Their correspondence is remarkable not just for the intimacy it reveals, but for the fact that the volume exists at all: while Freud was alive, none of these letters would have seen the light of day. He was obsessively, obstreperously concerned with his privacy. One biography was halted after Freud felt too disconcerted by its revelations, and another was stopped at Freud’s behest by the very persuasive presence of a group of East-End gangsters. The first volume of William Feaver’s weighty account was only published in 2019 — eight years after the artist’s death.

Martin Gayford — who edited the new volume with Freud’s long-term assistant David Dawson — was uncompromising about how Freud would see this latest book: “I’m sure he wouldn’t have welcomed it… [but] posterity is owed the correspondence.”

It’s not hard to see why an intrepid writer would run the risk of Freud’s wrath or even hired violence. Freud’s life is made for a biography. The grandson of Sigmund Freud, he was born in Berlin and moved to London to escape the rise of Nazism in 1933. He dated Greta Garbo, danced with Marlene Dietrich, was friends with Frank Auerbach and Francis Bacon, married the sculptor Jacob Epstein’s daughter, Kitty (after an affair with her aunt), eloped with the Guinness heiress and socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood, and, in his later years, was friends with the supermodel (and future subject) Kate Moss. He dated the artist Celia Paul — after having met her when she was his student — and had scores of other mistresses. He is the acknowledged father to 14 children, and the suspected father to dozens more.

It is this celebrity — his “fame and infamy” — that the new retrospective at the National Gallery, Lucian Freud: New Perspectives, hopes to “look beyond”. The exhibition’s curator, Daniel F. Herrmann, writes that Freud’s artistic practice has been “overshadowed by biography”, and he hopes to bring the paintings back to the fore.

It’s a worthy aim — who doesn’t want an art exhibition to be focused on the art? — but, when it comes to Freud, the line between biography and creation has always been rather fraught. After his early portrait of his art teacher and friend Cedric Morris (Love Lucian also features letters to Morris), Freud rarely painted portraits of named sitters. His pictures of his first wife, Kitty Garman, often refer to her only as “girl”: Girl with a Kitten (1947); Girl with a White Dog (1951 – 1952); Girl with Roses (1948). Garman may have been Freud’s muse, but he was meticulous about keeping her name, and any hint of their joint biography, out of his work.

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This anonymising impulse continues throughout Freud’s work: his first portrait of a male nude is called Naked Man with Rat (1977-8). There is no mention of the man, Raymond Jones, who took off his clothes and sat for hours and hours at a time with a drugged rat next to his naked testicles. (To keep the rat still during the painting, Freud fed it champagne mixed with sleeping pills. As if the scene couldn’t get any more surreal, Raymond recalled how Freud used to stop painting to have sex with his girlfriend in the bathroom next door, and would come back having had a “bath to settle [him]self down”.)

Even the nobility — Freud liked to claim he moved “vertically” through society from wheelers and dealers to the Royal Family — did not avoid his anti-biographical impulse. In her 1957 portrait, the 11th Duchess of Devonshire, Deborah, is only given the name Woman in a White Shirt.

But it is not just his painting’s anonymising titles that seem to simultaneously invite and deny discussions of biography and celebrity. Freud’s characteristic style is also marked by an almost clinical detachment. His sitters are subjected to his excoriating gaze, and the final products seem to treat them more as observed animals or inert carcases than humans.

Take his 1995 work Benefits Supervisor Sleeping. It is a brilliant painting of “Big Sue” Tilley on a cream and floral sofa, with the heft and weight of her body falling naturally towards the painting’s bottom edge. Her flesh is uncompromisingly, brilliantly realised — Freud was a master of tone, and it is possible to see the tangible difference between the soft squish of her stomach and the knobble of her knee. Yet for all this brilliance, the painting is unbelievably disconcerting. It is notionally a painting of “Big Sue” asleep, but the cold, unsparing nature of Freud’s gaze makes her seem dead. Is there a chance this is a corpse? If her left arm weren’t raised and holding on to the back of the sofa, it would be all too easy to think so.

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It is, of course, the other aspects of Freud’s life — the model-firing; the bread-roll-throwing; the general stroppiness — that the curators of the new exhibition want to “move beyond”. And they have a good point: once you hear of some of Freud’s behaviour, it’s hard to look at his work in the same light. Look at his “naked portrait” — Freud hated the word “nude” — of his 18-year-old daughter Rose Boyt, Portrait of Rose (1979). It’s an unashamedly sexual picture: Rose is lying back on a sofa, with her arms raised and her legs apart. Even MailOnline insists upon pixelating the area between Rose’s legs. The picture has caused a stir ever since it was first exhibited, but, after reading how he once shouted across a restaurant that “women should smell of one thing: cunt — in fact, they should invent a perfume called cunt”, it’s even harder to brush off an all-pervasive sense of his chauvinism.

