Close Your Eyes, Open Your Ears, Mark C. Taylor on Silence

 

Silence is no weakness of language.
 
It is, on the contrary, its strength.
 
It is the weakness of language not to know this.
 
—Edmond Jabès
 
Close your eyes, open your ears. Close your eyes, open your ears and listen. Listen attentively, listen patiently. What do you hear? Now imagine . . . try to imagine the impossibility of imagining Now. Imagine, try to imagine not being—not being here, not being now. Not being here, not being now, not being elsewhere, not being anywhere. Imagine being before being. Imagine being after being. Imagine being Not. Imagine not imagining. Imagine not being. What do you hear? Keep listening, listening attentively, listening patiently. Whom do you hear? Whom do you not hear? What do you hear? What do you not hear? Nothing perhaps? Perhaps nothing? What is the sound of Nothing? Silence, perhaps? Perhaps silence? What does hearing silence sound like? What does hearing silence mean? Does hearing silence mute silence? What does not hearing or not being able to hear silence mean? Keep listening, keep thinking, keep asking until you hear, if not silence itself, echoes of silence by seeing nothing.
 
Pause. Pause to ponder. Pause to ponder a lingering question: What color is silence? Perhaps white? Perhaps black? Perhaps something in between—something approximating infinite shades of gray? Through a strange synesthesia, to see the invisible is to hear silence, and to hear silence is to see the invisible.
 
Silence is stillness—stillness is silent. Not merely the absence of noise, silence is the stillness that sounds and resounds in all sounds and echoes in every word. There is no Word without silence, and no silence without Word. Silence is the ever-receding horizon of words. Words allow silence to speak by unsaying itself. To hear silence is to betray silence—to hear by not hearing, to tell by not telling, to reveal by not revealing. Telling Not. Hearing Not. Revealing Not. The lapse of language is the stillness that stirs in the rustling of words.
 
Silence. The impossibility of silence. Gods, like mortals, sometimes speak, sometimes do not; they sometimes remain silent by speaking, sometimes speak by remaining silent. “Whither is God?” screamed Nietzsche’s madman. “I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this?” We have killed God by having forgotten how to hear silence. If, however, to hear silence is to silence silence, then the death of God is unavoidable. The question that remains is whether there is another silence, a deeper silence, a silence beyond silence yet to be heard in the stillness that surpasses understanding.
 
Religion is the apprehension of the Unspeakable, Unnamable, Unknowable, Unfigurable once named “God” or “God beyond God.” “God” is one of the pseudonyms of “the Real”—there are others, many others. Neither here nor there, neither now nor then, the Real is always near, yet forever distant. It (the gender is insistently neutral) approaches by withdrawing, and withdraws by approaching. The pulsating rhythm of the Real marks and remarks the ebb and flow of life and death. Unspeakable, Unnameable as such, the Real remains shrouded in silence, or, perhaps, silence is the Real itself. Silence is the whence and whither of all that is and everything that is not. We come from and return to silence, and in-between, silence is the in-between, endlessly murmuring to still the noise created to avoid it. A plenitude that is a lack, and a void that is a fullness, the ligare of re-ligare binds and rebinds us to the silence that haunts all that once seemed real. To hear silence is to find stillness in the midst of the restlessness that makes creative life possible and the inescapability of death acceptable.
 
 
Without. Before. From. Beyond. Against. Within. Around. Between. Toward. With. In. . . . Silence. Not present without being absent, not absent without being present, and, thus, never a position or pro-position, but always a pre-position. Thirteen plus one stations along an errant path that no longer has to be merely the Via Dolorosa. The silence that punctuates the stages along life’s way allows saying to be said and the Unsayable to be heard. If we listen to silence perhaps gods, and with them mortals, will be reborn. Perhaps.
 
Close Your Eyes, Open Your Ears: Read an Excerpt from “Seeing Silence” by Mark C. Taylor.
 
Universityof Chicago Press, May  26, 2020.

University of Chicago Press

The world of the present  is characterized not so much by the omnipresence of noise as by the impossibility of silence. It’s not that we can’t hear the signal, but that the multitude of signals leave us no time to take stock, to reflect, to experience. The news, for example, used to come daily to your door in a little bundle, or set out on a rack at the café, or in measured doses on TV at certain hours of the day. Now it is an incessant stream: noisy chatter — yes — but as heavy and concerning as the world itself, and which draws us in whenever we, inevitably, reach for our smartphones.
 
