Camille Claudel

For more information on Camille-Rosalie Claudel, visit Britannica.com.

(b F?re-en-Tardenois, Aisne, 8 Dec 1864; d Villeneuve-l?s-Avignon, Gard, 19 Oct 1943). Sculptor, painter and draughtswoman. Her nascent interest in sculpture was fostered at Nogent-sur-Seine by a local sculptor, later highly successful, Alfred Boucher. She came to share with Boucher a taste for symbolic figure groups with philosophical messages. Her earliest extant works were executed after 1881, when Mme Claudel and her children moved to Paris, and Camille started to attend the Acad?mie Colarossi. These were portrait heads and busts of the family and friends, such as Paul Claudel Aged 13 (bronze, 1881; Ch?teauroux, Mus. Bertrand).

Part of the Claudel family

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943) was the muse, pupil, and lover of Auguste Rodin, as well as a major artist in her own right. She is perhaps better known for her tempestuous relationship with Rodin than for her moving works of art, many of which can be found at the Musee Rodin in Paris.

After her breakup with Rodin in 1898, Claudel composed some of her best sculptures, yet she grew increasingly reclusive and paranoid. In 1913 her family committed her to an insane asylum, where she remained for the last 30 years of her life.

Camille Claudel was the eldest of three children born to Louis-Prosper Claudel, a civil servant, and Louise-Athenaise Cervaux Claudel, a middle class country housewife on December 8, 1864 in Fere-en-Tardenois, France. The family moved occasionally as Louis-Prosper's work demanded, living for a time in the small town of Bar-le-Duc, where Claudel first attended school at the age of six. However, the family returned often to its ancestral home in the small village of Villeneuve in the Champagne region of France. Though not wealthy, the Claudels were well established in the community and lived comfortably.

At an early age Claudel took an interest in modeling with clay, finding in the art of sculpture an outlet for her active imagination. A willful and precocious child, she quickly adopted the identity of an artist and never doubted her talents. Before she had even taken lessons in sculpture, Claudel coaxed every family member - her father, mother, brother, and sister - into posing for clay-modeled portraits.

While Claudel's father encouraged his daughter in her pursuit of art, the young sculptor's mother never accepted what she regarded as her daughter's unconventional, proud, and wayward disposition. Of her three children, Louise-Athenaise favored Claudel the least, preferring her obedient and traditional younger sister, Louise. In a household filled with discord, Claudel turned for affection to her father, and especially to her brother, Paul, to whom she grew very close.

Like his sister, Paul had an artist's temperament. He crafted a talent for writing that would make him one of France's leading poets and playwrights. The two artists shared a deep love and understanding, and from an early age they motivated and inspired each other in their creative endeavors. The unusually intense bond between the sculptor-sister and poet-brother would later become a subject of fascination and curiosity among cultural historians.

By the age of 15 Claudel had completed her first significant sculptures, which included busts of Napoleon and Bismarck (who defeated Napoleon III) as well as a group of figures depicting the tale of David and Goliath. (None of these works survives.) At this time she and her family were living in Nogent-sur-Seine, a Champagne town about 60 miles from Paris. The location was an auspicious one for Claudel, as the town was home to two respected nineteenth-century sculptors, Alfred Boucher and Paul Dubois. Boucher, asked by Claudel's father to give his opinion on the young girl's work, expressed astonishment at her talent and encouraged Louis-Prosper to send his daughter to study at an art academy.

At that time only men could attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the prestigious academy in Paris, but some private art schools admitted female students. In 1881, before she turned 17, Claudel entered the Colarossi Academy in Paris, sharing a studio with three female British art students. One of these, Jessie Lipscomb, would remain a lifelong friend.

The first sculptures Claudel completed at the school are among the earliest surviving examples of her formative works. These include a bronze bust of her brother at age 13 (made in 1881) and La Vieille Helene (1882), modeled after the family housekeeper. The latter piece would become her first exhibited work in 1885.

