The
painter Gwen John suffered from jealousy in her relationship with the sculptor
Auguste Rodin. She was 27 when she started to model for him. He was 63. Rodin
slept with a lot of women during his lifetime and the women he slept with also
posed for him. John was jealous of Rodin’s other women. She was deeply in love
with him. Throughout their tempestuous affair, she continued to paint, her
paintings becoming ever more distilled and intense. She wrote in a letter: ‘I
may never have anything to express, except this desire for a more interior
life.’ In her work she showed no dependence on Rodin’s romantically charged, monumental
style. Her paintings were usually very small, her focus narrow. She always knew
what she wanted. Even as a student at the Slade School of Art, her talent for
clear observation was completely formed.
Gwen
John’s artistic style owes no debt to the two men with whom she was intimately
involved: Rodin and her brother, Augustus John. Yet, when she is referred to
publicly, her stature as an artist is qualified by the information that she was
the lover of one and the sister of the other. She is often described as an
artist ‘in her own right’. I hate that term: it implies that ‘her’ position as
an artist is established only in relation to her circumstances. ‘She’ will
never be seen as simply a great artist. The term ‘in her own right’ is used
most often about women. I hate the word ‘muse’, too.
‘Longing’
is the emotion that drives Gwen John’s art. It is also the emotion that fuelled
Charlotte Brontë’s writing. She fell passionately in love with her teacher,
Monsieur Héger, when she studied at his language school in Brussels. When she
returned home, his wife intervened to stop the exchange of letters between her
husband and his infatuated English student. Charlotte pined for him. She
channelled her yearning into her art. Jane Eyre is the result. These two women,
Gwen John and Charlotte Brontë, are the artists to whom I feel most deeply
connected. Longing powers my own art.
In the
second volume of William Feaver’s biography of Lucian Freud (Bloomsbury, £35),
David Dawson, Lucian’s long-serving assistant, describes Susanna Chancellor,
the woman who remained Lucian’s partner longer than anyone else, as ‘a proper
woman, not one of these neurotics’. She is the girlfriend who replaced me.
People
don’t become artists if they are sane and well-adjusted. The world is indulgent
towards the neurotic male artist. The more impossible his behaviour, the more
he is valued. The world disapproves of neurosis in a female artist. This
disapproval fills her with shame and undermines her confidence. Lucian was
attracted to young women artists precisely because they were neurotic. He was
drawn to their vulnerability. There is a sad pattern to this biography: the
long list of sensitive young women, one after another, who fall for Lucian and,
when they become too dependent and needy, are dumped by him. He always
encouraged the infatuation, needing their dependence, until he felt too
claustrophobic to stand them any longer.
Lucian
didn’t like to be thought of in connection with other artists. He resented that
his paintings were often compared to the pedantic realism of Stanley Spencer,
and it irritated him that people presumed he’d been influenced by the Neue
Sachlichkeit movement – the painters Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad
who were active during Lucian’s childhood in Berlin. It came to an end, along
with the Weimar Republic, in 1933, the year that Lucian and his family fled to
England.
Lucian
once told William Feaver: ‘I want to be beyond compare.’ But he was pleased if
he was compared to Rodin. He was excited by the parallels in their lives. He
liked to tell me how delighted he was that he had the same birthday, 8
December, as Rodin’s lover, the sculptor Camille Claudel, while Suzy Boyt, the
mother of four of his children, had the same birthday as Rodin: 12 November. Lucian
thought this showed that their relationship had a special significance. My
birthday is 11 November.
Lucian
owned several sculptures by Rodin, including the statue of Balzac that Lucian
placed in his small hallway; it confronted every visitor to his flat in Holland
Park. Another Rodin statue, entitled Iris, stood on a low round table in the
sitting-room, in front of Francis Bacon’s painting of two men wrestling on a
bed, known as ‘The Buggers’. Rodin’s Iris is a headless figure, her legs are
splayed, her genitals the central vortex of the whole erotically charged form.
Many of Lucian’s naked portraits remind me of this sculpture. Time and again
the figures, with splayed legs, are lying down under his forensic scrutiny. In
these paintings, Lucian always started with the genitals, and the composition
grew out from this focal point.
In the
catalogue to an exhibition of Lucian’s drawings at the Matthew Marks Gallery in
New York, Leigh Bowery asks him: ‘In your work the pictures of naked women are
always of straight women, while the pictures of naked men are always of gay
men. Why is that?’ Lucian replies: ‘I’m drawn to women by nature and to queers
because of their courage.’ His answer is brilliant, but typically evasive. He
doesn’t reveal what Leigh really wants to know, i.e. are the naked portraits
always about desire, and is that why there are no naked portraits of gay women
or straight men? William Feaver (or ‘Villiam’ as Lucian called him) is a
straight man and Lucian never painted him.
There is
a strange tempo to his book. Lucian’s words, intermingled with Feaver’s, create
the impression that nefarious goings-on are deliberately being concealed by the
pace and the wit of the conversation, almost like a pair of conjurors using
patter to distract the audience. Lucian’s ability to dodge a question is
complemented by Feaver’s speedy prose; he is also very careful to allow Lucian
to have his way by avoiding any kind of psychological interpretation of the
paintings, even when the images are loaded with sexual symbolism. You don’t
have to know Francis Beaumont’s 17th-century parody The Knight of the Burning
Pestle to see what a pestle and mortar signify. Yet Feaver goes out of his way
to explain that there is no intended meaning in the pestle and mortar placed so
surreally at Lucian’s mother’s feet in Large Interior, W9, the double portrait
of her with his lover Jacquetta Eliot.
Rodin’s
life and Lucian’s life were different in one important aspect. Rodin had just
one son, by his companion Rose Beuret. Lucian had numerous children by many
different women. Neither Rodin nor Lucian involved themselves in their
children’s upbringing. Rodin made sure that his son was looked after by Rose’s
sister, Thérèse, so that Rose could continue to ‘be there’ for him.