Mark C. Taylor’s Seeing Silence is, among many things, a response to this condition, which is connected with, though not the same as, the “postmodern condition.” The postmodern, Taylor suggests, is the “desert of the real,” borrowing the phrase from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s writings on simulacra and simulations. And the noise of the present is what must happen when the real comes crashing back in through the facade. Baudrillard, Taylor explains, “knew this virtual reality could not last and tried to warn us about the looming disaster.” And so:
 
     ‘’In an effort to recover the real, he drove into the desert — not the fake desert of the Strip with its “Sands,” “Dunes,” and “Luxor” hotels, which are nothing more than a “Mirage,” but the real desert with real sand, dunes, and rock art much older than the hieroglyphs etched on Egyptian pyramids. Here Baudrillard discovered an ecstasy that was no longer human, an ecstasy that carries you to the elsewhere that is always near.’’
 
This sentence reveals the artfulness of Seeing Silence; a sober writerly craftsmanship that, while a far cry from the sparkly Gallic virtuosity of Baudrillard’s America, is no less extraordinary. Baudrillard, the enfant terrible of postmodernism, is mentioned only a few times in the book, just as the concept of the postmodern itself appears only sporadically. And yet, answering to the “culture war” jeremiads that have become deafening in an age of YouTube philosophes, Taylor responds not with polemics but by pointing elsewhere: toward an ecstasy found in the silence of rocks. Against those who, judging philosophy from the outside, force it to choose again and again between various rocks and hard places — between Cartesian foundationalism and barren empiricism, science and poetry, idealism and realism, impartiality and direct political engagement — Taylor offers a different prospect: philosophy as a way of living, and above all a way of experiencing things that resist experience. Silent things, or, in a word, silence.
 
As hard to pigeonhole as Taylor’s prolific and wide-ranging career, Seeing Silence is not exactly philosophy, or spiritual autobiography, or art theory. It is a textual antechamber leading into — or perhaps a frame surrounding — the sculpture in which the life-work of the philosopher-turned-artist lies exposed. A demanding book, Seeing Silence asks of the reader not only patience and attentiveness, but a certain commitment. It is also surprisingly accessible, written in an elegant but plain English, free of technical jargon and of names and concepts dropped without introduction. This demanding accessibility is achieved above all by a strategy marked out in the title: the seeing before silence must be taken very seriously. As John Cage has shown us, silence cannot be heard, it may even be impossible, since the act of hearing entails the negation, even the betrayal, of silence. Listening to silence just by listening is a futile exercise. Capitalism is prodigious in its capacity to appropriate every form of resistance; a silence that can be “heard” is a silence that can be commodified. But silence can, somehow, be seen. It is as if the disjunction between sound and vision (each a different immediacy) makes possible an encounter between being and nothingness, the finite and the absolute, without forcing us down the path of the Hegelian dialectic — the path of mediation, reconciliation, and universality.

 
In a quest to see silence that is neither Odyssean nor Quixotic but the taciturn homecoming of the crusader in the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, Taylor leads us on a pilgrimage of revelatory encounters with the works of more or less contemporary visual artists, from the cross Ad Reinhardt painted for Thomas Merton’s monk cell to Michael Heizer’s massive Double Negative etched into Mormon Mesa, from Rothko’s somber Houston chapel to Ellsworth Kelly’s white chapel to Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light and Church on the Water. He ends with his own sculpture garden in the Berkshires.
 
While his narrative seems at times to fall too easily into the conformable rhythms of travel narration, there is a precise strategy at work. Neither proclaiming the enigmatic “meaning” of the artwork, reducing it to concepts, nor retreating into the merely empirical, Taylor combines the conceptual, perceptual, and affective with the concretely historical and factual, while offering something more than, and irreducible to, these aspects: a sense for the work as a moment, in each case unique, of silence becoming visible, and visible growing silent. This is not a substitute for the actual experience of these sites, but rather the schema of an experience that may or may not ever take place.
 
An important guide in this is Heidegger, whose essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” uses the Greek temple to reveal the play of the alētheia, truth as the play between concealment and unconcealment. Taylor escapes the greatest flaw of Heidegger’s philosophy: the provinciality that rarely allows the German philosopher to see beyond the fantastical cultural dyad Greece-Germany. Heidegger’s reading of the Greek temple is based on abstractions and polarities, with no basis in the rich aesthetic experience of an artifice built into an actual site. By taking the reader to a range of real temples — high-art temples at the edge of the present rather than kitsch resurrections — Seeing Silence avoids this trap. Seeing silence means seeing the play of absence and presence, concealment and unconcealment. This play is never simply monochrome. Along the stations of a pilgrimage that begins black against white, with the crusader playing chess against death — against himself — something unexpected happens: color. In the polychromatic space of the lifelong atheist Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin Chapel, “a riot of light and color,” “the Via Dolorosa becomes the Via Jubilosa”: “Neither beyond nor within, neither above nor below, neither circumscribed nor limited to a place set apart, the sacred is all around us.”