Became Rodin's Assistant

Boucher took an interest in his young protege's progress, and every Friday he would visit the studio to give advice to Claudel and Lipscomb. When Boucher relocated to Italy in 1883, he arranged for another sculptor to continue these weekly tutorials. His replacement was Auguste Rodin, then 43 years old and considered perhaps the foremost sculptor of his day, though not yet celebrated as a master.

The first meeting between Claudel and Rodin is a subject of much speculation, although little is known of the fateful day. At 19, when she met Rodin, Claudel was strikingly beautiful, with large blue eyes and chestnut hair. The young sculptor displayed a passion for her art that Rodin doubtless found disarming as well. In 1884 he completed his first bust of the woman who would become his collaborator and muse.

The following year, Claudel and Lipscomb had become habitues in Rodin's studio, hired as assistants to help complete his masterpiece, The Gates of Hell. Rodin had begun this large-scale work in 1880, and it would continue to consume him until 1917. Claudel became Rodin's most active assistant, posing as figures and helping to compose various elements of the sculpture. Many art historians believe that Claudel also sculpted the hands and feet of the Burghers of Calais, Rodin's monument to six citizens who gave their lives to save the French town of Calais in the fourteenth century.

Thus began a long period of intense relations between Claudel and Rodin, who had become lovers as well as partners in artistic creation. Art historians continue to disagree about which of the two sculptors most influenced the other. Many contend that their influence was mutual. What is clear is that Rodin produced much more artwork than Claudel during this time, and that she helped him do so. All of Rodin's assistants (and there were many) helped build the legendary sculptor's reputation as a prolific artist of almost superhuman productivity - especially during the late 1880s and early 1890s, when Claudel was at his side.

The love affair and creative collaboration between Claudel and Rodin would last nearly 15 years. Letters from Rodin in the mid-1880s reveal just how smitten he was with the female sculptor who was 24 years his junior. In 1886 he followed Claudel to England, where she was visiting Lipscomb. Accounts of this early stage in their relationship depict Claudel as elusive and perhaps teasingly coy with the famous sculptor. Rodin, meanwhile, held a longstanding reputation as a womanizer, a sculptor specializing in the female nude who required fresh models regularly. He also remained involved with one woman whose presence preceded - and long outlasted - that of Claudel. This was Rose Beuret, a seamstress whom Rodin had met in the mid-1860s as well as the mother of his son, Auguste.

A Love Triangle

As relations intensified between Rodin and Claudel, Beuret naturally became a subject of contention between the lovers. Claudel repeatedly asked Rodin to choose between them, but he refused, desiring to keep both women in his life. Beuret, who lived with the sculptor, kept his house, and raised his child, seemed willing to accept her lover's infidelities and his lack of interest in marriage. In most circles, Beuret was known as Madame Rodin, despite their unmarried status. Rodin's unwillingness to leave Beuret would ultimately drive Claudel away. Some believe it also drove her mad.

In 1888 Claudel moved out of her parents' house and rented a small apartment in Paris. Shortly after, Rodin purchased a house nearby known as La Folie-Neufbourg. Here the lovers were said to have occasionally lived together, while Beuret remained at Rodin's primary residence. During this time, Rodin sculpted several portraits of Claudel, and Claudel sculpted her Bust of Rodin (1892), the artist's favorite portrait of himself. Claudel also began working on her minor masterpiece The Waltz (begun 1891), which depicts a couple entwined in a dance.

While Rodin's infidelities are well-documented, less is known of affairs Claudel may have had with other men. Some historians believe she had a brief romance with the composer Claude Debussy in or around 1890. Whatever passion may have existed between them was over by early 1891, however, when they ceased seeing each other. Debussy was said to have kept a small cast of The Waltz on his piano until his death.

Matured as an Artist

In 1893 Claudel exhibited two sculptures at the Paris Salon: The Waltz and Clotho, a moving depiction of one of the Fates from Greek mythology. Claudel depicts Clotho as an elderly woman with a hauntingly wasted body, tangled in the threads of destiny she must weave. Both pieces were received well by critics, and it seemed that Claudel, about to turn 30, was entering her peak as an artist.