When I
first met William Feaver, I had recently had a baby: Lucian’s and my son, Frank
Paul, whom I had left with my mother. My mother was Frank’s main carer during
his babyhood and early childhood. I left him with her so that I could continue
to paint, and so that I could continue to sit for Lucian. Before I got
pregnant, I had started a big painting of my mother sitting on a bed with my
four sisters. My father had died the previous year and the painting is full of
grief. I continued working on it throughout my pregnancy and after the birth of
my son. On the strength of this painting, which Charles Saatchi bought, my
first dealer had started to represent me. I was due to have a solo exhibition
at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery the year after I met William Feaver.
Here is
his description of me on first sight:
“”We went off to dinner. I drove. He, in his
immaculate grey flannel suit, twitched beside me all the way, giving directions
to Mark’s Club, off Berkeley Square. Celia joined us there. She seemed
silenced. Sitting with her beneath the ornately framed Victorian hunting scenes
that set the tone of the décor, he touched her leg and she reached for his arm,
peeking sidelong at him as he talked.””
My first
impressions of William Feaver were affected by the knowledge that he was
sitting opposite me with his pregnant wife. I thought about how different their
child’s upbringing would be from my own son’s. My silence was due, in part, to
this. I was also remembering the last time I had come to this restaurant, three
years previously, with Lucian and my father, then the bishop of Bradford.
I had
felt proud of my father on that occasion, because he had recognised that the
drawings on the walls were by Max Beerbohm and had impressed Lucian with his
knowledge of art and culture. My father died from a brain tumour the year after
this meeting. He left my mother no money. He never thought about saving from
his small salary and the houses we lived in always belonged to the church. When
he died, the church raised enough money for my mother to buy a little terraced
house in Cambridge. This is the house where she was living with my son at the
time of this dinner with Lucian, William Feaver and his wife, Andrea Rose.
Feaver
asked me about my painting and I described Family Group, which I was still
working on. He visited my studio a week or two later. He liked it but said he
thought the figure of my sister Lucy needed ‘bulking out a bit at the bottom’.
He didn’t sit for Lucian, but he did sit regularly for Frank Auerbach, Lucian’s
closest friend. Frank supplies this book with many quotes about Lucian, his
work, his friends and lovers. Feaver quotes his words about me:
“”I remember him saying that because Celia
gradually found out that she wasn’t his only girlfriend she very often wept
while she was sitting [for him] and she had no esteem at all because he
preferred other people on occasion to her. And Lucian was really distressed and
asked me what could he do to make her feel better about herself.””
These
words make me feel sad. Puzzled, too. Surely the way to make me feel better
about myself was for Lucian to be faithful to me? Isn’t it natural to be upset
if your boyfriend cheats on you?
When I
met Lucian in the autumn of 1978, I was 18 and Lucian was 55. He was a visiting
tutor at the Slade. I was keen to show him the first drawings and paintings I
had made of my mother. I knew I had found my subject matter and I was excited
to be making my first real works of art. And I had seen an exhibition of
paintings by Lucian a few months before and had been especially struck by the
paintings of his mother. I felt connected to him because of them.
I come
from a family of sisters. I have no brothers. Lucian was my first lover. My
father was head of an evangelical community in North Devon when I got into the
Slade, aged 16. I had been brought up to regard sex outside marriage as a sin.
The
first chapter of Feaver’s biography is devoted to Lucian’s involvement with
Jacquetta Eliot, an heiress. He portrays her vividly: a sensationally beautiful
diva who understood the rules of the sexual game that Lucian played – namely,
making the other person jealous. She succeeded and beat Lucian at his own game.
None of the other relationships that Lucian had in his later years receives as
much attention. Years of my life are dealt with in a clumsy paragraph, in the
context of a description of the painting Interior, W11 (After Watteau):
“”Her father had said, after meeting Freud for
the first time, that he was ‘the most selfish man he’d ever met’. He died in
1983, the year she moved into the flat Freud bought for her, high in a building
opposite the British Museum. After his death and following After Watteau, she
painted her mother and sisters adrift on a bed: the remaining family lovingly
nestled. Her son Frank was born on 10 December 1984. She took three weeks off
in Cambridge after the birth at the Portland Hospital (which Freud paid for)
before leaving the baby with her mother and returning to London. In After Watteau
she sat with Bella, because of having to rest her hand on her knee, but not
with the others.””
I didn’t
like sitting for Lucian. I felt trapped. I have never liked to be looked at,
though I do like attention, of the right sort. I cried throughout the sittings
for all of the paintings Lucian did of me: Naked Girl with Egg, After Watteau,
Girl in a Striped Nightshirt, Painter and Model. (There is also a beautiful
painting of my head and shoulders, with one hand lifted to my cheek and the
curve of my naked breast just appearing from my white shirt – I don’t remember
the title. It’s not often exhibited or reproduced.) I sat for him because I was
in love with him. The last painting Lucian did of me was Painter and Model.
Feaver quotes Auerbach:
“”Lucian
was very aware of the fact that Celia wanted to paint and actually went out of
his way to encourage her ... That elaborate and, to me, not entirely successful
picture of her and Angus ... was partly done, I think, in order to make her
feel better ... Certainly he was concerned to keep his two sitters to hand for
as long as he needed. The painting was completed in 1987. And that proved to be
the end of the intimacy.””
Again, I
am more amused than upset by Auerbach’s interpretation of Lucian’s concern
about my frustration at not being able to paint as much as I wanted. Surely the
most effective way he could help me would be to spend some time with our son
himself? My mother was Frank’s main carer, but I travelled regularly to
Cambridge, usually every other day in the early years, and I was often
exhausted. Doing a painting of me standing up was hardly a way to make me feel
better about my own work. But Feaver is right in saying that this painting
‘proved to be the end of the intimacy’. I didn’t sit for Lucian again. He
remained central to my life but gradually I fell out of love with him. I went
on loving him, however.
