‘He said I sounded hysterical’: Celia Paul on lover Lucian Freud, his cold friends and the ‘devastating’ YBAs

In prose and in paint, the great artist Celia Paul is exorcising the ghosts of her past – from the cruelties of her lover Freud, to his offhand cohorts, and the YBA revolution that declared painting deadPainter Celia Paul has lived in the same flat in Bloomsbury – bought for her by her then lover Lucian Freud – for 40 years. To ascend to it, up the 80 steps to bring you level with the pediment of the British Museum opposite, is to enter a different world. The main room contains