Liberating Visions

Victor Willing (1928–88) is perhaps the least classifiable of the brilliant early-1950s Slade generation, which includes his wife Paula Rego.

Victor Willing (1928–88) is perhaps the least classifiable of the brilliant early-1950s Slade generation, which includes his wife Paula Rego. So it is uniquely appropriate that this first major posthumous exhibition should be at the beautiful museum built in her honour and opened last year.

Willing’s career is dramatically divided. In his twenties he was briefly successful with portraits and still-lives. Then there is a blank 20 years before a last decade of remarkable imaginative paintings, when his art, in Paula Rego’s words, ‘moves backwards and forwards between the figurative and the abstract, the funny and the disturbing’.

Willing’s earliest childhood was spent at an army camp in Egypt. He did national service, whose monasticism he enjoyed, then went to the Slade, where his contemporaries regarded him as the coming man.