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‘He said I sounded hysterical’: Celia Paul on lover Lucian Freud, his cold friends and the ‘devastating’ YBAs
In prose and in paint, the great artist Celia Paul is exorcising the ghosts of her past – from the cruelties of her lover Freud, to his offhand cohorts, and the YBA revolution that declared painting dead
Painter Celia Paul has lived in the same flat in Bloomsbury – bought for her by her then lover Lucian Freud – for 40 years. To ascend to it, up the 80 steps to bring you level with the pediment of the British Museum opposite, is to enter a different world. The main room contains little but a lumpy and ancient chaise longue and a metal-framed bed. One wall is stacked with freshly stretched empty canvases. Next door a mountain range of old sheets, stiff and stained with paint, obscure what might be a sofa. There is a huge, dusty mirror in which we both appear, spectrally: she a slight figure in a brown floor-length skirt, her slippers paint-encrusted. I ask her if she sleeps in the metal-framed bed. Sometimes, she says, but she shows me her bedroom. It is equally spartan, but for the immense piles of books. “You didn’t get round to building many bookshelves,” I observe weakly, in the face of this almost unimaginably austere existence.
Paul – like Edmund de Waal, a contributor to the vast monograph about her work that is about to be published – is now as much respected for her writing as for her art. In 2019 her Self-Portrait came out, a memoir that, among other things, described her relationship with Freud, who seduced her when she was 18 and he in his 50s. In 2022 came Letters to Gwen John, a one-sided correspondence with one of her favourite artistic forebears. These books were published in her 60s. On her shift to writing, she says, “It is a way of articulating thoughts that otherwise just brew. That can work evocatively in painting. But with words, you need to have order of a different kind. One sentence does have to follow another. And that’s what I needed to do.”
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© Photograph: © Gautier Deblonde Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
© Photograph: © Gautier Deblonde Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