This anecdote was just one drunken outburst — and it is unlikely Freud ever imagined it being used in criticism of his work. But it is part and parcel of a picture of a man who could be uncompromisingly cruel, just as much as he could be ostentatiously generous. In his biography of the artist Breakfast with Lucian, Geordie Greig draws attention to this uglier side of Freud’s character: he could be anti-Semitic, despite being Jewish himself; he railed against waiters for assuming he was gay when he was out with another male friend, despite having had homosexual affairs; and he was continually getting into altercations in bars and restaurants, even when he was elderly.

But however scandalous these stories are, they only really lead us back to one, boringly hackneyed, question: how far can you separate the art from the artist? It’s almost a moot point. You can feel Freud’s cruel, uncompromising, brilliant gaze in every canvas — and the paintings do not get worse, or better, when you hear sweet stories of him drawing pictures for children, or being unbelievably unpleasant to his mistresses.

There is one person for whom there was little difference between Freud the artist, and Freud the man. The artist Celia Paul was Freud’s student, and had a relationship with him for a decade. Paul sat for many of Freud’s paintings and has written, beautifully and eloquently, about the pain of being his “muse” (she hates that word) in her two books Self Portrait (2019) and Letters to Gwen John (2022).

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Paul has recently painted a work called Overshadowed — a large portrait which is on show at an exhibition in Victoria Miro until 1 October. She has painted herself seated, staring out at the viewer with her hands clasped. But when I speak to her, she draws attention to the fact that it isn’t a simple self-portrait: “I have painted myself as a painter.” The work is a response to the Renaissance artist’s Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait with Bernadino Campi (1559), in which all power balances are upended: Anguissola is being painted by her teacher, but she appears to be in charge. In Paul’s words, she “guides Campi’s hand as he appears to paint her”.

Paul wanted to do her own version of Anguissola’s painting — “Campi was Anguissola’s teacher as Freud had been my teacher and lover” — and “placed Lucian on the left of the composition”, using his self-portrait as a guide. But the result was “too illustrative“, and Paul rubbed him out. All that is left is his ghostly shadow. The resulting work is quietly, inordinately powerful. It is about looking, concentration, and focus; and it’s also a reversal of the expected power dynamic. Paul is seated, smaller than Freud’s shadow, but her gaze leaves no ambiguity about who is in control.

This is a work which plays with the shadow of biography — letting it hover; fade; and be present despite its absence. It is, wonderfully, the antithesis of many of the impulses in Freud’s work. Perhaps better than any exhibition, it succeeds in trying to “move beyond” biography; the unseemly, ungainly elements of Freud’s life. Here, in Paul’s painting, is proof of the power of letting them linger, overshadowed by her own talent.

“You are always associated, in the public’s eyes, with your brother Augustus and with your lover, Auguste Rodin. I am always seen in light of my involvement with Lucian Freud,” Paul continues. “We are neither of us considered as artists standing alone. I hate the term ‘in her own right’ — as in ‘artist in her own right’ — because it suggests that we are still bound to our overshadowed lives, like freed slaves.”

They may have painted remarkable portraits themselves, but both women are primarily known as the muses of “great” male artists. And Paul’s new book takes the form of a series of letters to John, whose life was “stamped with a similar pattern” to her own.

“I hate the word ‘muse’, too, for the same limiting reason … What is it about us that keeps us tethered?” Paul undoubtedly knows the answer to this question already: she is forever seen first and foremost in terms of her association with a man, rather than judged by her own successes.

When the National Portrait Gallery, for instance, recently acquired a self-portrait by Paul (“Portrait, Eyes Lowered”), each of the news articles emphasised her “relationship with Lucian Freud, who painted her many times”. Similarly, Rachel Campbell-Johnston chose to open her Times article with the very same framing the artist despises: “Celia Paul was a model and muse for Lucian Freud. She is also an artist in her own right. There . . . I’ve said it. That’s how Paul does not like to be introduced.”

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This rhetoric is not unusual: there is a long history of women being identified as partners of men, rather than as individual agents. Constance Mary Lloyd was a children’s book writer and dedicated activist who campaigned for a woman’s right to serve in parliament. But, upon marrying Oscar Wilde, she was referred to as “Mrs. Oscar” in the press.

This is particularly galling when a woman has been instrumental to her partner’s success by, say, serving as a muse — a role whose influence has been repeatedly denied by male artists. Some have actually demanded that muses who were practising artists forget their careers to exclusively serve them. We know the famous faces of these women but often nothing of their own art. Jo Nivison Hopper, for instance, frequently features in her husband’s cinematic paintings, including the downtown diner scene, “Nighthawks” (1942). Most people recognise this painting; but how many could call to mind one of Nivison’s?

