Celia Paul | Victoria Miro & Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert
Celia Paul is best known for being one of Lucian Freud’s many victimised romantic partners. But she is also increasingly famous these days for the “austere beauty” of her own work. That spot-on description is from the novelist Rachel Cusk, whose recent profile of Paul also contained a gasp-inducingly cruel fact: the artist’s London flat was bought for her by Freud on an unsellably short lease. So she’s still trapped by him, physically as well as reputationally.
Two London exhibitions this spring - one of Paul’s lovely, lyrical drawings at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert; one of her larger, psychologically-charged paintings at Victoria Miro - show the artist struggling to escape this trap.
Freud died in 2011, joining his London School colleague Francis Bacon, who went in the early 1990s. Frank Auerbach, the other famous alumnus, died late last year. There’s a famous photo of the three taking lunch in Soho, taken by John Deakin in 1963. Paul painted a version of this photo 60 years later, and it’s on show at Victoria Miro. “The men are looking at me, looking at you, from out of the strange cold land of the dead,” she says. They’re the ghosts that give the show its title.
They’re looking at her, because on the opposite wall is Reclining Painter, from the same year (2023) and intended as a companion piece. Paul is laid on a chaise longue in her unsellable flat, looking askance. Typical of her paintings, her oils are applied very thinly to the canvas, its texture is clearly visible. So unlike the macho impasto of the men opposite. Her expression is cool and appraising. They are ghosts. She lives.
It’s Freud’s cruelty - as documented in his biographies, and also as revealed in his art - that ultimately sours me on him. And his paintings of Paul, who met him as an 18-year-old art student (he was 55, and her teacher) are some of his cruellest.
At Victoria Miro, there hangs Paul’s own version of one of these portraits, a recasting of the 1980 Freud painting Naked Girl with Egg. In the original, Paul is hideously strip-lit, brawny and big-boobed. In the foreground, the titular egg is hardboiled and sliced, a crude tit joke.
In a recent diary piece for the London Review of Books, Paul writes: “Naked Girl with Egg is a cruel objectification. I am shown lying on a black bedsheet; one hand cups my full breast, the other is raised to my excruciated face. A halved boiled egg sits in a white dish on a marble-topped table. The brown swirling veins of the marble echo my pubic hair and the egg resembles my breasts. The painting was bought by the British Council and widely exhibited.”
Paul’s decision to exhibit her new version, from 2022, is a retaliation to this unwanted exposure. The scene is nocturnal, the figure dreamily weightless, almost ectoplasmic, and the expression on the girl’s face is one of… distaste. Up yours, British Council.
Rachel Cusk is quite a cruel writer too, withholding the detail about Paul’s lease right to the end of her long article. “It is a moment in which I believe I hear the sound of the last laugh being had,” she concludes.
I’m thinking back to that room at Victoria Miro, the girl with the egg facing me, the colony of ghosts to my right, the vengeful Paul, on her chaise longue, to my left. And I’m thinking - not so fast, Rachel!
Celia Paul Diaries is at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert (London). 21 March - 02 May 2025. Celia Paul: Colony of Ghosts is at Victoria Miro (London). 14 March - 17 April 2025