Claudel, Camille (1864–1943)

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Claudel, Camille (1864–1943)

French sculptor, primarily of small-scale works, noted for their detail and expressive quality. Pronunciation: Kah-MEE Klo-DEL. Born Camille Claudel on December 8, 1864, in Fère-en-Tardenois, France; died on November 19, 1943, in Montdevergues, France; daughter of Louis-Prosper Claudel and Louise-Athénaïse (Cervaux) Claudel ; sister of Paul Claudel (renowned poet and diplomat); entered the Académie Colarossi in 1881; tutored by sculptor Alfred Boucher and Auguste Rodin; never married.

Moved with family from Fère-en-Tardenois to Bar-le-Duc (1870), to Nogent-sur-Seine (1876), to Paris (1882); began work as an assistant in the studio of Rodin (1885), began affair; had first major exhibition (1888–89); left Rodin's studio (1893); broke with him (1898); continued to exhibit (1898–1908) but showed signs of mental instability; committed to asylum at Ville-Evrard (1913); transferred to asylum at Montdevergues (1914), lived there until her death (1943).

Sculptures:

La Vieille Hélène (1882); Young Roman or My Brother at Age Sixteen (1884); Giganti (1885); Bust of Auguste Rodin (1888); The Waltz (1891–1905); Clotho (1893); Sakuntala or Abandon (plaster 1888, marble 1905); The Gossips (1897); The Age of Maturity (first version, plaster, c. 1894); The Age of Maturity (second version, bronze, 1898); The Wave (1900); Perseus and the Gorgon (1902); The Flute Player or The Little Siren; Deep Thought or Woman Kneeling before a Hearth (1905).

Camille Claudel's reputation as an artist has long been entwined with that of Auguste Rodin, the most respected French sculptor at the end of the 19th century. For some, she is no more than an episode—albeit an important one—in his life. Indeed, before anyone had written any serious work about Claudel, one could always find a few pages or a chapter devoted to her turbulent affair with Rodin in any biography of that artist. Further, as the sister of Paul Claudel, the renowned poet and diplomat, her name was also well-known. Yet she was most often portrayed as a cross he and his family had to bear and not as the talented artist she was. Indeed, Paul Claudel found in his sister an example of the dangers of art: "I witness the tragedy of my sister's life, and I don't encourage anyone to follow the path of the arts," he told a reporter just a few months before her death. It is perhaps not surprising that the accomplishments of a woman associated with two such major figures should become subsumed to theirs, especially since her life did not fit into an easily constructed narrative. Nonetheless, her brother characterized her as a "genius," and Rodin recognized that she was "abundantly gifted." In line with these judgments, renewed interest in her work in recent decades allows a more complete glimpse into her life and her originality.

Camille Claudel was born into a comfortable, middle-class family in a small town in the Champagne region. Louis-Prosper Claudel, her father, was a civil servant who held the office of registrar of mortgages, a position that found him frequently being transferred from district to district. The family's move to Paris in 1882 was occasioned by the fact that Claudel had already left home for Paris to study in a private art school the year before. Although the Claudels moved a number of times, they always kept the house in Villeneuve that came to the family when Louis-Prosper married Louise-Athénaïse Cervaux. That house would remain their preferred place to pass the summer vacations and serve as an anchor to the family.

All that has happened to me is more than a novel, it is an epic…. [I]t would need a Homer to recount it.
—Camille Claudel

By all accounts, Camille Claudel was headstrong and independent as a young girl, dominating her brother and sister, her schoolmates, and the servants. She was closer to Paul than to her sister Louise , though in most matters later in life Paul would side with his mother and Louise. From an early age, Camille showed an interest in sculpting; she would model bones from clay and bake them in the oven. She turned the house into her atelier and even taught one of the maids how to prepare marble blocks for sculpting. This desire and determination to become a sculptor, an activity her mother considered completely inappropriate for a young woman, engendered frequent family disputes. Claudel's father, while not certain of her abilities, encouraged her to pursue her goals, and she began sculpting in earnest. The family's moves took them to Nogent-sur-Seine, a town that happened to be the home of two well-known sculptors, Paul Dubois (later the director of the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris) and Alfred Boucher. Claudel's father called upon Boucher to assess his daughter's works, and Boucher immediately recognized the talent of the now 15-year-old Claudel. He offered Camille both encouragement and served as an occasional tutor until the family moved again, this time to Wassy-sur-Blaise. Claudel longed to go to Paris where she could study and exhibit her work. Although women were not allowed to attend the Beaux-Arts, a number of private schools did accept female pupils. It is likely that the intervention of Boucher and Dubois facilitated Camille's acceptance into the Académie Colarossi in 1881. She moved to Paris and persuaded her father to rent an apartment there for the family.

