Overview

A unique work of art and literature- a profound, intimate and deeply personal memoir told through words and images, by one of the most important British painters working today. 'Painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what' Olivia Laing I'm not a portrait painter. If I'm anything, I have always been an autobiographer. In Self-Portrait, Celia Paul reveals a life truly lived through art. She moves effortlessly through time, in words and images, from her arrival at the Slade School of Fine Art at sixteen, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practices of her present-day studio. This intimate memoir is, at its heart, about a young woman navigating the path to artistic freedom, with all the sacrifices and complications that entails. 'Powerful' Zadie Smith 'Engrossing' Vogue 'Captivating... Mesmerising' New York Times **Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize **

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9781529111552

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Reviews

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. Her book is about many things besides Freud: her mother, her childhood, her sisters, her paintings. But she neither rejects her past with Freud nor rewrites it... One of the subtle methods of this crafty book is insinuation, creating new feminist genealogies and hierarchies by implication... [A] powerful little book... What else will we start to see now the mist of misogyny begins to clear? Self-Portrait will go some way to clearing that mist from the world of portraiture. -- Zadie Smith * New York Review of Books * Captivating... Mesmerizing... Paul's powers of observation are keen and often ruthless. -- Jennifer Szalai * New York Times * Self-Portrait made me think of two recent, elliptical autobiographical projects that refuse to conform to traditional notions of intimate disclosure: Rachel Cusk's autofiction trilogy... and Joanna Hogg's film The Souvenir... Like Cusk and Hogg, Paul plays with the balance between confession and dispassion. In their different ways, all three are challenging our ideas about how autobiography works. There's something tremendously refreshing about Paul's lack of sensationalism... Self-Portrait is both the obvious extension of Paul's oeuvre, and a powerful, urgent and essential depiction of what it is to be a woman artist. -- Lucy Scholes * Daily Telegraph * [I was] very unprepared for the raw honesty and openness of this memoir... Among Freud's myriad relations, lovers and friends, none can have brought a reader so close to him, none can have detailed so tellingly the fluctuating dynamic of magnetism and despair, the assertion of will in the face of domination. Paul tells with brilliant immediacy the story of their first meeting, her reluctance, her fascination, her gradual succumbing. It is tender, exciting, touching and never prurient... Their ten-year relationship is told unflinchingly, without rancour or self-pity... Although this book will doubtless be cited in the bibliography of every book on Freud, it will more rightfully take its place at the top of the bibliography of every book on Celia Paul. -- Honor Clerk * Spectator * A poetic, sometimes painfully honest memoir. -- Tim Adams * Observer *

Author Information

Celia Paul is recognised as one of the most important painters working in Britain today. She was born in India in 1959, before moving to England as a young child. Her major solo exhibitions include Celia Paul, curated by Hilton Als, at Yale Center for British Art (2018) and The Huntington (2019); Desdemona for Celia by Hilton, Gallery Met, New York (2015-16); and Gwen John and Celia Paul, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (2012-13). Her work was included in the group exhibition All Too Human at Tate Britain (2018), and is in many collections, including the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Saatchi Collection and Metropolitan Museum, New York.

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