While Claudel's work flourished in the 1890s, her relationship with Rodin progressively deteriorated. She did not want to share Rodin with Beuret, but she was not content, either, merely to be the muse of her famous lover; she wanted a successful career of her own. The break between the lovers took years, but by 1889 the relationship was over. Claudel would not let Rodin enter her studio, though she is said to have often hidden in the bushes near the artist's house to watch him return home at night.

Immediately following the breakup, Claudel was perhaps her most productive, completing some of her most original and mature works, including L'Age Mur (1898), an autobiographical sculpture depicting a love triangle, and La Vague (1900), with three female figures bathing under an enormous wave. The latter work was indicative of a new style for Claudel, who now used onyx, a rare material, and based her compositions on an eloquent play of curves. She composed large works as well as sculptures of a more intimate scale, making quick sketches of people in the streets of Paris and returning home to sculpt them. Unfortunately, these small figures do not survive; she destroyed them all.

Descended into Madness

In the early years of the twentieth century, Claudel had begun a pattern of working obsessively for months, and then destroying her creations. She had become reclusive, losing touch with the world, taking in stray cats, and letting her apartment fall into a state of filthy disrepair. She struggled with poverty, and turned down social invitations with the excuse that she had nothing to wear. Increasingly, she grew paranoid of Rodin, imagining that he was plotting against her.

Claudel's family became aware of her circumstances and her apparent descent into madness. Upon his return to France in 1909 after four years of diplomatic service, Paul Claudel found his sister appallingly changed. In his journal (quoted in the Smithsonian) he described her as "insane, enormous, with a soiled face, speaking incessantly in a monotonous metallic voice."

For a few more years Claudel lived in her disheveled studio, with her shutters closed to the light and neighbors warning their children not to speak to her. Then, on March 5, 1913, three days after the death of their father, Louis-Prosper, Paul arranged for his sister's internment at a mental asylum in Ville-Evrard, near Paris. Five days later two orderlies broke into Claudel's apartment and took her to the asylum in an ambulance. She was 39 years old.

For the remaining 30 years of her life, Claudel languished in an insane asylum, transferring once to a facility in Montdevergues, near Avignon. Her life as a sculptor was over, although she wrote letters begging her brother and mother to release her and let her return to the artist's life. When Claudel's doctors tried to interest her in sculpting and presented her with clay, she angrily rejected it. Diagnosed as suffering from a persecution complex, she remained deeply paranoid of Rodin, and blamed him for her troubles.

Whether or not Claudel was truly insane and needed to stay in an asylum remains unclear. She wrote lucid letters to her family and friends, and even her doctors recommended that she be released on at least two occasions. But her brother was often abroad, and her mother would not allow her release, claiming that she was too old to care for her daughter.

"I live in a world that is so curious, so strange," Claudel wrote in a letter to a friend in 1935. "Of the dream which was my life, this is the nightmare." She died eight years later, on October 19, 1943 in Montdevergues, France.

Books

Paris, Reine-Marie, Camille: The Life of Camille Claudel, Rodin's Muse and Mistress, Seaver Books, 1988.

Schmoll Eisenwerth, J. A., Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, Prestel-Verlag, 1994.

Periodicals

Smithsonian, September 1985.

Online

"Artist Profile: Camille Claudel," http://www.nmwa.org/legacy/bios/bclaudel/htm (October 24, 2001).

"Camille Claudel," http://www.musee-rodin.fr/claud-e.htm(November 1, 2001).

This article is about the artist. For the 1988 film, see Camille Claudel (film).

For the musical, see Camille Claudel (musical).

Camille Claudel in 1884.

Camille Claudel (8 December 1864 – 19 October 1943) was a French sculptor and graphic artist. She was the older sister of the French poet and diplomat, Paul Claudel.

