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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.”
Getting things down in prose – “the hurt mixed with love in my relationship with Lucian” – stirred up much that she is now working through in paint, she says, the fruits of which will be seen in an exhibition at the Victoria Miro gallery in London. Paul met Freud when he came into the Slade, where she was a student and he a visiting professor. Reading about his seduction of the teenager in Self-Portrait is painful. It is clear that she was emotionally in thrall to him. The reaction to the book was powerful, too. One especially pungent response was from novelist Rachel Cusk, who implied that Paul was still trapped by the older painter, long after his death. Paul did not agree, and has made many paintings in order to prove the point – works that enact her memories and changing feelings about not just Freud, but the circle of men in which he moved.
She shows me a painting in the studio. It’s called Weeping Muse and Running Tap. It is based on Freud’s Large Interior W11 (After Watteau), which is an enormous early 1980s painting of Paul along with one of Freud’s previous lovers, her child, and one of his children. Paul’s version retains just her own figure, her feet seemingly submerged in water. “I really, really didn’t like sitting,” she says. “I felt trapped, and I didn’t want to chat. I was always crying. And he found that incredibly exasperating. I think men are very perplexed and often exasperated by women crying.”
There is a tap in the background of Freud’s original painting – “a sort of signal to me,” she says, to “switch off the faucet”. Her riposte in her new work is to double down on the waterworks – that pool of tears under her feet. “I think men find crying exasperating because it’s quite a strong thing to do, isn’t it? I mean, it’s so ‘not done’. But it’s quite a subversive thing.”
Near it is a portrait of her mother. It is back in the studio so she can adjust a detail before it goes on show again. She made it when her mother was about her own age now – 65 – and she was 30. “I can’t be detached enough to see it as a painting,” she says. “It just seems to me to be her.” The older woman, a devout Christian, used the time as her daughter’s sitter for reflection and prayer. Freud, by contrast, liked his sitters to focus on him and chat, and hated it when Paul would disappear into her own world. I observe that her paintings are spiritual and inward-gazing, where his are about surface, skin and flesh. “I think that’s what Lucian found very unsettling about my paintings. It’s where our paths really divided. When he saw me going in that different direction, it was disturbing to him that he couldn’t control me,” she says. “Because his way of painting is actually about control.”
Chat was always torture to the shy young Paul when Freud took her out to dine with his grand painter friends: Frank Auerbach (whom Paul did adore, naming her and Freud’s son after him); Francis Bacon; and Michael Andrews. “Francis knew how to be incredibly polite, but devastatingly cutting,” she says. “I didn’t say anything throughout those dinners, but one time Lucian said, ‘I wish you would say something,’ and so I resolved next time to actually pipe up. We were talking about a Michael Andrews exhibition and I expressed some opinion. Francis just looked at me with this very condescending air, and turned back to Lucian. Afterwards Lucian said it was because my voice sounded too hysterical.”
She says this matter-of-factly, leaving it to me to editorialise on the cruelty and sexism of this exchange. Her own response comes in paint. There is a well-known photograph by John Deakin of the men – confident, animated, handsome, boozy – dining at Wheeler’s restaurant. Paul has used it as the basis of a new painting, Colony of Ghosts. In her work they stare forth greyly, no longer animated, as if from another dimension.
She has also painted a companion piece of herself, lying on the uncomfortable chaise longue on which I have been perching. It is meant to hang opposite Colony of Ghosts. She is very self-possessed in this painting, and offers an appraising gaze to those men who once intimidated her. There is something of Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of Madame Récamier about it. The works, she says, “refer to my experience of being at the table, but being shut out and not welcomed in. But there’s also a feeling that now they’re really not approachable at all, because they’re all dead.” She adds, “Here I am in this studio space which Lucian bought for me, with all these memories very alive. I feel quite haunted by all of them.”
Paul may have dined silently at the table of the men, but she is only five or so years older than the Young British Artists, who rose to prominence in the 1990s and with whose work her own could not be less in harmony. “I found those years very, very difficult, because people really were saying ‘Painting is dead,’” she says. “That was devastating, because painting was my life. There seemed to be this party going on that I was definitely excluded from.”
She had had great early success but by 1991, when she had her first solo exhibition with the Marlborough Gallery, the tide had already turned. There was barely any response. By this time she and Freud had split up. She had the flat, and Marlborough gave her a stipend of £14,000 a year as an advance against sales. Her son was mostly brought up by her mother in the country, while she continued to work during the week in Bloomsbury, painting despite everything. “It was an incredible struggle for a long, long time.”
The cultural climate eventually shifted. Painting crept back into the conversation. In 2012, Pallant House Gallery in Chichester showed her work alongside that of her beloved Gwen John. Victoria Miro Gallery took her on. But there was also a shift inside her. “Lucian died in 2011. I hadn’t felt inhibited by him. But I think I must have been, because it was at that point I thought, ‘I really need to change my life.’”
The works that converse directly with Freud’s paintings are only one way she has been grappling with the past. She has also made many self-portraits – herself as she is now, herself as she once was, and even herself as she imagines she was once seen by men. There is a core of newfound strength and self-assurance in these works. But she is also planning to retreat again, into the world of the interior and of the spirit. Once the new exhibition is out of the way, there is a stack of blank canvases in her flat, waiting to be painted.
