areas the stylus has exposed, creating incised lines that can then be inked and printed after the remaining ground is cleaned off with a solvent. Of all the printmaking techniques, etching is one of the most physically-intensive, even surgical. Like chemistry (and its predecessor alchemy), it is founded on a theory of material transformation: metals are manipulated through heat, chemicals, pressure, and the human hand.[1] Etching smells of chlorine and melting wax, of tacky inks, smoke, and turpentine-substitutes. It sounds like pencils scratching across hard surfaces, water swilling in gentle circles, and the careful breathing of the artist as they cut into the resist. It is, ultimately, an intensely physical practice, an index of the etcher’s body as they move between acid bath and printing block, as they pick up, put down, incise, submerge, roll, press, and pull.
This is the physical activity that gave shape to the bodies in Rego’s Abortion series. Each print— except for one—shows a woman alone in various postures and at different moments of the medical procedure. In Untitled 5 (fig. 1), the figure kneels atop a rounded bucket, supporting her weight on flexed fingers as she leans her head into the side of a bed, eyes closed. Her hair has fallen like a curtain over her left shoulder and blends into the crumpled coverlet, further insulating her. An eerie stillness suffuses the scene, although the effect is more eye-of-the-hurricane than calm-after-the-storm; in the background, an armchair has been tipped—pushed?—over and a mass of fabric swarms around an enormous jug of water.
In other examples, the women’s faces are turned outwards and then you can see that they’re not really women at all, but girls. The toppled armchair has been righted in Untitled 3 (fig. 2), and leans, conspiratorially, towards the figure sat atop a bucket on the right, still wearing her school uniform. In Untitled 7 (fig. 3), two folding chairs take the place of stirrups, and the young woman seems to flex every muscle in her body in anticipation of what’s to come. The aftermath of this is depicted in Untitled 2000/2020 (fig. 4), perhaps one of the most disturbing of the series. One of two published nearly twenty years after the others, it is the only image that includes a second figure, a man dressed in all black, who washes his hands in a basin—not dissimilar from the basin that once submerged this etching’s actual plate so that the acids contained therein could eat away at the waxy surface. The girl, so stoic and still in Untitled 7, has fallen back onto her forearms, gripping the sheet with renewed intensity. Her hair sticks to her forehead, and her eyes are wide and dizzying. In contrast, the man wears dark sunglasses, giving him an anonymous, skull-like appearance.
Throughout the series, Rego and Coldwell play with the effects of plate tone and constitutive blanks.[2] Coldwell later notes of this series, “the prints are quite stripped down in terms of texture. They are surprisingly light in tone which gives them a more disturbing quality. These are tragedies being conducted while the lights are on.”[3] But these women are not victims. Throughout her work, Rego’s figures face conflict and crisis head-on, with a sort of measured familiarity that is almost more horrifying than the alternative.
Rego was a decidedly art historical artist and the implications of medium and materials were central to her practice. She was especially invested in the work of William Hogarth, creating several works influenced by the eighteenth-century British artist and even publishing a series of etchings titled After Hogarth. Printmaking is well-suited to such satirical, polemical, and historical image-making. Beyond the established points, like economy of production and reproducibility, there are technical and theoretical cognates with the social and political world.[4] As the printmaker Kathryn J. Reeves notes, “the margin, and the identification with the marginal, is deeply embedded within the printmaking psyche.”[5]
In printmaking, process is always on display. Each etched line breaks down the composition, fragmenting it, while also fusing together like the individual fibers of a woven textile to produce a single, cohesive unit. The conflicting properties of cohesion and fragmentation destabilize the image, subverting and skewing it, but that conflict also activates the image, giving it its potency. The print that we look at, is, after all, an inversion of the original etching. The image is through-the-looking glass, it is an upside-down world where right can be wrong and yes is no and autonomous bodies are surveilled bodies and spare bedrooms become hypothetical hospital rooms.