Danny
Moynihan, the son of Anne Dunn, one of Lucian’s lovers, was at the Slade with
me. He arranged a show for some of us at Acquavella Galleries in New York in
1981. The work was at the Moynihans’ house, waiting to be shipped to the US,
when, according to Dunn, ‘Lucian came round, walked straight in, took [Celia
Paul’s] work away and that was that ... Danny was mortified at setting all this
up, such a slap in the face. Lucian would get a better gallery for her and he
wanted control.’ Feaver asked Lucian about the incident. This is how Lucian
remembered it, apparently: ‘Danny Moynihan got Celia’s paintings from the Slade
and she said she wanted them back. He said: “Sorry, they’ve gone to America.”
So I walked round to Redcliffe Road’ – where the Moynihans lived – ‘and took
them.’
This
anecdote seems crucial to me in understanding the dilemma young women face
about their own ambition for their art, and their need to be loved and desired.
The two ambitions are usually incompatible. When I told him about the
exhibition in New York, Lucian said: ‘Are you sure that’s what you want?’ He
advised me that it was essential to focus on one’s art without distractions of
this kind, especially when one was young (I was 21). I sensed that he would
disapprove of me, and love me less, if I went ahead with it. If, instead, he
had encouraged me, my life might have been very different. William Acquavella
was Lucian’s dealer from 1992 till the end of his life, selling his paintings
for record-breaking prices.
One of
Lucian’s last models was a former art student, Ria Kirby. He had met her when
she was working as an assistant at the V&A, helping to hang an exhibition
of his work. When Feaver asked David Dawson about the nature of Lucian’s
involvement with her, David said: ‘Ria? She’d never dream of it. Never entered
her head. To her he was an old man.’ Lucian was pleased with his new model:
‘She’s from a different social background. Something brand-newish about her but
she’s so sensible, loves working at the V&A and was at Camberwell, painting
where painting was discouraged. I’m very pleased. No hint of showing me her
work, always a quarter of an hour early and since I’m always longing to start
that’s good too.’ She posed right away to appreciable effect. ‘Lying on the bed
she’s tragic.’
Ria was
not one of ‘these neurotics’. She was not pushy about her own work. She was
approved of by David and Lucian for these reasons. She decided when the time
was right to stop sitting for Lucian. She told him that she didn’t want him to
start another painting of her because she wanted to get married and have
children sometime.
Reading
about Ria reminds me of this ideal of straightforwardness, and how inhibiting
and distressing it was for me to know that I couldn’t live up to it, even if
I’d wanted to. Ria was never in love with Lucian. Love complicates things.
Gwen
John sought out a life of solitude, a life lived in the shadows. Charlotte Brontë
likened her writing process and that of her sisters to potatoes growing in a
cellar. I know that women possess this particular power of interiority and
silence. Perhaps the great women artists are nocturnal creatures who prefer to
create freely in the darkness. In this way, too, they avoid being referred to
as ‘one of these neurotics’. Perhaps they choose their overshadowing? If they
go unnoticed they can be as madly inventive as they like, without making anyone
jealous.
When
Lucian died, I started to feel that I’d had enough of cellar life. Like Gwen
John, I had continued to paint with complete dedication through very turbulent
times. I had been represented by the same gallery, Marlborough Fine Art, for 25
years. In 2011, after Lucian’s death, I wrote to various galleries, hoping for
a change. Simon Martin, the director of Pallant House in Chichester, suggested
a joint exhibition of me and Gwen John. Victoria Miro saw the exhibition and
liked my work. I am now represented by Victoria Miro and my life has been
transformed. I am not often referred to as a ‘painter in her own right’. I
still work and live alone, my aim is still silence and interiority, but I feel
I am beginning to enjoy a certain freedom, in my work and in my life.
Feaver
writes affectionately about Lucian’s sons: Ali Boyt, Freddy Eliot and my son,
Frank. He describes him in a tender account:
“”In March 1998 Frank Paul (‘Young Frank’, to
distinguish him from Frank Auerbach) had sat the scholarship exams for King’s
School Canterbury. He was successful and consequently on a Sunday in September
Lucian went down to Canterbury to see him and the other newly enrolled scholars
blessed in the cathedral ... Lucian said: ‘Frank looked awfully good and got
into trouble, as he’s so dreamy and had mould on his gown.’ ‘He’s always
reading,’ his housemaster said. ‘He’ll be fine.’ (He was to win prizes for
academic excellence and German and proceed to Cambridge.)””
It meant
a great deal to me, as of course it did to Frank, that he and his father formed
a real relationship. Frank grew closer to his father when he started to sit for
him. Unfortunately for Lucian, Frank was about to go away to university. He was
studying languages and spent a lot of time abroad. The painting was never
finished. Feaver quotes Lucian discussing Frank in 2004, when he was studying
in Russia: ‘Poor little Frank’s been robbed: his glasses, his passport, credit
cards, everything. He was held up in the street. Basically, he’s OK. It’s only
just happened. Didn’t want to come back at all. He’s very affected by how
people are to him.’
Frank
and I spent some time with Lucian on the last day of his life. We were shown
into his bedroom by Lucian’s daughter Rose Boyt, who told Frank that one of the
nurses had said that the last sense to leave a dying person is their sense of
hearing, so Frank should say a few words to his father, if he felt inclined.
Rose and I left the room. I’ve often wondered what last words I would have
spoken to Lucian, if I had been given this opportunity.
Celia
Paul cried throughout her first sessions modeling for Lucian Freud. “The
experience of being naked disarmed me,” Paul writes in her new memoir,
Self-Portrait. She describes sitting for him as a tortuous experience and the
sense of his scrutiny as overpowering. “I felt like I was at the doctor’s or in
hospital, or in the morgue.” At one point, he tells her that her breasts
reminded him of eggs; then he boils one, slices it in half, and places it in a
dish in front of her. She has to lie still while he paints it.
This
became Freud’s Naked Girl With Egg (1980-81), a strange and slightly surreal
work that one critic noted was emblematic of Freud’s interest in female
genitalia, a painting that “turns the body inside out and drags the mystery
into the daylight.” The mystery dragged into the daylight was Paul’s body,
naked and splayed on a black bedspread, as she cups her breast with her hand.
Her eyes are turned upward toward something in the distance so that we see
mostly their whites. In front of her, on a small table, is the egg, lookng
like a pair of disembodied breasts or yellow eyes.