Contents 1 Early years 2 Creative period 3 Illness 3.1 Confinement 4 Legacy 5 Notes 6 Bibliography 7 External links

Early years

Camille Claudel was born in Fère-en-Tardenois, Aisne, in northern France, the second child of a family of farmers and gentry. Her father, Louis Prosper, dealt in mortgages and bank transactions. Her mother, the former Louise Athanaïse Cécile Cerveaux, came from a Champagne family of Catholic farmers and priests. The family moved to Villeneuve-sur-Fère while Camille was still a baby. Her younger brother Paul Claudel was born there in 1868. Subsequently they moved to Bar-le-Duc (1870), Nogent-sur-Seine (1876), and Wassy-sur-Blaise (1879), although they continued to spend summers in Villeneuve-sur-Fère, and the stark landscape of that region made a deep impression on the children. Camille moved with her mother, brother and younger sister to the Montparnasse area of Paris in 1881, her father having to remain behind, working to support them.

Creative period

Fascinated with stone and soil as a child, as a young woman she studied at the Académie Colarossi with sculptor Alfred Boucher. (At the time, the École des Beaux-Arts barred women from enrolling to study.) In 1882, Claudel rented a workshop with other young women, mostly English, including Jessie Lipscomb. In 1883, she met Auguste Rodin, who taught sculpture to Claudel and her friends.

Around 1884, she started working in Rodin's workshop. Claudel became a source of inspiration, his model, his confidante and lover. She never lived with Rodin, who was reluctant to end his 20-year relationship with Rose Beuret. Knowledge of the affair agitated her family, especially her mother, who never completely agreed with Claudel's involvement in the arts. As a consequence, she left the family house. In 1892, after an unwanted abortion, Claudel ended the intimate aspect of her relationship with Rodin, although they saw one another regularly until 1898.

Beginning in 1903, she exhibited her works at the Salon des Artistes français or at the Salon d'Automne.

It would be a mistake to assume that Claudel's reputation has survived simply because of her once notorious association with Rodin. The novelist and art critic Octave Mirbeau described her as "A revolt against nature: a woman genius". Her early work is similar to Rodin's in spirit, but shows an imagination and lyricism quite her own, particularly in the famous Bronze Waltz (1893). The Mature Age (1900) whilst interpreted by her brother as a powerful allegory of her break with Rodin, with one figure The Implorer that was produced as an edition of its own, has also been interpreted in a less purely autobiographical mode as an even more powerful representation of change and purpose in the human condition^[1]

Her onyx and bronze small-scale Wave (1897) was a conscious break in style with her Rodin period, with a decorative quality quite different from the "heroic" feeling of her earlier work.

In the early years of the 20th Century, Claudel had patrons, dealers, and some commercial success.

Composer Claude Debussy has also been romantically linked to Claudel.

Illness

After 1905 Claudel appeared to be mentally deranged. She destroyed many of her statues, disappeared for long periods of time and exhibited signs of paranoia. She accused Rodin of stealing her ideas and of leading a conspiracy to kill her. After the wedding of her brother (who supported her until then) in 1906 and his return to China, she lived secluded in her workshop.

Confinement

Her father, who approved of her career choice, tried to help her and supported her financially. When he died on 2 March 1913, Claudel was not informed of his death. On 10 March 1913 at the initiative of her brother, she was admitted to the psychiatric hospital of Ville-Évrard in Neuilly-sur-Marne. The form read that she had been "voluntarily" committed, although her admission was signed by a doctor and her brother. There are records to show that while she did have mental outbursts, she was clear-headed while working on her art. Doctors tried to convince the family that she need not be in the institution, but still they kept her there^{[citation needed]}.

In 1914, to be safe from advancing German troops, the patients at Ville-Évrard were at first relocated to Enghien. On 7 September 1914 Camille was transferred with a number of other women, to the Montdevergues Asylum, at Montfavet, six kilometres from Avignon. Her certificate of admittance to Montdevergues was signed on 22 September 1914; it reported that she suffered "from a systematic persecution delirium mostly based upon false interpretations and imagination".

For a while, the press accused her family of committing a sculptor of genius. Her mother forbade her to receive mail from anyone other than her brother. The hospital staff regularly proposed to her family that Claudel be released, but her mother adamantly refused each time. On 1 June 1920, physician Dr. Brunet sent a letter advising her mother to try to reintegrate her daughter into the family environment. Nothing came of this.

