Celia Paul Sits for Her Own Portrait
Celia Paul cried throughout her first sessions modeling for Lucian Freud. “The experience of being naked disarmed me,” Paul writes in her new memoir, Self-Portrait. She describes sitting for him as a tortuous experience and the sense of his scrutiny as overpowering. “I felt like I was at the doctor’s or in hospital, or in the morgue.” At one point, he tells her that her breasts reminded him of eggs; then he boils one, slices it in half, and places it in a dish in front of her. She has to lie still while he paints it.
This became Freud’s Naked Girl With Egg (1980-81), a strange and slightly surreal work that one critic noted was emblematic of Freud’s interest in female genitalia, a painting that “turns the body inside out and drags the mystery into the daylight.” The mystery dragged into the daylight was Paul’s body, naked and splayed on a black bedspread, as she cups her breast with her hand. Her eyes are turned upward toward something in the distance so that we see mostly their whites. In front of her, on a small table, is the egg, looking like a pair of disembodied breasts or yellow eyes.
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. “The act of sitting is not passive,” Paul writes, describing it, at times, as almost a form of intense meditation, one that requires its own kind of focus.
Self-Portrait might be read as a series of sittings over the course of a lifetime. Paul sits for Freud many times throughout their relationship, but he also sits for her. So do all of her…
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