Camille Claudel soon left the Parisian sculpting school to work again with Boucher and to pursue a more independent, and unfortunately more costly, program of study. She used her ingenuity to come up with a way to supplement the limited funds her parents had to contribute to her studies. Claudel organized a group of students, made up primarily of young English women (including Jennie Lipscomb with whom she would remain fast friends), into a sort of cooperative: they shared the expenses for rent of her studio on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs in Montparnasse, and for tutors' as well as models' fees. This period marks the beginning of Claudel's exploration of portraiture. Her earliest extant works date from this interval and include a bronze bust of her brother, finished in 1881. The next year, she completed a terra cotta head entitled La Vieille Hélène. These two works demonstrate the range of Claudel's vision from the idealized portrait of her brother to the highly naturalistic head of the family servant. Meanwhile, Boucher's talents garnered him the Prix de Rome, and he left Paris for Italy in 1883. At his urging, Auguste Rodin took over as tutor to Camille and her "school."

The association between Rodin and Claudel—first as mentor-pupil, then masterartist and assistant, then collaborators and lovers—coincides with the production of some of Rodin's greatest achievements. For Camille, however, the time was not without difficulties. The discovery of her liaison with Rodin did little to improve Claudel's relations with her family. Although she still had her father's support, the gap between Claudel and the other members of her family widened. Her successes in her early exhibitions somewhat mollified the family, and they were happier when she moved out of Rodin's studio and into a new one of her own. She traveled to England more than once during this period to see her friend Jennie Lipscomb and exhibited with her at Nottingham in 1886. L'Islette, a château near Azay-le-Rideau in the Loire valley, became a favorite hideaway where Claudel would stay alone or with Rodin as a break from city life. She attempted to steer a difficult course, one that created the fewest tensions with her family and that would allow her to balance her career as an artist with the demands of Rodin, who frequently asked her to model for him or to assist him in his work.

The relationship between Rodin and Claudel is reflected differently in their works. It is perhaps easier to see Rodin's influence on her style than Claudel's on his. Her Bust of Rodin, a bronze exhibited at the Salon of 1892, earned praise, most notably from Rodin who judged it to be "the finest sculptured head since Donatello." It also resembles most closely Rodin's own techniques. However, La Vieille Hélène, completed before Claudel ever met Rodin, was not dissimilar in style. Thus, while Rodin's influence is present, it is not incongruent with Camille's own stylistic choices. Rodin, on the other hand, executed a number of portraits and busts of Claudel. Her

image appeared in some of his most striking works, among them Thought and The Dawn. It is easy to understand why Camille has often been called Rodin's muse: she inspired many of his works while they were together and continued to do so even after their separation.

Claudel's own sculptures often seem to be symbolic representations of moments in her life, what Paul called the "confessional" aspects of her works. Sakuntala, which received honorable mention at the Salon of 1888, draws its inspiration from Hindu mythology. It is the name of a hermit maiden who secretly bears a child. According to some sources, Claudel gave birth to two children with Rodin; in contrast, Paul Claudel refers in his correspondence to an abortion. Whatever the truth is, it seems certain that this sculpture parallels in some sense Camille's experiences. The figures in the sculpture hover between naturalism and idealism and thus differ from the majority of pairs of lovers that Rodin sculpted (for example, his most famous couple in The Kiss).

Claudel then fashioned a new version of realism in sculpture that portrays the mythic. The Waltz, exhibited in 1893 and generally considered her masterpiece, depicts another couple, moving in complete harmony to the strains of some far-away music. A cast of the statuette was in the collection of the composer Claude Debussy. In this piece, Camille seems to have transcribed the music of Debussy who once played for her and, in so doing, created a piece unlike any other.

