The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I felt guilty and powerful’
The painter Celia Paul had a 10-year liaison with Lucian Freud. Now she reclaims her story, finds Lucy Scholes
WSELF-PORTRAIT by Celia Paul 216pp, Jonathan Cape, £20, ebook £9.99
hen Celia Paul, then 16, arrived at the Slade in 1976, she was bemused by the prospect of life drawing classes. “It seemed so artificial to me to draw a person one didn’t know or have any involvement with,” she writes in Self-Portrait. “Surely art was about recording a personal vision?”
This relationship, between artist and model, lies at the heart of Paul’s memoir. Unsurprising, perhaps, for a woman who’s famous as both painter and sitter. Paul, who is about to turn 60, has spent her life painting the people closest to her. It was her portraits of her mother – Paul’s principal sitter for years, until she became too frail to climb the stairs to her daughter’s Bloomsbury studio – that first attracted the attention of Lucian Freud, then a visiting tutor at the Slade.
He and Paul had a decade-long relationship, begun when she was 18 and he was 55 (she gave birth to their son, Frank, in 1984), and during that time, Freud painted her often. Self-Portrait, though, is an unashamed bid to reclaim “her own story”, to become master of her own life and art, rather than being reduced to an object in Freud’s.
It opens with an intriguing disclaimer. “I am not a portrait painter,” Paul writes. “If I am anything, I have always been an autobiographer and a chronicler of my life and family.” This book, which coincides with an exhibition at the Victoria Miro Gallery, and the release of a documentary about Paul by Jake Auerbach, feels like an extension of the same project. Just as Paul regards her paintings of those closest to her as a record of her own existence, so too SelfPortrait is constituted by a series of portraits-in-writing. “Linda”, for example – the name of a teenage friend-turned-rival, a classmate of Paul’s who also demonstrated notable early artistic talent – is the title of the chapter that deals with Paul’s time at boarding school.
Similarly, the texture of what she creates on the page is analogous to that of her paintings: her prose stripped back and minimalist, as devoid of excess adornment as her sombre, melancholy but emotionally charged canvases. Even at her most incendiary – when she tackles head-on, for example, what it’s like to be a woman artist both eclipsed by, and seen through the eyes of, her more famous male partner – Paul’s writing never loses this essence of calm solemnity.
Paul writes uncompromisingly about her ambition, from the “sickening” surges of jealousy that coursed through her when Linda’s work was good, to her inability to put down her brush and abandon herself fully to being Freud’s muse (he spoke to her admiringly of Gwen John, who had stopped painting while she was passionately involved with Rodin). The selfishness that’s necessary for the making of great art is a familiar narrative when it comes to male genius, but there’s still something electrifying in encountering a woman who allows her artistic “instinct” to trump her maternal desires. (Paul handed her son’s care over to her mother, “so that I could continue to paint.”) She also refuses to cohabit with her husband, preferring the peace and freedom of her own flat and studio.
For all this candour, Paul’s revelations retain an air of abstruseness. Not that they in any way ring false, but she gives no indication of feeling excoriated by the process of such candid self-exposure. Somehow, she remains detached. Perhaps it’s the whiff of “Never apologise, never explain” that permeates the text. She shows little interest in analysing the whys and wherefores, either of her behaviour or of those around her.
“I was disturbed by the experience,” she admits of Freud first taking her to bed, but this has less to do with his power as an older, already established artist,
Even at her most incendiary, Paul’s writing never loses its calm solemnity
and more her own innocence:
“I felt that I had sinned and that something had been irreparably lost. I felt guilty and powerful. I felt that I’d stepped into a limitless and dangerous world.”
She’d only ever known life at her single-sex boarding school, and before that a childhood in India, at the theological seminary run by her Christian missionary father, who later became the Bishop of Bradford. A different writer would have lingered on the dislocation that the shift between such particular formative experiences must have triggered – geographically, culturally and spiritually – but there’s little in the way of such introspection here.
Self-Portrait made me think of two recent, elliptical autobiographical projects that refuse to conform to traditional notions of intimate disclosure:
‘Something had been irreparably lost. I’d stepped into a dangerous world’
Rachel Cusk’s autofiction trilogy, Outline, Transit and Kudos, about a divorced writer and mother who remarries (details lifted directly from Cusk’s own life); and Joanna Hogg’s film The Souvenir, which tells the story of the director’s time at film school, and her relationship with an older man, a highfunctioning heroin addict.
Cusk’s fictional alter-ego relates the stories of others while saying barely anything about herself; her identity is shaped by the absences left in the text. Hogg, meanwhile, shuts the audience out from the interior thoughts of her younger self (played by Honor Swinton Byrne), despite the fact that she is always on the screen. Like Cusk and Hogg, Paul plays with the balance between confession and dispassion. In their different ways, all three are challenging our ideas about how autobiography works.
There’s something tremendously refreshing about Paul’s lack of sensationalism, which encourages a similar detachment in the reader. I found myself less interested in her (admittedly rather tame) depiction of the notorious Freud, and decidedly more absorbed in the astonishing relationship between Paul and her mother, particularly the way in which the interaction between them as painter and sitter turns, over the years, into a mutual act of deep generosity and love. Self-Portrait is both the obvious extension of Paul’s oeuvre, and a powerful, urgent and essential depiction of what it is to be a woman artist.
Call 0844 871 1514 to order for £16.99. Celia Paul is at Victoria Miro Gallery II, London N1, until Dec 20 (victoria-miro.com)