The Brooklyn Rail

The British artist and writer Celia Paul has called herself an autobiographer rather than a painter of portraits. Her latest exhibit, Colony of Ghosts, is a deepening encounter with an artist seizing hold of her narrative with rare clarity and ferocity. A self-portrait, Reclining Painter (2023), insists upon primacy as one enters the show, her figure in a paint-spattered, full-length dress appearing not so much in repose as supported by a gondola-like green chaise. Her mouth is set hard and her eyes glitter as she appears to assess the viewer.

Across the gallery, a portrait of equal size depicts four middle-aged men—the painters Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, and Michael Andrews—seated at an empty table, their faces illuminated as if by the glare of spotlights. An interrogation appears to be taking place, but the viewer senses that these men, once monoliths to Paul, have few answers. As she herself has written about in her 2020 memoir Self-Portrait, Freud, nearly forty years her senior, was her lover when she was a young student; their son, born when she was twenty-four, was named for Frank Auerbach. Paul has described restaurant meals with these figures as terrifying affairs, where she struggled to speak. Here, though, the men appear small in comparison with Paul across the room, contained by the table rather than dominating it. Even the broad-shouldered Freud and Auerbach seem like boys in the headmaster’s office. Having once held forth, they’re now silent.

The model for this work, Colony of Ghosts (2023), was a 1963 John Deakin photograph, The Last Supper, picturing the four men dining at Wheelers, a Soho restaurant. In Paul’s rendering fifty years later, the men could be prisoners rather than judges. Above them hangs a single round painting—perhaps one of Paul’s—indistinctly showing a path receding into the distance. The ghosts have been rendered powerless. Perhaps their art still whispers, but Paul is in command of its influence.

The other three paintings in the first room suggest the difficulty of Paul’s path to possess not only her art but her own story. A small portrait, Weeping Muse and Running Tap (2024), depicts in autumnal colors a seated young woman bent in sodden grief. At the far end of the room, Ghost of a Girl with an Egg (2022), revises Freud’s own portrait of a young Paul, Naked Girl with Egg (1980–81), revealing a look of abject despair on her averted face, her naked body seemingly pinned under the painter’s forensic gaze. Gone is the anonymity of Freud’s portrait with its evocation of a body rather than a person. Across the room, a last painting, Sunlight on Weeping Birch (2023), uses the same spring-like blue and green palette of many paintings in the exhibit but gilds it with radiant yellow, suggesting the tree is exploding. As elsewhere in her landscapes, the natural world provides the only reliable unabashed ecstasy.

Her family also has been a frequent subject. One of five sisters, Paul has included one portrait of them, My Sisters by the Sea (2023). The women are more individualized than they have been in earlier group renderings, where they seemed to occupy a mutual inner world, often of stunned grief. Here, two look out to the sea, one peers into the distance, the fourth at the viewer. The mood seems one of delicate camaraderie, a resolved acceptance of differences. It stands in remarkable counterpoint to Colony of Ghosts, where the four men seem to bear no relation to one another.

Several other self-portraits on view are definitive in mood. Weeping Muse (2024) depicts a becalmed Paul, shoulders and head bowed in grief, clumsy toes poking out like visible insecurities from beneath a nun-like dress. To be a muse, perhaps especially Lucian Freud’s, seems to mean giving up the agency of one’s art. Painter at Home (2023) suggests the steelier state of the artist. Her hands, folded in her lap, are outlined in rusty red as if stained by blood—the price of her art perhaps—but her face embodies equanimity. Painter Against Water (2024) also shows an unbent Paul, her determination unmasked rather than hidden by the half-hearted smile she often offered in earlier self-portraits.

If writing is “a way of explaining oneself,” as Paul has described it, she “unintentionally entered the ring,” when she published her first book five years ago. Self-Portrait delineated her younger self from a famous lover and tight-knit family, but these details also allowed her life to be at least partially defined by others. The monumental, just-published monograph, Celia Paul: Works 1975–2025 (MACK), which this exhibit celebrates, is another act of quietly defiant self-definition. Reproducing fifty years of work in beautiful plates and accompanied by substantive and searching texts by the artist, as well as contributions by others, including Hilton Als, Edmund de Waal, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, all memoirists themselves. This volume refutes any easy or slighting characterization of Paul’s work or life; she has taken her place not as a muse but as an artist of uncompromising accomplishment.