The
naked girl and the famous artist: It’s an old story and perhaps predictable arrangement of roles for Freud,
the much older and more famous painter, and Paul, his beautiful younger lover;
he paints and she sits for him. And yet. The concept of sitting occurs over and
over again in Paul’s book, and these roles are not as static as Naked Girl With
Egg might lead us to believe. Nor is sitting as simple as it might seem. “The
act of sitting is not passive,” Paul writes, describing it, at times, as almost
a form of intense meditation, one that requires its own kind of focus.
Self-Portrait
might be read as a series of sittings over the course of a lifetime. Paul sits
for Freud many times throughout their relationship, but he also sits for her.
So do all of her sisters. When Paul is just starting out as a painter, her
mother sits for her and cries because she feels like her daughter is treating her
as an object. But as Paul’s career continues, sitting becomes something of a
vocation for her mother; she takes the train twice a week to London to sit for
her daughter in her studio. Time passes, the roles and the balance of power
alter, and so the acts of sitting and painting change, too. There are
traditional narratives about the painter and his subject, the genius and his
muse. Paul tells us that, in her life, this story was at least partly true: She
was the naked girl on the bedspread, weeping and overexposed. But it is part of
a longer story that she is telling about herself and Freud and others in her
life, about the painter and those she paints. In Self-Portrait, Paul is her own
subject, but so are the shifting conditions of subjecthood and objecthood, the
changing relationships between the painter and the painted.
Celia Paul was born in 1959 in
Trivandrum, India. Her father was a missionary and later a minister in rural
England. Paul learned to paint while at boarding school. When she was 16, after
a teacher noticed her talent, she went away to the Slade School of Art in
London. There, two years later, she met Freud, then 55 and a visiting tutor at
the school. She showed him some drawings and a painting she had done, and he
invited her back to his flat to show her one of his. When he kissed her, she
writes, she was a little frightened. Slowly, they became romantically involved,
as she moved from rented room to rented room in London, waiting for him to
call. Their love was rooted in painting—both the act of putting paint to canvas
and a shared devotion to art as the primary purpose of their lives. Their
relationship was also turbulent. He often had other lovers, and she
occasionally did, too. He had a daughter roughly her age. In the prologue, Paul
states that one reason she wrote this book was to tell the story of their
relationship on her terms: “By writing about myself in my own words, I
have made my life my own story. Lucian, particularly, is part of my story
rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as part of his.”
Her
telling of this story is characterized by a certain matter-of-factness. She
incorporates old journal entries and letters, which float to the surface of the
narrative with a particular intensity, and images of her and his paintings.
Paul’s prose is at once unflinching and direct as well as reticent, full of
gaps. She tells us the details of a delicious meal she and Freud shared at a
bistro but not quite how she was feeling or why she acted a certain way. She
also reflects on a period when she was living in London, drinking heavily and
sleeping around, trashing her quiet landlord’s beautiful house, but she doesn’t
really tell us where these seemingly out-of-character impulses sprang from. She
doesn’t explain herself; there is a kind of dialectic between directness and
reticence in her work, as she reports the facts but obscures the motivations.
It made me think about portrait painting: After all, what is a portrait if not
a painting of a surface, an outer layer that hints at something deeper? In her
written portrait of herself, Paul exercises a kind of control in the acts of
revelation and withholding.
In many
ways, this is not a book about Freud but rather one about painting. Paul writes
about the particular intensities and tediums of her work, its relationship to
life, and its peculiar power dynamics. She describes, too, the sacrifices and
tensions that she sees as inherent in being a woman artist. Paul is nearly
ascetic about her work, even to this day at age 60. She chooses not to live
with her current husband in order to preserve her privacy and time for
painting. For the same reason, when she and Freud had a son, Frank, she did not
live with the child; his primary caretaker was her mother. She does not
apologize for this, nor does she valorize it. She simply relays the
circumstances of her life, what felt necessary and what did not, what allowed
her to paint and what she gave up to do so.
The
interplay between solitude and proximity, between separation and closeness,
factors into all of her close relationships. In a piece by her son for an
exhibition catalog, which Paul excerpts, he writes:
"' Isolation
is deeply important to my mum’s peace of mind…. Her studio, which no-one else
may enter without permission, is a mass of splintered floorboards, paint
spatters and canvases, but, like [her] bedroom, it’s devoid of any adornments
which others might find necessary for a sense of self-assurance. One might
conclude from this that my mum is an entirely self-subsistent person, yet she
feels separation keenly, as well as a deep guilt that her need for solitude
precludes her from being as hospitable as she would like to be. "
Frank
seems to have made a kind of peace with the unusual domestic arrangements of
his childhood and with his mother’s need for solitude. He has come to
understand that her choices were not easy for her. And yet Paul implies—again,
somewhat reticently—that he did not always feel so settled in her choices, and
neither did she. She describes the experience of painting a portrait of her
young son perched on his grandmother’s lap, as well as the sense that something
about the arrangement of their roles was strange. “I felt that it might be
wrong and suspect for me to be standing looking at him, where I had placed him,
lower than me on my mother’s knee,” she writes. “I should have been the one who
was sitting. I sensed that he felt this, too, and that there’s a trace of
indignation in his regard, and a hint of hurt pride.” When he was a teenager,
Frank started to refuse to sit for her, even becoming angry when he discovered
in her sketchbook that she was making sketches of him sleeping. It was a
rejection, perhaps, of the feeling of being somehow used. Later in life,
though, he began to sit for her once again, listening to audiobooks while she
painted him.
So it
goes: the flux of sitting and painting. Paul looks back to a time in her early
years with Freud when she tried to paint a portrait of him, which simply
wouldn’t come together. “I think I felt, at the time, that although I was
Lucian’s subject, he wasn’t mine,” she writes. She only finished the painting
many years later, after his death.
