Known in France as a giant of modernist sculpture, for the rest of the world Camille Claudel is mainly remembered as the lover of Auguste Rodin.
His tragic life, which included spending the last decades of his life in an asylum, was immortalized on film by Isabelle Adjani alongside Gerard Depardieu in the 1988 film. Camille Claudeland again by Juliette Binoche in 2013 Camille Claudel 1915. A student, model, muse and lover of Rodin who became his rival, he produced works of art as radical and expressive as his own. And now, on view at the Getty through July 21, it’s the first North American show in more than 30 years focused solely on his work, including approximately 60 pieces.
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The star of the show (seen for the first time in the United States at the Art Institute of Chicago) is The Mature Age along with various iterations of his signature piece, The Waltz. Portraits in bronze or marble also abound, a common genre for the few female sculptors of the time who could generate controversy by working with professional nude models. His likeness to Rodin is matched only by The ladya child rendered in marble. The Chatterboxesin green onyx, it depicts four women gossiping, leaning conspiratorially. It stands out in part because of its feminine gaze: naked women not distinguished by their sensual physique but by their expressive commitment to each other.
The Waltz, depicted in a diagonal outburst, comprises a pair of dancers emerging from the rough swirls of a dress. “Many artists were taking things to the extreme [government] I wasn’t always ready. That was the case of The Waltz,” says Anne-Lise Desmas, senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Getty Museum.
Conceived in plaster in 1889, it was taken 16 years earlier The Waltz it was cast in bronze. Working on a government commission, Claudel was unable to get them to commit to a marble reproduction. along with O Age of Wisdom, marks a break from his earlier works that show the influence of Rodin. “In the initial competition, he presented two completely naked dancers to a state art inspector, and they didn’t accept it,” says Desmas. “So she said, OK, and reworked the whole thing with curtains. So, based on the criticism, she was able to build on the criticism to make something even better.”
The works in Rodin’s studio, where he worked from the age of 19, include studies of different parts of the body, showing a delicate touch in difficult elements such as hands and faces. After a miscarriage in 1892, Claudel ended their relationship and, irritated by criticism that her work looked too much like her own, embarked on small-scale sketches of nature and everyday life. Dream of firemade of alabaster and bronze, depicts a woman before a glowing fire, while Claudel also interpreted Hokusai’s woodcut, The Great Wave (an influential Japanese work of the time), carving it in green onyx with bronze bathers.
Not making the journey from the Musée Camille Claudel, the French national museum dedicated to his work, opened in 2017 in his hometown of Nogent-sur-Seine, south of Paris, is his final work, a marble masterpiece. Perseus and the Gorgon. Conceived in 1897, a plaster rendering was exhibited two years later at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. After the cancellation of the state commission for the work, the marble, commissioned by Countess Arthur de Maigret for her mansion on rue de TIt ishIt isran in Paris, presented at the Salon of 1902. Fortunately, the Getty show includes a bronze miniature depicting Perseus holding the Gorgon’s head in one hand and his shield in the other, watching his victim in his reflection. Look closely and you will notice a resemblance between the Gorgon and Claudel.
Claudel’s masterpiece, The Mature Age, was commissioned by the government in 1895 and canceled in 1899 before a bronze was cast. Composed of three nude figures: a young woman, kneeling and holding out the hand of a standing man, who is swept away by the embrace of an older woman, it is an allegory of aging… or it may be a reflection of the love triangle. between Claudel and Rodin, 24 years older than her, and her lifelong companion, Rose Beuret, from whom Rodin refused to part.
In November 1898, the government expressed interest in a bronze casting of the work, and a plaster version was shown the following year, but no bronze casting was commissioned. One was privately cast in 1902 (seen on loan by the Musée d’Orsay) and another in 1913.
“You can imagine that Rodin was influential enough to say ‘I don’t want the commission to go ahead because I don’t want my private life to become public,’ but that is undocumented,” clarifies Desmas. “I like it The Waltz, had nothing to do with Rodin and was originally supposed to be commissioned from the State. And something happened, the deal I had stopped. We don’t know why. Every time the state didn’t order the marble or the bronze.”
Coming from a middle-class family in Hauts-de-France, in the northeast of the country, Claudel began working with clay at the age of 12. A neighbor, Alfred Boucher, immediately saw talent in the girl, and when she moved with her brother and mother to Montparnasse in 1881, he acted as a mentor, instructing her in a rented studio with other female sculptors. He soon found himself studying and sleeping with Rodin, who took over his instruction from Boucher.
There is a version of her story in which Rodin took credit for her work and used his considerable influence to stifle her career, that sexism prevented Claudel from achieving the same level of success as her mentor and doomed her to the fate of many women nonconformists as a patient in the psychiatric hospital of Ville-Évrard in Neuilly-sur-Marne where she was confined for the rest of her life. Then, as now, sexism existed, but there is no documentation or evidence to suggest that Rodin did anything to thwart his career.
“She couldn’t live by herself,” says Desmas. “When she was engaged in 1913, she had been living for many years in dirty clothes, alone, without food, going out alone at night and obsessed with a Rodin gang trying to steal her work of art, and upset that she was poisoned. “.
In 1920, a doctor informed his mother that Claudel was showing signs of improvement and could return to family life with proper supervision. But her mother, rejected her for dedicating herself to the arts, refused. Claudel never sculpted again and spent the last thirty years of his life institutionalized.