 

 Seeing Silence is divided into 15 chapters, including the introduction numbered zero. Three are almost blank: three dots, an ellipsis. The rest, save the first and the last, are titled, in order, “Without,” “Before,” “From,” “Beyond,” “Against,” “Within,” “Between,” “Toward,” “Around,” “With,” and “In.” The last chapter, titled “In,” consists only in the titles of all the chapters, and the ellipses, repeated once more though slightly rearranged. Just as the “real desert” is not a territory to be occupied and defended but a place into which one flees, existing only in this flight, seeing silence is prepositional, concrete, relative rather than propositional, abstract, absolute. It is not a question of stating “what” silence is, but of putting oneself in a certain gestural relation to it. Each titled chapter exemplifies one of these attitudes, each of which constitutes a mode of access to the inaccessible, exemplified through the lifework of a different artist. And the pauses ask us to take a breath in between.
 
Seeing Silence begins with the haunting discovery of a box of photographs, unlabeled and unnamed, as the author sorts through the attic of his old house after his father’s death. As the book arcs toward its end, one realizes that his meandering path through these new wonders of a new world — a path taking us from the modern, to the post-modern, to the post-post-modern — brings Taylor back to himself, to his sculpture garden: a symbol for his lifework. If, as a child, black-and-white photography had already taught him the most essential lesson of the philosophical tradition running from Kant to Heidegger’s clearing and Derrida’s khora, now, an old man already soberly aware of the flesh’s frailty, he is again learning something new — and immeasurably old: to build a stone wall dry with no mortar to fill the gaps.
 
The art of stonewalling, of splitting and joining and filling out an empty space, serves as a perfect image for the craft of his writing, which, free from posturing or polemics, achieves a kind of levity and joy from so many grave, serious fragments. But the work of life — in its very joy — is also the work of death. The bright-lit chamber of childhood becomes a silent stony crypt. The womb is a tomb, as Taylor reminds us. Not the abdication of the thinking life, this stonewalling is the moment when it fulfills and passes beyond itself. The child’s monochrome world of right and wrong, whose sadomasochistic play carried over into adulthood can only yield a thousand shades of gray, becomes the colors found in what is oldest and heaviest, like the Crowsfoot Schist, split mysteriously between the Berkshires and Venezuela, from which he will take his wall’s keystone:
 
  “The colors are from a palette than seems infinite — black, white, gray, blue, yellow, orange, burnt umber, and pink. As I placed the stone in the middle of the enclosure of the elliptical wall, I knew the work was done. Looking at the Crowsfoot Schist, there can be no doubt that the world is, indeed, a work of art.”
 
 
Stonewalling Philosophy: Envisioning Silence in an Age of Noise. Los Angeles Review of Books, January  31, 2021.
 

 From a certain point of view, the realist mood is quite peculiar. Why would one wish to reproduce what is already immediately present to one’s senses? Is there something the painted mountain bestows that the real mountain withholds? Or is the reproduction a form of genuflection? — does its significance lie there in the act, not in the created thing, which might just as well be destroyed upon completion? On the other hand, realism is supremely natural, springing from perhaps one of our most basic impulses. As Aristotle taught, “Representation comes naturally to human beings from childhood, and so does the universal pleasure in representations” — the most realistic representation being, on the face of it, the best and most pleasurable. Aristotle’s uncontroversial claim, while obviously largely correct, is nevertheless unsettling, and it is no simple task to pursue this source of disquietude to any kind of satisfying resolution.

 It is just such a task that Mark Taylor, professor of religion at Columbia University and author of some two dozen scholarly and not-so-scholarly books, sets himself in Seeing Silence, a glowing melange of philosophy, theology, and art criticism. Taylor, however, poses the question differently. He does not so much throw suspicion on the realist motive as he pulls the rug of the Real from under realism, thus forcing us to ask: “How does one see what cannot be seen, speak what cannot be said, hear what remains silent? How is it possible to figure the void?” For Taylor then, the reality of the realist is secondary to the unconceptualizable, unrepresentable void that underlies and makes it possible: “Far from a mere lack, this void, like the silence between words, is what makes the articulation of all forms and appearances possible.”

