Camille Claudel

Camille Claudel the French sculptor and graphic artist (1864-1943), whose impassioned, sensuous figures place her among the most gifted sculptors of the late nineteenth century. Her career was bound up with that of Auguste Rodin, and her later life was darkened by mental illness and institutional confinement that has made her a symbol of the neglected woman artist.

Youth and Early Vocation

Camille Claudel was born at Fere-en-Tardenois in northern France in 1864 and grew up in a bourgeois family that moved several times, settling at Nogent-sur-Seine and later at Villeneuve-sur-Fere. She showed from childhood a strong inclination to model figures from clay, and her father, who recognised her gift, gave her encouragement at a time when sculpture was almost closed to women.

The family moved to Paris in the early 1880s so that she could study, and she enrolled at the Academie Colarossi, since the Ecole des Beaux-Arts did not then admit women. She shared a studio with other young women artists and worked under Alfred Boucher, a sculptor who saw her talent and introduced her to the wider world of Parisian art.

In 1883 Boucher asked Auguste Rodin, already becoming famous, to take over the instruction of the young women in his absence. Claudel joined Rodin's workshop, and the meeting was decisive for both their lives. She was about nineteen and he was more than twenty years older and at the height of his creative powers.

Partnership with Rodin

Claudel became Rodin's pupil, then his assistant and model, and finally his lover. She worked on major commissions in his studio and contributed to works such as the Gates of Hell and the monuments of the period, though her precise share in them remains debated. Their relationship, intense and troubled, lasted about a decade and profoundly affected the course of her art.

Rodin was drawn to her fire and her originality, and she learned from him a sensitivity to movement and surface, yet developed an idiom of her own. Where Rodin's forms could be monumental and public, hers tended to be intimate and psychologically charged, often expressing longing, surrender or sorrow in the twisting of bodies and the flow of hair and drapery.

The liaison could not be regularised, as Rodin would not abandon Rose Beuret, his companion of long standing. Claudel suffered from the ambiguity of her position, and in 1893 she broke with him, though the separation was neither complete nor final. The strain of the affair and of her dependent professional position marked her subsequent work and temperament.

Independent Work and Major Sculptures

After leaving Rodin, Claudel struggled to establish herself independently. She obtained some official commissions and exhibited in the Salon, but she lacked the connections and steady patronage that her former master enjoyed, and the suspicion that she was merely an imitator of Rodin dogged her reception.

Her finest works display a personal vision. The Waltz, made in several versions, shows a couple swept up in an embrace that is also a loss of balance, capturing the heady and precarious character of passion. The Age of Maturity is a poignant allegory of destiny, in which a figures turns away from a kneeling suppliant toward an old woman, widely read as a reflection on her abandonment by Rodin.

She worked in bronze, plaster and in the difficult medium of marble, and she also made smaller works and sketches of great delicacy. The Wave and Clotho are among the pieces in which the ornamental and the expressive are held in balance. Her craftsmanship was recognised by fellow artists even when public success eluded her.

Mental Illness and Confinement

From about 1905 Claudel's behaviour became increasingly disturbed. She destroyed works, suspected conspiracies against her, and lived in growing isolation and poverty. She accused Rodin of plotting to ruin her and of stealing her ideas, and she withdrew from the world that had made and then marginalised her.

In 1913, shortly after the death of her father, who had been her chief support, her family arranged for her to be committed to an asylum. She was first at Ville-Evrard and then at Montdevergues, near Avignon, where she remained for the rest of her life. She repeatedly asked to be released, and a number of physicians believed she could live outside an institution, but her mother and brother refused to bring her home.

She spent thirty years in confinement, receiving few visitors and producing almost no sculpture. She died at Montdevergues in 1943 and was buried in the asylum cemetery. The circumstances of her imprisonment have since been interpreted as an indictment of the treatment of women who defied the expectations of their class and gender.

Reassessment and Influence

For decades after her death Claudel was remembered chiefly as Rodin's model and mistress. From the 1980s, however, exhibitions and catalogues began to present her as an artist in her own right, and her major bronzes were cast and placed in prominent collections, including the museum at Nogent-sur-Seine dedicated to her work.

Her reputation now rests on the quality and emotional intensity of a relatively small surviving oeuvre. Critics admire her ability to convey inner states through posture and surface, and to combine lyricism with a sense of fragility. The Waltz and The Age of Maturity have become defining images of the art of the period.

Claudel has become a symbol of the woman artist destroyed by a world that could not accommodate her ambition, and her story has inspired films and novels. Her place in the history of sculpture is now secure, and the recovery of her work has reshaped the understanding of the age of Rodin.

See also

• Auguste Rodin
• The Waltz
• The Age of Maturity
• French sculpture