The last
portrait Freud did of Paul before their relationship finally came to a painful
end was called Painter and Model. In it, she is painting a nude male model; she
is dressed in a paint-covered smock, stepping on a tube of paint and
brandishing her brush. It is a clear reversal of the traditional gender roles
in art, a radical image of a woman artist in control of the male body. “I felt
honoured that Lucian should represent me in the powerful position of the
artist: his recognition was deeply significant to me,” she writes. “But
underlying my pride, I felt wistful that I was no longer represented as the
object of desire.” It is not so straightforward after all, the shedding of the
objectification that bothered her so much in the beginning. Paul distills these
tensions masterfully, and her book does something that painting alone cannot,
linking all of these sittings and portraits in a way that allows us to see the
relationships from different angles and at different times. She fluctuates
between subject and object, not just in her relationship with Freud but even in
her own conception of herself and how she would like to be seen.
After
Freud died in 2011, Paul writes, she wanted to paint something about what he
meant to her. She called this work Painter and Model, and it is something of an
updated version of the one he did of her. But this one is a self-portrait,
giving the title a new frisson of meaning. Paul sits and looks straight ahead,
wearing a similar spattered smock, the paint tubes scattered around her feet.
She is older and looks a bit stoic, somewhere between happy and sad, but
peaceful.
This
version is more visually muted than Freud’s—it’s darker in color and has a
single figure, and there is no action frozen on the canvas. It does not have
quite the same obvious thrill of upturned power dynamics, the woman artist
wielding her brush over a lounging male nude. In this portrait, she is simply
sitting. But of course, as she has told us, this is not so simple at all. Of
all the paintings in the book, this one perhaps crystallizes most essentially
the act of sitting, which animates so much of Paul’s work. It also manages to
capture most clearly that strange liminal space she occupies, that perhaps we
all occupy, moving between subject and object, caught in a flux of power and
attention, in a single canvas.
The
Painter and the Painted : Celia Paul’s Self-Portrait. By Sophie Haigney. The Nation, November 9, 2020.
“Pictures
unpainted make the heart sick.” With this indelible line, the principal of the
prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London persuaded Bishop Geoffrey Paul
to allow his talented teenage daughter to study there. Two years later, in
1978, Celia Paul met Lucian Freud, who was at Slade as a visiting tutor. She
was 18; he was 55.
In her
captivating memoir, “Self-Portrait,” Paul describes how her growing love for
Freud seemed at first to denude her of ambition. She stopped washing her
clothes and brushing her hair. Her work became “slack and halfhearted”; she
kept wiping away images, and felt “suffocated by the increasing debris of
unfinished paintings.” Her heart was sick.
Paul and
Freud were lovers for 10 years, and in 1984 she gave birth to their son, Frank.
By the time the philandering Freud died in 2011, he had at least 14 offspring
that he acknowledged as his own; The Times’s obituary played it safe by
specifying only that there were “many.”
Freud
was by turns domineering and caring, encouraging about Paul’s paintings while
doing what he could to stop her from making them. He was fanatical about his
own time, famously punishing portrait sitters who deigned to arrive late, but
he would keep Paul waiting for his arrival or even — because he refused to give
her his number — just a phone call. Freud would speak enviously of how Rodin
had convinced his lover Camille Claudel to give herself over to becoming a
muse, and how hurt Rodin was when he no longer had complete control over her.
“Self-Portrait” is Paul’s account of her life
and her work — or, more precisely, of her attempts to realize the possibilities
of each despite the constraints thrown up by the other. She left Frank with her
mother in Cambridge when he was an infant. When Paul spends time with him, she
says, “I don’t have any thoughts for myself.” She lives separately from her
current husband, who doesn’t have a key to her flat.
Paul
writes about her struggle to love someone while dedicating herself to her
painting, explaining in her prologue that she hopes her book will “speak to
young women artists — and perhaps to all women — who will no doubt face this
challenge in their lives at some time and will have to resolve this conflict in
their own ways.” But this makes her mesmerizing book sound more helpful than it
is, or than it needs to be; “Self-Portrait” is less tidy and more surprising
than such a potted purpose would allow.
When
Paul first met Freud she noticed how pale and waxy his skin was, with an “eerie
glow” that looked “like a candle inside a turnip.” (Her metaphors are often
startling in their cool specificity.) His initial attempts to seduce her made
her feel “hemmed in.” His apartment smelled of rotting fruit and food scraps.
“I watched him kissing me and my mouth was unresponsive,” she writes. “I was
frightened.”
It was
only later in their relationship that Paul describes anything resembling
pleasure. Still, aside from some ghostly charcoal sketches she made while he
slept, she wasn’t able to paint him. “Although I was Lucian’s subject, he
wasn’t mine,” she writes. The first time she sat for him, she cried. She lay
naked, and self-consciously pushed her hand to her breast; he told her to hold
the pose, even though it was excruciating for her: “I felt like I was at the
doctor’s, or in hospital, or in the morgue.”
She
recalls all of this precisely, without anger. When Paul learned about Freud’s
other affairs, she swallowed a handful of painkillers and chased them with a
bottle of whiskey. “This landed me in the hospital,” she writes. “I went home
to recover.” Paul’s powers of observation are keen and often ruthless, but she
never resorts to the language of self-pity — even when a reader might expect
her to. “Self-Portrait” reveals an abjection that declines to announce itself as
such.
Pages of
this book are given over to notebook entries she kept decades ago, describing
her painting practice with a moving, almost painful, immediacy. She would envy
Freud in his soundproof studio while she suffered a noisy apartment and had to
wear earplugs, “trying to block out the din so that one poor struggling thought
might swim through.” If only she could get the solitude and quiet she needed,
her next painting promised to be great. “There is a creativity working in me
like worms in sand.”
Unlike
the hard, clinical gaze of Freud’s work, Paul’s portraits are radiant with
intimacy. The child of missionaries, she has always been attracted, she says,
to the “juxtaposition of the mystical with direct observation.” “Self-Portrait”
includes lush, full-color reproductions of numerous paintings — Freud’s as well
as hers. Paul’s main subjects have been her four sisters and their mother, when
she was alive. “The act of sitting is not a passive one,” Paul writes. Her
mother would use the time for prayer. In one painting, “My Mother with a Ring,”
her mother looks off into the distance as if she’s waiting for something, her
eyes gleaming as they catch the light.
