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70
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
60/100Critics
80/100Scholars
Author:
Celia Paul
Publisher:
New York Review Books
Date:
November 10, 2020
Long overshadowed by her decades-long relationship with the older painter Lucian Freud, one of Britain's most important contemporary artists becomes the protagonist of her own life story, drawing on early journal entries as well as memory to depict her childhood in India, her days as an art student in London, her experiences with Freud, the challenges of motherhood, and meditations on a life in art.
What The Reviewers Say
It’s an account of a life so rigorously dedicated to art and family that fame seems beside the point.
... captivating.
... a beautifully written bildungsroman, a 'portrait of the artist' as a young woman. It is also, more uniquely, a powerful resource for artists who face the dueling responsibilities of creation and caregiving. You don’t have to be a woman or a mother to feel this friction..
The naked girl and the famous artist: It’s an old story and perhaps predictable arrangement of roles for Freud, the much older and more famous painter, and Paul, his beautiful younger lover; he paints and she sits for him. And yet. The concept of sitting occurs over and over again in Paul’s book, and these roles are not as static as Naked Girl With Egg might lead us to believe. Nor is sitting as simple as it might seem.
