RaveThe NationThe 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 ... Self-Portrait might be read as a series of sittings over the course of a lifetime ... But it is part of a longer story that she is telling about herself and Freud and others in her life, about the painter and those she paints. In Self-Portrait, Paul is her own subject, but so are the shifting conditions of subjecthood and objecthood, the changing relationships between the painter and the painted ... Her telling of this story is characterized by a certain matter-of-factness ... Paul’s prose is at once unflinching and direct as well as reticent, full of gaps ... there is a kind of dialectic between directness and reticence in her work, as she reports the facts but obscures the motivations.
