‘He said I sounded hysterical’

In prose and in paint, Celia Paul is exorcising the ghosts of her past – from the cruelties of her lover Lucian Freud to his offhand cohorts and the YBA revolution

Charlotte Higgins

Painter Celia Paul has lived in the same flat in Bloomsbury – bought for her by her then lover Lucian Freud – for 40 years. To ascend to it, up the 80 steps to bring you level with the pediment of the British Museum opposite, is to enter a different world. The main room contains little but a lumpy and ancient chaise longue and a metal-framed bed. One wall is stacked with freshly stretched empty canvases. Next door a mountain range of old sheets, stiff and stained with paint, obscure what might be a sofa. There is a huge, dusty mirror in which we both appear, spectrally: she a slight figure in a brown floor-length skirt, her slippers paint-encrusted. I ask her if she sleeps in the metal-framed bed. Sometimes,…

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Guardian Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, 21 March 2025

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