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. ‘He was so brainy he was amazing,’ Craigie Aitchison remembered. Paula Rego recalls, ‘People were frightened of him. He walked very well, with a great deal of bravado, and he was a very good jazz dancer.’
In 1955 he made a dazzling debut at the Hanover Gallery, the hottest ticket in town. He had married his childhood sweetheart, he was friends with the glamorous likes of Bacon and Rodrigo Moynihan. Yet Willing did not have another exhibition until 1978. In the intervening years he ran off to marry and settle with Paula Rego in Portugal, where her career burgeoned and his eventually ceased. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; tried, and failed, to save the Rego family business and, in the mid-1970s, returned with his wife and three children to live in London.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in