Celia Paul at Her Studio in London. Credit Alice Mann/Institute, for the New York Times

Cusk, Rachel. ‘Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist?’ The New York Times Online. 7 November 2019. Can a Woman Who Is an Artist Ever Just Be an Artist? The lives of two painters, Celia Paul and Cecily Brown, tell very different stories about what it takes to thrive in a medium historically dominated by men. Celia Paul at her studio in London. Credit Alice Mann/Institute, for The New York Times In a recent feature film about the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, we find the great man in his Paris studio, brooding over the difficulty of giving birth to his own genius. Fuming and raging, lashing out at his familiars, he is a chain- smoking wild beast being kept in cultural captivity. His growing fame brings admirers to his freezing workshop, where they wonder at his ascetic indifference to discomfort, and still more — gifted as he surely is — at his capacity for self-criticism. Not that his manhood can be in any doubt: He flaunts his ravishing young mistress before his careworn, miserable wife, who nonetheless remains his devoted slave in the fervent belief that she is the one who truly understands him. In one scene, in a fit of furious dissatisfaction, he hurls a sheaf of sketches into a flaming brazier before a group of astonished onlookers. The camera shows the horror on their faces as they watch the artworks burn, a horror it is assumed we share. It isn’t just the sight of Giacometti’s sketches going up in smoke that appalls us; it’s the fact that, to our retrospective eyes, he might as well be burning thousand-dollar bills. The cultural image of the male artist has perhaps evaded a proper examination: Who would conduct one? For this caricature is so intertwined with the public understanding and consumption of art that the two can perhaps never be separated. The male artist, in our image of him, does everything we are told not to do: He is violent and selfish. He neglects or betrays his friends and family. He smokes, drinks, scandalizes, indulges his lusts and in every way bites the hand that feeds him, all to be unmasked at the end as a peerless genius. Equally, he does the things we are least able or least willing to do: to work without expectation of a reward, to dispense with material comfort and to maintain an absolute indifference to what other people think of him. For he is the intimate associate of beauty and the world’s truth, dispenser of that rare substance — art — by which we are capable of feeling our lives to be elevated. Is there a female equivalent to this image? Does the woman artist feel herself to be interchangeable with the film character, with his lusts and his genius and his rage? For it seems to me, watching such a film, that the age-old question of what it is to be her goes unasked once more. It may even be that each time the synthesizing of art with masculine behaviors is casually reinforced, we know less about the woman artist than we did before. Her existence entails a far more stringent set of justifications. In the history of visual art, her appearance is the rarest of exceptions to the male rule. But of any woman creator an explanation is required of whether, or how, she dispensed with her femininity and its limitations, with her female biological destiny; of where — so to speak — she buried the body. That same body, in Western art, is contested: It has been condensed into the propulsive eroticism of the artistic impulse; it has fueled and fed the search for beauty and its domination by artistic form. In the story of art, woman attains the status of pure object. What does her subjectivity even look like? Did the female artists who emerged in the modern era — Joan Mitchell, Paula Rego, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin — navigate the styles of male cultural power by imitating them or by living at their margins? Today, when a woman artist sets out to create, who is she? The first time I visit the artist Celia Paul at her flat, she shows me a photograph. In it, she is sitting on a bed, a pale and puny young woman dressed in clothes that are somehow institutional-looking, with a sheaf of long hair falling around her elfin face. On one side of her sits the artist Lucian Freud; on the other — almost acting the role of his accomplice — sits his 22-year-old daughter, Bella. All three are laughing. It is an image of staged playfulness, the three of them rollicking on the bed, though the strange girl in the middle bears on her half-shocked features the marks of a very different kind of life from the other two. The Freuds are well dressed, full of beans, like two celebrities visiting an orphanage, fondling this odd creature as though they are considering devouring her. Celia Paul (center) with Lucian Freud and his daughter Bella at his studio in London in the early 1980s. This is the photo Celia showed the writer at their first meeting. Credit Bruce Bernard The photograph is a black-and-white print, taken by the photographer Bruce Bernard; it lives in a box of keepsakes near Celia Paul’s bed, a metal cot in a bleakly empty room with bare boards on the floor and water stains on the walls and ceiling. There are no decorations or furnishings, other than a chair in the far corner, where Celia sits, and a small stained chaise against the opposite wall that is offered to me. The room next door — Celia’s studio — is its mirror image, except that the floor and walls are encrusted with the rippling geological strata of dried paint. The flat lies at the top of an old building directly facing the British Museum. It is reached by walking 80 stairs up from the street. Celia Paul still has her sheaf of hair — graying now, for she is almost 60 — that falls down past her waist: She is a kind of Rapunzel waiting in her tower for intervention from the world, though whether that intervention would represent rescue or invasion is hard to say. Across the road, the British Museum is continually thronged with tourists. Their noise washes through the stillness and silence of Celia’s flat, which is unchanged — other than by decay — since Lucian Freud bought it for her 37 years ago. The austere beauty of her work, its almost pulsating wordlessness and the richness of its sorrow, is kindred to this silence. An accordion player has been stationed on the pavement below since 8 o’clock that morning, producing the same maddening refrain over and over for the passing visitors. On my first visit to the flat, I find that I do not believe in Celia Paul’s life. I regard it, suspiciously, almost as an act: It seems impossible to me that someone would choose — for choice it still then appears to be — to live so comfortlessly, so entirely without pleasure. I have an odd fantasy that somewhere concealed in these two rooms is a switch that if pressed would cause the walls to slide back and reveal a state-of-the-art home, with perhaps a handsome young neophyte in the kitchen preparing Celia’s lunch. Later I come to realize that what has unnerved me is to glimpse firsthand the very substance of which the artist-image is made, the absolute and unvarying disdain for convention, a moral and physical stance whose actual definition might be that it cannot be feigned. Later still, I wonder whether I might have been less suspicious of her “front” had she been a man. Why does it seem to me that for a woman to live in this way would require a strength that I can barely imagine? Celia Paul was one of five daughters of Christian missionaries. Her father became bishop of Bradford; her sister Jane is married to Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury. Her parents’ vocation took them first to Trivandrum in India — where Celia spent her early childhood — and then to a religious community in Exmoor, in southwest England, from where the sisters were sent to boarding school. When Celia was 16, her school’s art teacher contacted Lawrence Gowing at the Slade School of Fine Art, in London, to inform him of her pupil’s exceptional talent. He invited her to visit with her portfolio, and the utterly cloistered and unworldly girl went alone for the first time to London. Gowing accepted her straight away and wrote to her father to persuade him to let her go. In her second year at the Slade, at 18, she encountered and was quickly seduced by the 55-year-old Lucian Freud, who was there as a visiting professor, though he later admitted to her that his motivation for involvement with the school was not so much to teach as to “get a girl.” That girl, Celia Paul, whose strange life and extraordinary gift ensured that her intensity and sense of election were matched only by her vulnerability, fell into a harrowing experience of love. When I mention the Giacometti film to her, she gives a small smile. She recalls that she and her fellow Slade students used to kick and shove their canvases around the studio. There was no particular reason for these displays of machismo. “We just thought it was what real artists did,” she says.

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