 Seeing Silence is ostensibly a lively meditation on silence — our vexed relation to it and our vexed attempts to figure, master, and humble ourselves before it. Yet, as one reads on, faced with the soft torrent of materials and Taylor’s mantra-like interjections — “Does black consume red, or does red overcome black?”, “How do you listen to light listening?”, “Pause. Pause once again to ponder. Ponder a lingering question: What color is silence? Perhaps white? Perhaps black?” — one finds oneself somewhat vertiginously at sea. Taylor’s koanlike “silence” is not merely the familiar quiet, the quiet of negation, when no one is speaking and nothing is making a sound, and so it is not clear how or to what purpose we are to ponder it.

 Our minds are rigorously engaged, yet despite Taylor’s imposing (never forbidding) learnedness, we are obviously not being asked merely to learn or think. Intellection is persistently qualified and set against a more primitive or primal contact with the world: “Education does not begin and end with ideas, but requires something deeper, something more profound that can be taught only through physical labor and bodily discipline.” As though introducing us to a friend about whom we have heard many charming things, Taylor plays the role of spiritual-aesthetic matchmaker, saying just enough to kindle the relation — yet the lover we are provided is, as Taylor quotes from the doomed knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, like “someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.”

 Of course, the works — the beads of fascination strung together on the incandescent thread of the author’s own life and peregrinating passion — do appear one after another, conjuring a kind of postmodern performance piece in our minds: John Cage on a stage playing nothing, while a retro slide projector flings before us black-and-white images of abstract expressionist and minimalist masterpieces and a man dressed as Heidegger intones, “If the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms the sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void.” I do not tease lightheartedly, for Taylor’s book is a trenchant and perspicuous effort to probe what matters in unabashedly indeterminate terms, refusing to reduce the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of human experience to politics, history, morality, or unequivocally statable truths. In this, Taylor rises fully to the occasion of the negative half of the Nietzschean ultimatum he sets himself: to engage with life not as one seeking to correct or render it transparently knowable.

 The positive, however, is more elusive — both for Nietzsche himself and Taylor — and it is here that we run up against the temptation to satirize, for the pursuit to lay bare life’s imperiled seriousness necessarily risks a kind of comic self-seriousness or mawkish affectation. Taylor concludes his introductory Chapter Zero with a question that recurs throughout, providing a single flame to entrance, to meditatively congeal, the otherwise amorphous array of artists and thinkers: “The question that lingers after (the) all has been said is: can the Via Dolorosa also be a Via Jubilosa?” In plain terms, we might put it thus: how to be properly serious — to hold oneself existentially accountable — without becoming pathologically glum? Can one engage in rigorous self-scrutiny without lapsing into self-laceration, viewing oneself always with a certain levity and creative freedom? In religious terms, the question is: how to believe in God, to protect what is sacred, after the death of God and Truth and just about every norm-governed institution of meaning? How then to believe in God without, as it were, believing in God? — what to do when unbelief is as unattainable as belief? Taylor’s response is to turn to the cryptic origin of the work of art, cryptic in the sense also of “crypt,” a concept-image that Taylor borrows from Derrida to conjure that which surpasses the logic of both either/or and neither/nor: “The crypt within the self is the silence tolling in every word and the fertile matrix of the most profound works of art.”

 Taylor’s philosophical venture begins among the ruins of Hegel’s dream of absolute knowledge, a perfectly rational synthesis (overcoming) of subject and object. The Hegelian system signaled the zenith of Western thought’s suppression of silence. For Kant, the refractory “thing-in-itself” forced reason to redound critically upon itself, curtailing its metaphysical presumptions and appreciating the limits not merely of the knowable but of what knowledge is and the satisfaction it can ultimately afford us. Hegel, by contrast, made it his “philosophical mission … to break this silence by allowing the world to speak. Toward this end, he translates Kant’s subjective idealism into absolute idealism in which mind and world are isomorphic … in which everything and everyone become completely comprehensible.”

 Though Taylor fundamentally objects to Hegel’s totalizing rationalism, it nevertheless plays a rather crucial negativerole in his account. For when Taylor asserts that “there is always an overlooked, exceeded, repressed remainder that cannot be articulated and, thus, forever remains silent,” he reinforces the Hegelian picture of the known world even as he qualifies it. Thus, “the unsayable, unnameable, unfigurable” which Taylor treasures is in fact dependent on the articulable rationality it spurns. In other words, what is namable — the world continuously present to our senses — is largely ceded to reason, while the devout artist sets up camp elsewhere, where “the Real [is] a distant Beyond that can be approached, if at all, only negatively.” Taylor sums it up thus: “Phenomenology is the study of the appearance of phenomena, but how does one study, ponder, reflect on what does not appear?” My complaint is that Taylor is a bit hasty in presuming to draw the line between what does and does not appear. Phenomenology, after all, is not the study of appearance in the sense of appearance as opposed to hidden reality; it pursues a level of experience that is deeper than (and prior to) the rational recasting of the experiential relation in terms of, on the one hand, a perceptual mechanism and, on the other, the data with which the objective world furnishes it.

