Celia Paul Transcends Her Own Mythology
She puts her own spin on autobiography, exceeding her own cult status as a monastic artist.
My buildup to Celia Paul’s exhibition Innervisions at Gladstone Gallery has been a long one. First, I read Zadie Smith’s sharp, smart essay, “The Muse at her Easel” in the New York Review of Books, about the relationship between Paul and the notorious figurative painter Lucian Freud. She was 18 and an art student at Slade School of Fine Art, and he was 55 and famous. They had a 10-year relationship, and eventually, a child together. Though she is regarded by many to be one of Freud’s muses, she also kept a rigorous painting schedule, working daily.
I then read Paul’s marvelous book, Letters to Gwen John (2022), about the Welsh painter who lived most of her life in France, engaged in a passionate relationship with sculptor Auguste Rodin, and painted tonal portraits of anonymous women. Wanting to know more about this enigmatic artist and memoirist behind this work, I watched Jake Auerbach’s beautifully sympathetic documentary film, Celia Paul: private view (2020). In one scene, the artist, wearing an oversized, paint-splattered smock and sitting in a chair, nervously rubs her hands in her lap and says: “I’m not a portrait painter. If I am anything, I’ve always been an autobiographer and a chronicler of my life and family.”