The arc
of Paul’s story is not one of triumph, but endurance. “I felt that time itself
was like water, a powerful current that had dragged my mother away and that was
also pulling me in the same direction,” she writes. “There was some comfort for
me in this thought.” A self-portrait she painted after Freud’s death was done
as both homage and severance. Like a painting he did of her, it’s titled
“Painter and Model” because now, she writes, “I am my own subject.”
‘I Am My
Own Subject’: Celia Paul on Lucian Freud, Motherhood and a Life in Art
By
Jennifer Szalai. The New York Times, November 11, 2020
A woman
sprawls on a bed, the suggestion of a wall behind her. With her left hand, she
cups her left breast, while the right falls free. Her eyes are turned toward
the pillow. Her strong thighs don’t quite meet, and her knee points toward a
table in the foreground, where a boiled egg, sliced in half, waits in a white
cocotte (a morning-after repast, maybe): a visual echo of her bountiful nipple.
Lucian Freud called this painting Naked Girl With Egg.
The girl
in question is Celia Paul. She was in her twenties when she sat for the
painting; Freud was in his fifties. Sure, it’s that old story: the art student
and the visiting tutor, a passion we might speak of as forbidden were it not so
familiar. In her new memoir, Self-Portrait, Paul, now in her sixties, no longer
student but master in her own right, writes of modeling for Freud in the fall
of 1980, not long after they’d met and begun an affair that would last nearly a
decade. She struggled under her lover’s scrutiny—she recalls that he “peered
down” at her, though on canvas the subject’s body looms over the viewer. “I was
very conscious of my flesh, and I felt myself to be undesirable.”
Of
course, that’s Freud’s work: lush bodies and frank physicality, haunted faces
with the suggestion of introspection. We might understand his nude figures as
sexual, but they’re rarely sexy. Maybe Paul was just too young to understand
that; maybe she thought modeling for her lover—intimacy with a complicated
power dynamic—something close to a sex act. “I felt exposed and hated the
feeling. I cried throughout these sessions.” She never gives her opinion of the
finished work.
It’s probably wrong
of me to begin with Freud, though I imagine there will be readers who come to
this memoir looking for him. In life, his fame far eclipsed hers—we might call
her an artist’s artist. Self-Portrait is not an exercise in setting the record
straight, the unvarnished truth about a great man. Nor is it the work of an artist’s
muse, speaking up at last. It’s an account of a life so rigorously dedicated to
art and family that fame seems beside the point. Perhaps the most telling
relationship in the book is Paul’s friendship and then rivalry with another
girl, Linda, when she was only 15, both so obsessed with art that they became
“secretive and mistrustful of each other.” Self-Portrait documents a woman
learning to trust—not Freud, not other artists, but herself.
Celia Paul was born
in 1959 in India, where her father was head of a seminary. Faith was important
to both her parents. Her mother, frequently Paul’s model, used their sessions
together to pray. Paul doesn’t speak of religion’s role in her own life, but I
understand art—defined broadly—as the filter through which she sees all,
perhaps as total as her parents’ Christianity. As a writer, she’s possessed of
a heightened sensibility, a particular vantage on to the world. Here’s her
recall of India, which she left at age five:
’The
drumbeats from the Hindu festivals would echo up to our house across the paddy
fields from the Hindu temple in Trivandrum. The drums would be accompanied by
chanting and screaming, which would reach a crescendo and then suddenly there
would be silence, punctuated only by the lonely howl of the jackals.”
This is
less a memory than it is the colonial mythology that a woman now in her sixties
would have been raised on. Of course, a memoir is as much a construction as a
painting. Here are things as I see them: as dramatic, thrilling, extreme.
’’My mother had been radiant in her richly
embroidered dresses and saris. I loved her passionately. When my younger sister
Kate was born, I was so traumatised by being displaced in my mother’s
affections that I resolved to die.”
Self-Portrait’s
direct language doesn’t quite convey the intensity of the author’s
feeling—those screaming Indian villagers, a mother so loved that the arrival of
a sibling would make Paul want to die. There’s something similar in Paul’s
paintings, which can appear placid and understated but upon closer study yield
fervent emotion.
Paul’s
mother was one of the painter’s most rewarding subjects. Several of the
portraits of her appear in this volume, and even in reproduction you can read
the affection in the 2005 oil My Mother. An elderly woman in a diaphanous
dress, she is thinner than in a portrait made 15 years earlier: not wasted, but
sainted, with her beatific smile, her feet that seem not to touch the floor.
She’s seated, and only the modulation of light and color imply a physical space
behind her; she’s in the studio, or she’s in the kingdom of heaven. When Freud
looked at Paul, she felt reduced; when Paul looks at her subjects, they are
exalted.
Self-Portrait
is loosely organized by theme, in chapters titled “Lucian,” “Home,” “Being a
Mother,” “My Mother.” From them, the reader can piece together the particulars
of Paul’s life: a happy upbringing with her four sisters, an adolescent mania
for art that carried her to the Slade School of Fine Art, where she met Freud.
The two had a son, Frank, in 1984, and their romance ended in 1988. Freud died
in 2011. In a recent documentary, an art historian referred to him in plain
hyperbole as “one of the great European painters of the last 500 years.”
Self-Portrait illuminates what Freud’s long shadow obscured: Celia Paul
herself, and an altogether different way of being an artist.
Though there are
appreciable differences in their styles, as artists, both Freud and Paul are
interested in people, depicted in constructed vignettes that imply some elusive
narrative, a drama of the self. Generally, in these pages, Paul speaks of Freud
not as a teacher, but a lover, a man who both delighted and frustrated her. She
does not engage in the question of what effect his style might have had on her
artistic development, nor does she answer whether her youthful experience
modeling for Freud informed her own practice of painting from life—particularly
her mother, her sisters, and her son, Frank—but a comparison suggests itself.