Nivison was initially the more successful artist. In 1924 she was invited to show six watercolours at the Brooklyn Museum, alongside Georgia O’Keeffe and John Singer Sargent. Meanwhile, Hopper hadn’t sold a painting in over a decade. Nivison, wanting to support Hopper, convinced the museum to include his work in the show; this was the exhibition which launched his career, and ended hers.

That same year, Jo Nivison married Hopper. From this moment on, her diary tells the story of his abuse, which was physical as well as psychological. Her husband discouraged her from painting: “If there can be room for only one of us, it must undoubtedly be he,” she writes, assuming the role of studio assistant, secretary and muse, and sacrificing her own success for Hopper’s.

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Paul intersperses her letters to Gwen John with reflective passages; they reveal that her fate contains distressing echoes of Nivison’s. Freud attempts to control and exploit Paul; he suggests that she should act like Gwen John, who gave up her own work while having an affair with Rodin:

“He often compared me unfavourably to Gwen John. He told me how beautiful he thought it was that she stopped painting when she was most deeply in love with Rodin because she wanted to give herself up entirely to the experience. She told Rodin, ‘I am not an artist, I’m your model, and I want to stay being your model for ever. Because I’m happy.’ This is how Lucian would have liked me to be. He would have loved Gwen.”

Freud’s desires reflect wider societal expectations that women should serve men’s needs above their own. Nevertheless, Paul — in contrast to John and Nivison — refused to acquiesce to Freud’s demands, living on her own and, following the birth of their son, passing childcare duties to her mother. She reveals that she always felt “resentful” about wanting to be with Freud, as it meant spending less time on her own work.

Perhaps Paul hates the term “muse” so much because she was forever attempting to evade the role — which is a demanding one. As she has said before, “the act of sitting is never passive”. She didn’t have the time, motivation or energy to be Freud’s full-time muse, if she was to become a successful artist on her own terms. “He wanted active participation”, and she wasn’t prepared to surrender. Which perhaps makes it all the more infuriating that being Freud’s muse is so often seen as the most important thing about her.

Still, for someone who is so enraged by the term, Paul can’t quite seem to (or doesn’t want to) completely let her identity as Freud’s muse go. In her letters she dwells on the decade in which she was “intensely involved with” the painter. And it’s not the first time that he has been her subject on the page. Her first book, Self-portrait, focused on her 10-year relationship with Freud, from meeting him while a student at the Slade (she was entranced by his “eerie glow”) to the first time she posed for him and cried. Throughout, she chronicles her struggle to love someone while dedicating herself to painting.

Having already told, and sold, her story as Freud’s muse, isn’t it about time that Paul moved on — especially if she wants everyone else to? Though professing to “hate” being seen always in relation to Freud, isn’t Paul also mining that association? In her letters to John, she is still reflecting on their “connection”, which she can’t seem to break. And in her paintings, Paul continues to orbit Freud. For her show at the Victoria Miro in 2019, she submitted an intimate self-portrait, “Lucian and Me”, in which the male painter tilts his head towards her, as if about to whisper a secret in her ear; she, too, leans in.

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Does Paul want it both ways? She is complaining about the plight of the muse, while attempting to profit from that status, effectively cashing in on her association with Freud. But then, why shouldn’t she? Paul, like so many other female artists, has been overlooked and exploited by the patriarchal art world. Why not take advantage of a situation she can’t escape, even when she tries?

“The world celebrates and rewards women who are chosen by powerful men,” the model Emily Ratajkowski pointed out last year in her memoir, My Body. No matter what she does, she will forever be known for her debut: dancing nearly naked in the music video of Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”. It is practically impossible for women to escape the association, and influence, of the male gatekeepers who have “made” their careers; all they can do is try to reshape the narrative about their origins. Knowing that, why should we judge Ratajkowski because, to use her words, “I’ve capitalised on my body”?

Paul, too, has been placed in an impossible situation: no matter what she does, she will be seen as Freud’s muse first and an artist “in her own right” second. Paul may as well, then, leverage this association with Freud to further her career, and identify with other women like John who have also been framed in this light. It’s clear that she, like Ratajkowski, is using the very connection that binds her for her own means.

And yet, there is more than self-aggrandisement at stake. Paul is not simply feeding the reader’s fascination with the artist-muse relationship and name-dropping Freud; she is also turning the tables on art history.

In another self-portrait, “Painter and Model” (2012), Paul sits with tubes of paint at her feet, in a huge, stained overall. She is, unmistakably, the painter. But the title coyly alludes to the lasting impact Freud, though he’s not present in the painting, has had on her life. So much so that the viewer is left wondering: is Paul’s final project to invert their relationship? Here, she is the protagonist, while Freud has become a supporting character in her story: an invisible muse.

Ruth Millington’s book, Muse, is published this month.