Deeds which populate the dimensions of space and which reach their end when someone dies may cause us wonderment, but one thing, or an infinite number of things, dies in every final agony, unless there is a universal memory . . . What will die with me when I die, what pathetic and fragile form will the world lose? 

— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Witness”

Celia Paul. Letters to Gwen John. New York: NYRB Classics, 2022. (pp. 241-244)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions, 1962.

1

I keep fumbling back towards a word used by Celia Paul in Letters to Gwen John, an epistolary to a ghost, a correspondence with the spirit of artist, Gwen John. (For more on Gwen John, there is a riveting read on her colors and tone by Neil Lebeter.) The word, itself, is a wraithlike thing that inscribes an affinity while articulating a shared position between them: 

This word, recueillie, is slightly off kilter. The conjugation twitches, but that isn’t what draws me back to the word. I feel like Celia Paul hid something in it; she folded a secret into a pose that becomes a series of re-poses.

In French, recueillie serves as a noun and an adjective for a certain exterior calm, an imperturbable tranquility, a coolness that withholds concern, an unflappable demeanor. 

“You and I have often painted self-portraits by proxy,” Celia tells Gwen. They have also shared this an angle of repose, a position of the body, a pose that becomes a place of encounter in absence. Recueillie, in Celia’s usage, becomes a body. Or an oeuvre: an artistic corpus.

“What will die with me when I die, what pathetic and fragile form will the world lose?” The question belongs to Jorge Luis Borges, but the italics are mine.

2

After spending years as Rodin's muse and lover, Gwen John withdrew from the world to occupy a solitude that made space for art.

After being "the muse" of Lucian Freud and raising a son sired in that relationship, Celia Paul recognizes herself in John's desire to be unperturbed. 

"I have hoped to be unassailable and complete within myself," she writes to Gwen. But there is something that wants to be created; there is "something stirring" inside her, something to which she wants "to be receptive," something that compels her to seek the ghost's "guidance."  

Drawing on the ideal of recueillie, Paul considers her own self-portraits, or the ways in which she imagines herself. 

Her painting, Overshadowed, is a self-portrait inspired by Sofonisba Anguissola's self-portrait that reveals her famous teacher, Bernardino Campi, working in the margins. Titled Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (1539), the artist depicts him "brush in hand, in the act of painting her." Celia’s tone lacks inflection when she writes, matter-of-factly, that the "powerful portrait" of her belongs to him, "as if painted by him, on his canvas."

In this double-portrait of Sofonisba Anguissola, according to Celia:

Although "pleased" with her depiction of Lucian ("it caught him as he was, quicksilver and mercurial"), Celia decided to paint him out of the portrait. But men insinuate themselves into the emptiness that surrounds a woman’s body, especially when this emptiness exists as a repudiation of their influence.

Painting him out didn’t prevent Lucian from leaving what Celia calls "a shadow," a trace of an encounter. 

She tells Gwen about her battle with the impossible stain of Lucian’s shadow:

These eyes "alive and alight with challenge" indicate Lucian's presence. It is a gendered presence, as Celia explains. It is a presence she recognizes and feels throughout her body, from her head to her shadow. Her solution has been to step aside and refuse the cockfights. And Celia recognizes this part of herself in Gwen: both have relinquished the ring and let the men have at it. This is where the pose comes in:

“Only by being withheld (recueillie) can we access this strength.” The pose of withholding merges with the refusal to squander that reserve of energy (or strength) on male artists and partners. It is self-sabotaging to waste one’s artistic energy on trying to win. The palette is waiting to be discovered.

“Your self-portraits are always painted on a small canvas,” Celia continues. And she begins thinking about her own work. There is "a small, dark self-portrait" of Celia’s head and shoulders that "burns with a quiet intensity." The color scheme is “is russet and gray: the colors of late autumn.”

Despite her physical absence, Celia places Gwen in the present, collaborating as her mentor, a spiritual proximate.

“I thought of you a lot when I made this image of myself,” she writes.

And then Celia pauses. You can almost feel her looking up, and away, from the page. You can almost smell the cerulean canvas overpainted and darkened by grays. "I need you more than ever, Gwen,” she continues, “I need you to direct your calm regard upon me, to steady me. I am entering a time of turbulence.” You can almost taste the chilled air of the studio, the scattered brushes, the empty sink. The loneliness is about to begin.

3

In 1996, while restoring "Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola", the specialist laborers came across a spectral spot in the painting. Anguissola’s left hand seems to be holding a glove, but the laborers found that it was actually another hand, covered up in varnish, influencing the painter's hand. Mairead Small Staid describes the hand's implied motion as that of reaching up and "out of the canvas-within-a-canvas, as if to guide Campi’s own hand, as if to take his mahl stick and brush."

I shuddered with pleasure at these descriptions. As for what the Campi, Rodin, or Lucian Freud intended, I have no way of knowing. Nor am I convinced that any member of that trio possessed the self-reflexiveness to know their own intentions, or to distinguish between their actions and their accidents.

In a different sky, there is trio of writers well-versed in self-interrogation; three writers capable of making the sorts of mistakes we call accidents. And I find my recueillie-informed wandering towards them, enunciating their names in a whisper so my dog will not get jealous as I set aside three spoonfuls of mango creme, an offering flavored by the tenderness most writers feel for our ghosts. Yes, it is true. Clarice Lispector and Thomas Merton and Ingeborg Bachmann all died young in fires of their own accidental forgery, in bed with cigarettes burning forever, the accident of sleep.