The World-Changing Gaze of Celia Paul

“My Sisters in Mourning,” painted thirty years later, shares the same motif and theme but is very different in its execution. The four sisters sit close together, dressed in similar long, loose, and featureless dresses, all with their hands in their laps, against a background of subdued color. None of the visual information found in “Family Group” is present here—it could be anywhere, anytime. The only thing that differentiates the sisters is their facial features, but those are not very pronounced, either. Another unifying factor is the light, which comes in from the left, falls upon the back of the figure seated at the edge, erases the contours of her dress, lies around her head like a halo, lights up the cheek of the next figure, and also shines, somewhat more muted, upon the faces of the last two.

The difference between the two pictures is striking. They depict the same sisters, gathered in the same situation—sorrow at the death of a loved one—but in the first picture the emphasis is on external differences, and the sense of fellowship comes from within. In the other picture, it is as if the fellowship is marked by external similarities—the dresses, the poses, the light that shines upon them all. None of the women are looking at one another, they are sitting each in her separate world, looking inward. It is, I imagine, more an image of grief as an entity, the grief that has taken possession of these people, the way grief has always taken possession of people, while the first picture is of a particular situation of grieving, it belongs to the people we see, there and then. If one takes a step back and regards the pictures at a greater distance, there is one thing they have in common: there are no sharp edges between the persons in either group, there are no visible conflicts, no obvious competition, no one is asserting herself at the expense of anyone else.

When I visited Paul the first time, and she told me about the picture she was planning to paint, she mentioned this dynamic, how different the group portrait of the four artists would have to be from the group portraits she had painted of her sisters. If a friendship existed between the artists, it was hardly without competition, envy, egoism, and idiosyncrasy.

As on the previous occasion, only a few seconds elapsed from when I pressed the intercom button until the sound of her voice came over the speaker. And, as before, she received me in the hallway with a smile. We chatted for a few minutes about what had happened since, and then she brought me into the studio to show me the painting.

There wasn’t just one painting in there, there were three.

The first depicted four of the painters at the restaurant in Soho in 1963. But all the details of the photograph had been eliminated; in the painting they were seated behind an empty table in an empty room, and they were sitting very erect, side by side. Nothing was going on between them, nothing was going on in front of them, it was just them—Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, Andrews. All four were peering straight ahead, out of the picture. The wall behind them was greenish, and the table, wavily painted, was green in the shadows. The only object that remained from the photograph was a round painting that had hung on the wall. Here, it resembled a porthole, as if the four were sitting aboard a ship. All that green gave me an underwater feeling. What kind of world they were in wasn’t easy to say, other than that it wasn’t this one. They looked out at us from the past, that sunken world, the realm of the dead.

Directly opposite this picture, which was large, there hung another newly painted picture. It was a self-portrait, also large, and it depicted Paul in a color-flecked painter’s smock, reclining on a green chaise longue. Visually, the smock dominated the image—with all its spots of color, it resembled an abstract painting itself—but the emotional center was the face. It was painted with clear, coarse brushstrokes, typical of Paul’s self-portraits—the head small, the mouth broad, the hair dark and tight—and the face was turned toward the viewer. But it was as if the eyes looked past, at something else. They lacked the self-examining quality that so many of her self-portraits have. This was not a soul laid bare but one that sat there and let something come to it.

Hanging like this, it was as if Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, and Andrews were peering at Paul from the depths of that lost world, while she peered back at them from this one. So much was in motion in that room. Death, the past, art, longing, all of it sent whirling and made current by the two paintings. The men were painted as they had looked at the beginning of the sixties, at the height of their careers, but although they are next to one another and practice the same profession, the picture doesn’t radiate any sense of fellowship, they are sitting there singly. The figures’ passivity and the fact that they are lined up in a row made me think of defendants seated in the dock. The presence of the self-portrait, the painter who sits back to look at her work, complicates the image, for we see Freud, Bacon, Auerbach, and Andrews the way she sees them, but we also see her seeing, and that creates a distance in her gaze upon them, opening up a space for the viewer.

The third painting was of a tree, almost explosively present.

I stood for a long time looking at these paintings, which charged one another in such peculiar yet intense ways. They took hold of the room, and they took hold of me. Not until we left the studio and went into the kitchen to drink coffee and chat about this and that, as we had done the first time, did the impressions of the paintings slowly dissolve, for there everything was in motion, the words, the thoughts, the light, our hands, and reality’s jumble of unsurveyable detail, new at every glance. But now, as I write this nearly eight months later, in October, 2src24, it is the paintings that I remember, and the feelings they left in me. Of course this is so, because they depicted presence—of the past, of the painter, of the tree—and what you have once been close to stays with you. ♦

(Translated, from the Norwegian, by Ingvild Burkey.)

This is drawn from “Celia Paul: Works 1975-2src25.”