VICTOR WILLING
The Mayfair gallery Timothy Taylor has announced its representation of the Estate of Victor Willing (1928-88) and is planning a major solo exhibition of his work in September.
Willing, of course, was the husband of the recently passed Paula Rego, who he met at Slade School of Art in 1952. He was the Slade’s star student, already exhibiting his stylised figurative nudes in London galleries, and described by art critic David Sylvester as ‘the spokesman of his generation’. He was a 24-year-old war veteran, already married, and a friend of Francis Bacon; she was a teenage fresher. By all accounts it was love at first sight.
Victor Willing with wife Paula Rego in the early 1960s. © Estate of Victor Willing
A pregnant Rego (she had already had several back-street abortions), returned to Portugal to have the child. He eventually followed her, and in 1959, after his divorce, they married, and settled in the then-Fascist dictatorship. While her career thrived, he developed a creative block, and became a forgotten man on the London art scene, eventually taking the reins of his father-in-law’s business, while suffering from the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis.
The business failed, and the couple returned, practically penniless, to London, with their three children. Remarkably, the subsequent period saw Willing’s career flourish as he channelled a burst of creative energy, producing a body of complex, enigmatic, expressionist/ surrealist paintings, which were exhibited in solo shows in both the Whitechapel Gallery (curated by Nicholas Serota) and the Serpentine Gallery. He died in 1988, and his work, which, as gallerist Timothy Taylor puts it, ‘anticipated 1980s New Wave painting as well as recalling the off-kilter still lifes of Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio de Chirico’, has continued to be exhibited in Britain and beyond.
Taylor adds: 'We are honoured to work with the Estate of Victor Willing, whom I first met as a young gallerist working at Bernard Jacobson where Willing gave several shows in the early ’80s. Expressing ideas decades ahead of his time, Willing’s emergence as an artist of profound psychological insight echoes his artistic peer Philip Guston’s radical turn from abstraction to surreal landscapes of the inner self. Were he alive today, I am certain that the intensity of his flame would have burned just as brightly.’