Claudel produced two versions of The Age of Maturity: the first (c. 1894) depicts a man caught between two women, one older, one younger, each holding on to him. In the second version (1898), the younger woman no longer holds onto the man. Claudel was the younger woman; Rose Beuret , Rodin's older mistress, was the older woman; the figure in the middle was Rodin. The works are noteworthy not only for their biographical content but for their stylistic differences. The earlier of the two is smaller and much closer in style to Rodin. The second version changes the proportions and displays the gap between figures, which appears frequently in Claudel's work. The unusual composition makes it all the more remarkable.

Clotho is one of Claudel's most enigmatic pieces: a skeletal old woman tangled in the fateful threads she spins. The vacant stare on Clotho's face renders the work all the more disturbing. The sculpture again recalls Donatello, yet the tree-like braids of Clotho's hair display the ornamental quality of the nascent Art Nouveau style.

From the period before Claudel's last major show in 1908 at the gallery of her longtime supporter Eugène Blot to her commitment by her brother Paul to an insane asylum in 1913, it becomes extremely difficult to sort out what happened in her life. Camille had become a recluse in her studio on the Ile-Saint-Louis. Although she continued to exhibit, these exhibits did nothing to change her temperament. The Age of Maturity, a marble Sakuntala, Perseus and the Gorgon, The Gossips, The Wave, and Deep Thought were all shown from 1902 to 1908. Despite the fact that these works did not receive unanimous praise from her contemporaries, each marks a significant part of her output. The final version of the Age of Maturity reaffirms Claudel's style of sculpture as a play of void and weight while Sakuntala demonstrated again her skill in marble. Of the new works, in Perseus and the Gorgon Claudel achieved her ambition of creating a monumental group while retaining the same enigmatic quality as the smaller-scale Clotho. The Gossips, The Wave, and Deep Thought or Woman Kneeling before a Hearth all are examples of Claudel's mastery of the small scale piece and are highly successful juxtapositions of bronze and onyx or marble. Deep Thought brings Claudel closest to the decorative arts tradition that dominated the Art Nouveau movement. This period saw the completion of many long-term projects and the beginnings of some experimentation. Paradoxically, her production began to decline. As Camille began to recycle images and figures in new groupings, it seemed as if her creative talents were on the wane. Finally, in 1906, she began to destroy the clay, plaster, and wax models of her works after they were cast.

Things might well have continued outside of an asylum were it not for the death of her father in 1913. Within a week, her brother was able to get an order signed, committing Camille to a public insane asylum just outside Paris. With the onset of World War I and the impending threat to the safety of Paris, Claudel was transferred to another public asylum in Montdevergues, in southern France, just outside Avignon. It was there that she spent the remaining three decades of her life, virtually cut-off from all family and friends. Neither her mother nor her sister ever came to visit. On the contrary, her mother refused to let her be released into her family's custody. Lacking any real psychiatric evidence, we can surmise that Claudel suffered from a persecution complex and may well have been manic-depressive. The mood swings she manifested would seem to bear out the latter conclusion, and her repeated accusations against Rodin's treachery concerning her career (which, in fact, was quite untrue) support the former. The question remains, however, as to whether Camille Claudel was truly "insane" as her brother asserted. Jennie Lipscomb maintained that Claudel was sane, and she as well as others, including some members of Claudel's family, saw the confinement as a convenient way for Paul and his mother to push aside someone who was a liability, both financially and socially. In a letter to Blot, Claudel wrote of her confinement: "I live in a world that is so curious, so strange. Of the dream which was my life, this is a nightmare." The nightmare ended on October 19, 1943, when Camille Claudel died at age 79.

Eight years after her death and over four decades after her last exhibition, the Musée Rodin in Paris organized a special exhibition of Camille Claudel's sculptures. Paul Claudel's introduction to the catalogue, "My Sister Camille," was a paean to his sister's genius and the eulogy she never received at her death. In 1951, Camille Claudel had once again begun to receive the recognition she had so long been denied.