BOOK OF THE WEEK Self-Portrait by Celia Paul (Cape £20, 216 pp) Just be glad you weren’t a young
Public Group active 3 years, 1 month agoBOOK OF THE WEEKSelf-Portraitby Celia Paul (Cape £20, 216 pp)Just be glad you weren’t a young, innocent, impressionable female art student at the Slade in the 1970s.It was all too likely that you’d be spotted by Lucian Freud, who was a visiting tutor and used to prowl the corridors and refectory.He would make a flattering remark about your painting, then take you home in a taxi, rubbing his knuckles onto your neck and researchave.com through your hair in the back of the cab. Later he would push you to the floor inside the door of his flat, so the coins fell out of your pocket, and that would be the beginning.This was precisely what happened to the young art student Celia Paul. The memoir Self Portrait details how Celia Paul fell in love with artist Lucian Freud at art school’I felt that I had sinned, and that something had been irreparably lost,’ she writes, recalling her first sexual encounter with Freud in 1978, when she was 18 and he was 56.’I felt guilty and powerful.
I felt that I had slipped into a limitless and dangerous world,’ she adds.Her vocabulary might sound a bit overblown, but that was the effect Lucian seemed to have on women. Celia fell helplessly, dangerously in love — so deeply that, as she writes, it ‘was more like a sickness’. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Her hair became matted and her face white.
She would wait indoors for three days for the telephone to ring if he said he was going to ring her (I’d forgotten that dismal aspect of lovesickness in the days before mobile phones).Her mother cried when she saw her daughter in this state, in thrall to a powerful man more than three times her age.Celia worshipped Freud’s body, his art and his mind.
‘I feel my bones melting in gladness,’ she writes, describing his touch. The memoir reveals how she was in thrall to a powerful man three times her age (pictured in 2010)Her craving for him really was a sickness: one that lasted ten years, and caused her moments of ecstasy followed by bouts of deep depression.She fell into the trap so many others fell into: the belief that she was the chosen one, the only one.Friends kept telling her gently that Lucian was famous for having lots of girlfriends at the same time, but she shunned the information.<div class="art-ins mol-factbox floatRHS home" data-version="2" id="mol-ff359bc0-0721-11ea-9ea3-2fbf9c7a300f" website Celia Paul loved Lucian Freud so passionately it made her ill
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