“I have noticed that the men I have worked
from are interested in the process of painting and in the act of sitting. The
silence, when I am working from men, is less interior. Women, in my experience,
find it easier to sit still and think their own thoughts, and they often hardly
seem to be aware that I’m there in the same room. For this reason, I usually
feel more peaceful when I’m working from a woman, and more free.
”
In My Sisters in
Mourning, reproduced in this book, Paul paints her four sisters in shapeless
white frocks, seated close together. They are arrayed by age, faces similar, as
biological siblings’ so often are; it’s almost the progression of a single
person over the years. The sitters’ hands are folded, almost in gestures of
prayer. Paul speaks of the silence of her subjects in the moments she is
painting them, and that quality exists in the finished work, too: the process
informing the product.
This exchange between
artist and subject, inside the studio, is clearly important. It’s not merely an
act of looking—“If I know my subject well, it’s almost as if I don’t need to
look at them in order to give them intense attention,” Paul writes—but one
nearer collaboration. For Paul, the model is an active presence. She notes that
for some early paintings she let her sister Kate read a book while she modeled;
the finished work is a failure, “the vital spark is missing.” For Paul, the
peculiar dynamic between artist and model is almost a moral question. As a
younger artist, she painted her mother:
‘’I peremptorily instructed my mother about
what position she should assume: she should lie on her back and raise one leg
slightly. When she faltered and didn’t get the position just as I had wanted, I
shouted at her. I was very cruel. She cried and said that I was treating her
like an object. I responded irritably to her tears and said that she didn’t
believe in me.”
She says her best
student life drawings were of a model who wept, echoing the artist’s mother’s
feeling of being dehumanized.
“I empathised with her because I had so often
cried when I sat for Lucian, and I understood how an awareness of how exposed
one is, when lying naked in front of someone, can undermine one’s confidence,
if one is made to feel undesirable.”
Recall Linda, Paul’s
adolescent artistic nemesis. In young adulthood, the two rekindled their
friendship, and Linda became one of Paul’s subjects. An understated pastel of
her, hands demure on her lap, eyes downcast, contains the same silence I divine
in so many of Paul’s portraits. It’s a humane picture of a human being, with
dignity and beauty and mystery. It is distinct from Freud’s glorious nudes
because Paul is a different artist, yes. But it’s also a different approach
altogether to the complicated matter of transubstantiating a real person into a
work of art: the model as subject, not object.
If you want to know
about Lucian Freud, William Feaver’s biography will be a better guide. He’s
present in Self-Portrait, but he’s not very interesting. Paul recalls a double
date: her and Freud, the painter Frank Auerbach and his never-named companion.
It’s difficult not to cringe: “The woman doesn’t say a word and nor do I. We do
not say a word to each other, either. Two dynamic scintillating men and two
silent bewildered and embarrassed women sitting eating olives.”
Given time, Paul
would assert a dynamic, scintillating personhood all her own. If Paul is
correcting the record here, it’s to engage with the perception that she must
have been the older artist’s muse at best or victim at worst. Freud had an
unorthodox personal life, the father to 14 children by six women, but he and
Paul were happy enough for the decade of their entanglement. That she writes of
him with neither fondness nor exasperation isn’t a consequence of the author’s
attempt at objectivity. It’s because he’s not the point.
There are moments,
indeed, when it’s clear that Paul was not so much a muse as an influence—a far
more active thing—on Freud. A teacher at Slade deemed her study of her parents
and her sister Kate, Family Group, 1980, completed when she was 21, “a great
painting,” and “Lucian admired it, too.”
“”In the weeks after
seeing it, he often seemed preoccupied. He said, “I’m thinking of your
painting.” He started to think about doing a big painting involving several
sitters, and he ordered his biggest canvas yet to be stretched.”
That would become
Interior W11 (After Watteau). It’s a startling painting, five figures huddled
together in a shabby interior. Paul modeled for it, alongside Bella, one of
Freud’s two daughters with Bernardine Coverley, and Suzy Boyt, herself once a
student at Slade, where she met Freud, by whom she had four children. Kai,
Boyt’s son and Freud’s stepson, also appears in the composition, as does a
young girl unrelated to the rest of this blended family. Though the title
credits the eighteenth-century French painter, Paul wants us to recognize her
role in this work’s genesis.
We cannot understand
Paul as Freud’s prey, as we often do when an older, established person takes up
with a younger, vulnerable one; they had a long relationship, not a brief
affair. Infidelities and complexities aside, theirs was a union of mutual
respect, and Paul makes it clear that their son is one of the great joys of her
life. I liked the fact that the flat in which Paul continues to work—captured
here in Room and Ghost of the British Museum—was a gift from Freud; if he gave
her nothing else, he gave her this liberty, her own space. Freud’s final
depiction of Paul, Painter and Model, shows Paul in spattered garb, brush in
hand, tube of pigment beneath her feet. “I felt honored that Lucian should
represent me in the powerful position of the artist.” He saw her as she truly
was; what is that but love?
Celia Paul is a more
gifted writer than she has any business being; it’s almost unfair. She joins
the ranks of Anne Truitt, the great minimalist sculptor who wrote meditatively
of her development as an artist, and Sally Mann, whose memoir Hold Still is a
beautiful document of her life. By contrast with those artists’ memoirs,
though, Self-Portrait reads like a novel. Paul alights on a topic, offers
asides and digressions, circles back to her main point. The work is written
with intention but wears it lightly.
Paul paints people
she knows. You can read that intimacy in the work, or perhaps once you hear her
explain this, you see the paintings anew. Her painting is not an act of close
observation—she’s seen these people before—but some deeper communion with the
person she’s aiming to fix on canvas. It’s impressive that she’s able to render
them in words, too, on the page: Freud, her parents, and, of course, herself.
You hear it in the book’s title: She’s no longer a naked girl with an egg—she’s
granted that girl a self.
Celia Paul Redefines
the Artist’s Model. By Rumaan Alam. The New Republic, October 29, 2020.
‘I have
made my life my own story,’ the painter Celia Paul writes in the introduction
to her recently published memoir, Self-Portrait. ‘Lucian, particularly, is made
part of that story rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as
part of his.’ The Lucian in question is Lucian Freud, with whom Paul had a
painful ten year relationship and a child. Despite the suggestion of reclaimed
narratives, chapter one of her life story is titled ‘Lucian’. He remains the
dark sun under which this grimly compelling narrative unfolds.
