Self-Portrait
Celia Paul
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Self-Portrait
Celia Paul
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
It’s an account of a life so rigorously dedicated to art and family that fame seems beside the point.
... captivating.
... a beautifully written bildungsroman, a 'portrait of the artist' as a young woman. It is also, more uniquely, a powerful resource for artists who face the dueling responsibilities of creation and caregiving. You don’t have to be a woman or a mother to feel this friction..
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.
Much of the narrative in this book circles around her turbulent relationship with Lucian Freud. After his death, she noticed mentions of herself in his obituaries, as well as articles and books, and became determined to tell her own story. No longer wanting to remain simply a part of Freud’s story, she wanted to make him part of her story, a narrative about her life as a painter.
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.
Charting her decade-long relationship with Freud, Self-Portrait is, quite explicitly, an exercise in reversing the subject position: 'By writing about myself in my own words, I have made my life my own story'.
We look in vain for anger or defiance, or a self-worth that repudiates his treatment of her: as often with this book, we are torn between fury on her behalf and fury at her complicity.
Celia Paul’s memoir,Self-Portrait, is a different animal altogether. Lucian Freud, whose muse and lover she was, is rendered here—and acutely—but as Paul puts it, with typical simplicity and clarity, 'Lucian…is made part of my story rather than, as is usually the case, me being portrayed as part of his.' Her story is striking. It is not, as has been assumed, the tale of a muse who later became a painter, but an account of a painter who, for ten years of her early life, found herself mistaken for a muse, by a man who did that a lot.
[The] relationship, between artist and model, lies at the heart of Paul’s memoir.
Self-Portrait , Celia Paul’s memoir and account of her decade-long entanglement with Lucian Freud, is both the story of a life and an argument for her own legacy. To be known as Freud’s companion might be fine, for a time; to be canonized as such would be unbearable. His death in 2011, and her subsequent subordination as Freud’s lover and muse, made it seem unlikely that she would ever be known simply as “the painter Celia Paul.” But Paul’s memoir is more than an attempt to balance the scales. Self-Portrait is the work of someone who has learned how to see herself.
... while the book, which includes contemporaneous notes and letters, vividly portrays her relations with Freud, it situates that portrayal within an account of her self-inspection and development as an artist that would impress Rilke. Her writing has the same intensity and restraint as her paintings.
... is a delicate reconstruction of a self never lost but perhaps silenced.