 Let us return now to the realist predicament with which we began. Although Taylor does not grapple directly with questions of genre, his fascination with (the impossibility of) figuring silence persistently nips at the heels of the age-old problematic of representation and its discontents (Taylor confines himself to just the discontents). The artists with which Taylor concerns himself, in a sense, are realists of the direst mold; they chase a pure realism, one that punctures and ultimately wishes to bypass aesthetic artifice in the hope of turning perception back on itself. As the book traces its “infinite conversation” from John Cage’s provocative 4’33”, a work that forces one to attend to the “ambient noise that usually is repressed,” through James Turrell’s sensory deprivation installations in which we discover “how the absenceof sound and light make hearing and seeing possible,” to Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, a 240,000-ton incision made on Mormon Mesa that suggests “a haunting anonymity, a terrifying impersonality, an inhuman intelligence,” one arrives at a somewhat inverted sense of creation. The task of the artist is not so much to add as to strip away, revealing a world that is already a work of art — shattering the petrified opulence that hijacks perception and drives subject and object irreparably apart. Such, I take it, is the danger Taylor sees in the contemporary world’s feverish need for ever more noise, speed, and virtuality.

 Thus, the abandonment of representation, the splintering of literal realism into a shepherdless flock of avant-garde black sheep, need not signify mere fatigue, a generation of Solomonic disciples for whom there is nothing new under the sun to do or see and thus nothing worth representing. Rather, “the Real” has revealed itself as interstitial, just beyond the pale of visible forms and hearable words, predicated on a lacuna. Of Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Taylor writes:

          “When viewed at close range, the painting engulfs you in a red glow where all distinctions and differences dissolve … Subject and object disappear to create a sense of at-onement. In this way, Vir Heroicus Sublimis becomes, impossibly, the experience of what I, or more precisely the I, cannot experience. Rather than the attempted representation of the sublime as in a Turner seascape, for Newman, the ‘experience’ of the sublime occurs in the painting itself. The painting, in other words, is an event, a happening.”

 Although such descriptions give the reader a pleasantly impressionistic sense of the majesty of such works, one begins to wonder how Taylor conceives of the relation between his words and what he describes. If, as he says, “the pure black or white surface cannot be translated without leaving an inexpressible remainder,” then the philosopher or critic is somewhat distastefully positioned against what is meaningful, bringing to light the sacred remainder only by partaking verbally in the limited whole from which it is excluded. And so, it is not quite clear just what Taylor’s many suggestive aporias — absence that is presence, withdrawal that is approach, silence that is seeable, silence deeper than silence, voids that make plenitude possible — ultimately are meant to mean, what role they are to play in our lives, intellectual or otherwise.

 Of Ellsworth Kelly’s chapel “Austin,” Taylor dramatically concludes: “In this space, the Via Dolorosa becomes the Via Jubilosa. Neither beyond nor within, neither above nor below, neither circumscribed nor limited to a place set apart, the sacred is all around us. To follow the stages on life’s way Kelly charts is to come through the dark night of the soul and to discover gaiety, gladness, joy — perhaps even hope.”

 This may be true of the world suspended within Kelly’s chapel of light, but in what manner does this omnipresent sacredness persist elsewhere and otherwise? Taylor’s insistence on the experiential, his vehement sense of art’s capacity not merely to shed light greedily on itself but to generously purify “experience itself,” risks the sacrifice of specific experience — the unassimilable particularity of the work of art — to a disappointingly generic mystical whole. That is to say, there is a danger of absolutizing the work of the artist, until little remains to distinguish art from any other human activity, and so the figure of the supremely meaningful, the sacred, becomes diffuse, lacking the necessary contrast with ordinary, profane life.

 Or perhaps I am the fly who simply will not leave the bottle, one of the disparagers of contentment to whom Taylor puts his question: “Why is despair profound but joy superficial?”

  On Seeing Silence by Mark C. Taylor. By Daniel Schwartz.  On the Seawall, January 5, 2021.

 

Celia Paul : Self-Portrait

 

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.
 
 
  

Painting in the Dark. By Celia Paul. London Review of Books,  December 2020. 

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.