An exhibition I am sorry I think I will miss: Paula Rego at the Tate. Rego's work was largely unfamiliar to me.

"Rego grew up in Portugal under the Salazar dictatorship, witnessed many injustices and consistently sided with the victims of abuse and prejudice." She went to Slade like many of our School of London artists, and was also praised by David Sylvester who was so instrumental to them as well.

One of the things she has consistently addressed are issues around women and suppression. On my mind today of course is the confounding and extremely disturbing non ruling of the Supreme Court over the Texas abortion law.

Rego did a series of pastels and drawings in response to the legalization of abortion in Portugal in 1998. These remind me of the hyper reality of Alice Neel's pregnant women--only on the other, darker side. Rego wanted to show the aftermath of illegal abortions--which is where some poor Texas women are going to certainly end up. This is one, Untitled, 1998.

"I want to draw a real person who has an everyday story," she once said. Alas all too soon this aftermath will become an everyday story.

Rego has chosen to take figuration to a political level. It takes a certain courage to be responsive to cataclysmic world events. Now no artist need search for topics as the daily onslaught is overwhelming.

Like Warhol, Dorothea Tanning, the subject of a new retrospective at the Tate, toiled first in advertising when she came to New York. She had been deeply affected by the groundbreaking MoMA Surrealism/Dada show of 1936 and her ads for Macy’s and others reflected this new awareness of the ability to disassociate body parts and imagery.

She herself was selected by her future husband Max Ernst—then married to Peggy Guggenheim—for a show of women artists at Guggenheim’s Art of this Century gallery when she returned from a stay in Europe. (Was this the moment of the Ernst-Tanning coup de foudre? A year later they were together) Georgia O’Keefe refused to be relegated to this show of ‘women artists” but Tanning accepted. When next invited to participate however in a women-only show in the 70’s second wave of feminism, like many creative women who had already made their own way (Mary McCarthy, Lillian Hellman et al) Tanning was also finally a refusnik. ‘Women artists,” she said, “There is no such thing – or person. It’s just as much a contradiction in terms as “man artist” or “elephant artist”. You may be a woman and you may be an artist; but the one is a given and the other is you.’

She had by then grown into a bold, incisive, self-confident practitioner of painting, poetry, sculpture, costumes and set design.

"Just put yourself in my place, George, " she wrote after she had, in a labor of love, produced the costumes and sets for Balanchine’s new ballet Night Shadow, supported by Lincoln Kirstein, "and you would cry too." Tanning was passionate about ballet, but her production had an unfortunately short shelf life when a new production by the Monte Carlo ballet appeared just a few years later. "I really thought all this time that I had helped to make it a good work, and lots of other people thought so too. I was proud to have worked with you to make such a pretty ballet and I felt it was a real collaboration of all 3 of us. But I suppose it’s a very complicated story and I don’t understand very well how these things work."

Tanning went on to work on other ballets and had plans for many more, but was thwarted by lack of funding and the nature of the collaborative process which stymied her as a solo practitioner .

I wonder what Tanning would have made of the many women-only international shows organized this year in response to #MeToo. Ghetto or Gift? The concurrent counter narrative solo exhibitions—besides Tanning (Ernst), Lee Miller(Man Ray) and Gala Eluard (Dali)—who have finally been removed from the rolls of the ‘muses’-only, tell a more complete tale.

The exhibition runs from February 27 to June 9, 2019 at the Tate Modern. All images courtesy of the Tate.