The girls of Paula Rego and Agustina Bessa-Luís: reflections on women and power.

• Grant number: 25/04426-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: September 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Literature - Other Vernacular Literatures
• Principal Investigator: Renata Soares Junqueira
• Grantee: Roberto Xavier de Oliveira
• Supervisor: Maria do Rosario Sampaio S. Sousa Leitao Lupi Belo
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências e Letras (FCL). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Araraquara. Araraquara , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Universidade Aberta (UAb), Portugal
• Associated to the scholarship: 24/04880-0 - AS MENINAS by Agustina OR Agustina Bessa-Luís, art critic OR Paula Rêgo, Agustina's character, BP.MS

Abstract

As an outcome of an interdisciplinary Scientific Initiation, which focused on the study of literature and painting in the modernism of Brazil and Portugal, this Master's research project proposes to analyze and interpret the book entitled AS MENINAS (2001), in which the Portuguese writer Agustina Bessa-Luís (1922-2019) comments on paintings by Portuguese-British artist Paula Rego (1935-2022). Focusing on this book, we hope to shed some light on the process of constructing hybrid literary genres, common in Agustina's work as a whole. In fact, the writer put a lot of effort into creating novels with biographical inspiration, centered on the personalities of illustrious writers and visual artists who the author/art critic delights in interpreting. The hypothesis to be verified is that, committed to understanding the representation of family relationships in Paula Rego's pictorial work and, above all, the role of women in domestic environments, Agustina creates an open laboratory in As MENINAS, making readers aware of her own procedures and methods in the construction of characters, undisguisedly displaying her process of literary creation as a systematic exercise of fusing four genres of writing and figuration of people: the essayistic, the biographical (to the extent that she projects Paula Rego herself in the painted Girls), the autobiographical (to the extent that she herself, Agustina, identifies with Paula Rego and also talks about herself when summoning the painter's biography) and, ultimately and overlapping everything, the fictional (in the end, everything takes on the status of fiction, since among the girls painted by Paula Rego, Paula and Agustina can be seen surreptitiously). Other works in which the writer approached women painters will be valuable subsidies in this investigation: the biography of Vieira da Silva (1982), the book dedicated to Martha Telles (1986) and AS METAMORFOSES (2007) illustrated by Graça Morais, a work in which Agustina reflects on the genesis of some of her female characters. Consulting collections and interviews with experts and editors in Portugal are essential for carrying out this research, which brings together two renowned Portuguese artists: Agustina Bessa-Luís and Paula Rego.