L is an expert in the art of passive cruelty.

The visit disappoints M in almost every way. Other artists have stayed in the past, she explains in a letter, and found the “great but subtle beauty” conducive to working. The painter known to many as Lucian Freud’s one-time muse writes of her own muse, her mother, and provers herself a masterful writer as well.įifteen years later, remarried and living on the coastal marshes of Norfolk, M invites L, whom she’s never met, to stay at the “second place” behind their house, a cottage of warm wood and lime-washed walls. From that moment, I ceased to be immersed in the story of my own life and became distinct from it.” It so shakes her that after she returns home to England she leaves her husband.īooks Review: Celia Paul is finally her own muse in the dazzling memoir ‘Self-Portrait’ “Looking at it,” she explains, “I felt myself falling out of the frame I had lived in for years, the frame of human implication in a particular set of circumstances. Alone in the city, without her husband and young child, M was drawn to a gallery where one of L’s self-portraits stared back at her. Structured as a letter from the narrator, M, to her friend Jeffers, it claims to be an attempt at a portrait of an artist called L - a painter whose work violently rattled M on a long-ago visit to Paris. “ Second Place,” Cusk’s first novel after the conclusion of her radical, brilliant “Outline” trilogy (“Outline,” “ Transit” and “Kudos”), scratches at that variance, popping it open like a fat-domed pimple. “Of any woman creator, an explanation is required of whether, or how, she dispensed with her femininity and its limitations, with her female biological destiny of where - so to speak - she buried the body.” As Cusk writes in the profile, which finally situated Paul, at 60, as more than Lucien Freud’s nubile muse, female artists have to work through or around or beside their gender. He smokes, drinks, scandalizes, indulges his lusts and in every way bites the hand that feeds him, all to be unmasked at the end as a peerless genius.”Īrtist and male artist are not distinct terms. He neglects or betrays his friends and family.

“The male artist,” Cusk writes, “in our image of him, does everything we are told not to do: He is violent and selfish. The consummate swigging, stomping, scolding male virtuoso, Giacometti is performing a role he’ll never be asked to step out of. In a 2019 profile of the long-neglected artist Celia Paul, Rachel Cusk mentions a scene from a film about the painter Alberto Giacometti in which he jams dozens of his sketches into a firepit and watches them burn. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Review of second place by rachel cusk