Paul Claudel in 1927.

Paul Claudel visited her every few years, though he referred to her in the past tense. In 1929 Jessie Lipscomb visited her and insisted "it was not true" that Claudel was insane. Rodin's friend, Mathias Morhardt, insisted that Paul was a "simpleton" who had "shut away" his sister of genius.

Camille Claudel died on 19 October 1943, after having lived 30 years in the asylum at Montfavet (known then as the Asile de Montdevergues, now the modern psychiatric hospital Centre Hospitalier de Montfavet), and without a visit from her mother or sister (Her mother died on 20 June 1929). Her body was interred in the cemetery of Monfavet.

Legacy

Though she destroyed much of her art work, about 90 statues, sketches and drawings survive.

In 1899, Henrik Ibsen based his last play, When We Dead Awaken on Rodin's relationship with Claudel.

In 1951, Paul Claudel brother organized an exhibition at the Musée Rodin, which continues to display her sculptures. A large exhibition of her works was organized in 1984. In 2005 a large art display featuring the works of Rodin and Claudel was exhibited in Quebec City, Canada and Detroit, Michigan, USA. In 2008, the Musée Rodin organized a retrospective exhibition including more than 80 of her works.

The publication of several biographies in the 1980s sparked a resurgence of interest in her work.

Camille Claudel (1988) was a dramatization of her life based largely on historical records. Co-produced by Isabelle Adjani, starring herself as Claudel and Gérard Depardieu as Rodin, the film was nominated for two Academy Awards in 1989.

In 2003, plans were announced to turn the Claudel family home at Nogent-sur-Seine into a museum, which was negotiating to buy works from the Claudel family. These include 70 pieces by Camille Claudel, including a bust of Rodin.

Seattle playwright S.P. Miskowski's La Valse (2000) is a well-researched look at Claudel's life.^[2]

Camille Claudel was produced as a musical by Goodspeed Musicals at The Norma Terris Theatre in Chester, Connecticut in 2003.^[3]

In 2005, Sotheby's sold a second edition La Valse (1905, Blot, number 21) for $932,500.^[4] In a 2009 Paris auction, Claudel's Le Dieu Envolé (1894/1998, Valsuani, signed and numbered 6/8) has a high estimate of $180,000,^[5] while a comparable Rodin sculpture, L'eternelle Idole (1889/1930, Rudier, signed) has a high estimate of $75,000.^[6]

Notes

1. ^ The different scales, the different modes of plasticity, and gender-representation, of the three figures which make up this important group, enable a more universal thematic and metaphoric stylistics related to the ages of existence, childhood, maturity, and the perspective of the transcendent (v. Angela Ryan, "Camille Claudel: the Artist as Heroinic Rhetorician." Irish Women's Studies Review vol 8: Making a Difference: Women and the Creative Arts. (December 2002): 13-28).
2. ^ http://www.seattlepi.com/theater/valseq.shtml
3. ^ [1] Playbill News
4. ^ http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?lot_id=159563476
5. ^ http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?lot_id=159557282
6. ^ http://www.sothebys.com/app/live/lot/LotDetail.jsp?lot_id=159567009

Bibliography

Ayral-Clause, Odile. Camille Claudel: A Life. New York: Abrams, 2002.

Lenormand-Romain, Antoinette et al. Camille Claudel and Rodin: Fateful Encounter. New York: Gingko Press, 2005.

Rivière, Anne & Bruno Gaudichon. Camille Claudel: Catalogue raisonné. Paris: Adam Biro, 2001.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Camille Claudel

• Review of 2008 Claudel exhibition at Musee Rodin, Paris
• Camille Claudel and Rodin: Fateful Encounter at Detroit Institute of Arts 2005
• Claudel pages, including biography and timeline, at rodin-web.org
• Camille Claudel at artcyclopedia.com
• Camille Claudel: a Life of Struggle
• Camille Claudel, Of Dreams and Nightmares
• An Eye on Art: L'Age Mûr
• Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: Camille Claudel
• CBC interview for the 2005 exhibition in Quebec

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