The book, told through Paul’s reminiscences,
historic diary entries, paintings and photographs, begins in 1977, on the day
the pair met. She was 18, a student at The Slade School of Fine Art in London.
He was 55 and a celebrated painter, who arrived at The Slade for a job as a
visiting tutor dressed in an expensive woollen suit. Paul’s first impressions
describe a man with comically ghoulish charisma. His face, she writes, ‘had an
eerie glow as if it was lit from within, like a candle inside a turnip’. She
showed him some earnest studies she had made of her mother. He invited
her back to his flat.
What
follows is an unedifying pursuit. ‘I watched him kissing me and my mouth was unresponsive,’
Paul writes of their first physical encounter, sprung on her unannounced. ‘I
was frightened.’ When she skips school to avoid bumping in to him, he calls her
at home. They arrange to meet in Regent’s Park, where he unties her skirt and
starts to kiss her waist, an experience that made her ‘very sad, also
unnerved’. On other occasions he pushed her against a wall and pinned her to
the floor. ‘I felt hemmed in,’ she remembers, ‘I needed to get out.’ One
evening, Freud lights a fire in his bedroom made from wooden paintbrushes, a
novelistic detail suited to a man who comes across as an emotional arsonist
with a blazing ego. Nervous, romantic and no doubt aware of the asymmetry
between them, Paul recites him He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B.
Yeats. The poem is addressed to a more powerful lover, and ends with the
following plea for kindness: ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread
softly because you tread on my dreams.’ Freud was not a man inclined to tread
softly. Instead, he took the girl to bed.
Freud is
known to have been something of a bastard in his affairs with women. (He
fathered at least 14 children, although some have estimated the number as
closer to 40.) From infidelities to gas-lighting, there is plenty of evidence
of this in Paul’s book. Given his domineering tendencies, and the formative
years she spent with him, the distinction between their painting styles is all
the more remarkable. Much of the difference derives from the treatment of the
subject. Paul works from a place of intense sensitivity and quietude, focusing
on spirit and atmosphere over anatomy, an approach she says is only possible
when she has a meaningful bond with her sitters. Tellingly she struggled to
paint Freud, who would not allow her to dictate the dynamic between them.
‘Although I was Lucian’s subject,’ she writes, ‘he wasn’t mine.’ In contrast,
Freud’s strength lay in his capacity for cruelty, in a gaze capable of
dominating and exposing a subject like a cat toying with a bird. Paul recalls
the uncomfortable experience of sitting for him naked in 1980. ‘I felt like I
was at the doctors, or in hospital, or in the morgue.’
The
subjects to whom Paul is most bonded are her female relations, in particular
her mother who sat for her many times. ‘The drawings that I showed Lucian at
our first meeting at The Slade were the first true works of art I had made,
because they were of my mother’, she writes. ‘They were necessary because I
loved her.’ Included among the works reproduced in Self-Portrait is My Mother
(2005). In the painting she sits in a chair, emanating an old, familial
intimacy – the kind of thick, claustrophobic, heavy love that is capable of
warping perspective, causing us to encounter those we are closest to through a
haze of emotion and memory. Her small body, with its oversized feet and
shrunken head, has become one with the ambience of the room. A green fog that
hangs in the air is of the same substance as the ghostly pallor that
illuminates her skin.
An
eponymous exhibition of Paul’s paintings at Victoria Miro in London coincides
with the launch of her book. Most of the works on show were made after her
mother died in 2015 (Freud had passed away in 2011), but even when she is not
the subject she remains present by her absence. My Sisters in Mourning
(2015–16), a large oil painting depicted in shades of grey and blue, shows
Paul’s four sisters in the aftermath of her death. The women appear like a
gathering of saints, sitting in prayerful silence. Paul has added red and navy
marks to their noses and eyelids, so that their features appear raw and swollen
from sorrow.
The
religiosity of Paul’s paintings is no surprise. Her parents were missionaries,
and she spent her early years in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala.
Later, her father became the Bishop of Hull. One sister is a theologian,
another a priest and she counts a former Archbishop of Canterbury as a
brother-in-law. Her mother used her time sitting for Paul for prayer – ‘a gift
for a Christian,’ as she put it. Although she is not personally religious,
Paul’s upbringing seems to have instilled a belief in vocation, an interest in
the incorporeal presence of her subjects and a respect for cross-bearing.
Painting is treated as a call that must be answered, no matter the cost. Three weeks
after giving birth to her son Frank in 1984, she left the boy to be raised by
her mother. Freud had bought her a flat overlooking the British Museum and she
returned here, alone, to paint. The separation may have been a cause of great
sadness and anxiety, but she considered it a necessary burden. ‘I had a strong
sense of the rightness of the world,’ Paul writes of the happiness she felt
after giving birth, ‘I knew it couldn’t last.’
Today
Paul still lives and works alone in the flat across from the British Museum.
She left Freud after the birth of her son, following one infidelity too many,
and later married – although her husband does not live with her and she hasn’t
given him a key to her flat. The story she relates through images and words has
the feel of a painter’s parable, in which hardship, sacrifice and solitude
lead, eventually, to something like grace. There are times when her Christ-like
embrace of suffering may grate, but Paul is uninterested in making herself
appear more palatable for the benefit of a reader. She accounts for her life
like a person peeling off her bandages, often asking her audience to share in
her experiences of difficulty and hurt. In the recent painting Self Portrait,
Early Summer (2018), on display at Victoria Miro, her martyrdom is complete.
She depicts herself sitting at home in her self-imposed convent for one. The
light shines down upon her from above, she holds her hands serenely in her lap
and looks out towards the viewer. Her tattered studio clothes have transformed
into a robe, upon which the encrusted flecks of oil shimmer like gemstones.
A Muse
in Her Own Words: Celia Paul’s ‘Self-Portrait’. By Rosanna McLaughlin. Frieze,
November 26, 2019.
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