Etchings are made by carving into the matrix, a violent act but also a productive one. Historically, the term matrix was a rhetorical cognate for womb: to the metallurgists of sixteenth-century Europe—a time and place in which the medium of etching was developed—the earth was a womb, a warm space in which precious metals could grow and develop; the alchemist’s alembic was conceived as an alternative location for such transformations, modeled after Nature’s womb.[6] It is worth noting here that the French word matrice, integral to printmaking vocabulary, means both womb and matrix, thus creating an analogy between the etcher’s matrix, the geologist’s mine, alchemical vessels, and the bodily organ.[7] Following this, the cruelty and violence of governmental power structures that force abortions to be conducted underground plays out on a meta-level in the etching process, which manipulates the metal body of the plate with surgical implements and caustic mordants. When discussing Portuguese abortion bans in relation to her series, Rego uses a particularly violent language. “It affected the poor disproportionately,” she said. “If you were rich it was easier to find a safe way to have an abortion, usually by travelling to another country. Poor women were butchered.”[8] The grotesqueness of this unfortunate truth is made visible in the abortion etchings, where bodies contort and crawl across the page, objects seem to become sentient and girls in school uniforms kneel on buckets in the throes of illegal abortions.
Rego died this year, in June. She did not live to see the Dobbs ruling in the United States, but she certainly anticipated it, editioning the two more Abortion prints in 2019 and 2020, respectively. In an interview that same year, she commented, “it seems absurd that these battles have to be fought all over again. It’s grotesque.” Rego nevertheless had a busy year: a retrospective in June at the Milton Keynes Gallery, a large room in the Venice Biennale’s 2022 exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams”, and this past September, the Armory Show sold Rego’s reissued etchings in the front entrance of the Javits Center. Proceeds will be donated to Abortion on Demand in the late artist’s name.
I wrote this essay from Nashville, Tennessee, on August 26th, 2022. Just one day prior, Tennessee’s trigger law went into effect, making abortion illegal statewide. The streets were quiet, except for party buses and several bachelorette parties getting a head-start on the weekend. People came home from work, walked their dogs, received their first homework assignment. But surely this comes as no surprise. As we know, what happens next will take place behind closed doors, in dimly-lit spaces and undisclosed locations. People will die, lose their jobs, have lives forever altered without their consent.
Rego’s work reflects and inflects this new reality in matter of subject, but also facture. The contingencies of printmaking are such that they appeal to a world constantly in motion, inverting and reverting ad infinitum. The figures at the center, like Rego’s anonymous women, are at the mercy of this pendulum swing, forced to reenact their moments of resistance—that is, at least until the matrix is dulled and loses its potency, making way for a new structuring system, and hopefully, a new politics of bodily autonomy.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emily Friedman is an art historian and writer living in Paris. She worked as an Assistant Editor at 032c magazine before beginning her dissertation, “Transformations: The Master JG, Printmaking, and Intellectual Culture in Lyon, 1500-1550”, at Johns Hopkins University. She can be reached at emilyannfriedman@gmail.com.
NOTES
[1] As Albertus the Great wrote in De mineralibus (between 1250-1254) the “transformation of metals and transformation of one particular thing to another do not belong to physics, but the art that is called alchemy.” Quoted in Aksel Haaning, “The Philosophical Nature of Early Western Alchemy: The Formative Period, c. 1150-1350,” in Art & Alchemy, ed. by J. Wamberg (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006), 31. For more on De mineralibus and alchemy, see Robert Halleux, “Albert le Grand et l’Alchimie.” Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1982), 57-80.
[2] Wolfgang Iser is typically credited with theorizing the constitutive blank. See his book The Act of Reading (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, MD, 1978) and essay “Interaction Between Text and Reader,” in The Reader in the Text, ed. S. R. Suleiman and I. Crosman (Princeton University Press: Princeton, N.J., 1980), 106-119.
[3] Interview with Paul Coldwell on Christies website, June 8, 2022.
[4] In her A.W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Jennifer Roberts theorizes the ways in which printmaking itself can generate meaning. See Roberts, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print. A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art. Delivered between April 25, 2021and May 30, 2021.
[5] Kathryn J. Reeves, “The Re-vision of Printmaking”, from the IMPACT International Printmaking Conference proceedings, 1999, UWE and RWA, Bristol, England, 70.
[6] Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2007) 170.
[7] In his 1580 Discours Admirables, the French potter and theorist Bernard Palissy wrote of the matrice of the earth, the source of all the world’s metals and stones. Bernard Palissy, “De l’Alchimie: des metaux, de leur generation & nature” in Discours Admirables (Paris, 1580), 104. Rebecca Zorach draws attention to this double meaning in her essay “Everything Swims with Excess: Gold and its Fashioning in Sixteenth-Century France”, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 36, 1999, 128.
[8] Lanre Bakare interview with Paula Rego, “Paula Rego calls US anti-abortion drive ‘grotesque’” in The Guardian, May 31, 2019.
