Student or Colleague? The Minimizing of Camille Claudel

As I continue to peck around the edges of the fascinating but perhaps too well-known story of Camille Claudel, a theme emerges that even today is familiar to women artists and writers who chose to study with better-known mentors: is it possible for us to be perceived as original when the shadow of this inevitably more esteemed man falls so heavily across us?

This is the reason I’ve never had a mentor, even now when women mentors, finally, abound. I am too aware of the anxiety of influence.

Because Claudel was only twenty when she began to work with the much-older and much-admired sculptor, August Rodin, it was inevitable that she would be viewed not only as his student but as his imitator, and her twisted statues of lovers grappling with each other are so similar to Rodin’s work that the question remains haunting. Not until after they separated and she created the smaller, more intimate works, like Les Causeuses—the Gossips—would she show her true originality, and because these are small works devoted to women figures, they did not receive the acclaim given to Rodin’s monumental sculptures like The Burghers of Calais. Across the entire field of visual art, and across all countries, women were known for small works, often domestic, until thirty years ago when the Women’s Movement released us to create on a large and demanding scale.

Since I’ve always believed, although without much proof—maybe just the proud curl of her lip in an early portrait—that Claudel was an original and a genius, I was reassured to find the following in the superb Camile Claudel: A Life by Odile Ayral-Clause (Henry Abrams, 2002), first from Rodin himself: “I showed her where to find gold, but the gold she finds is truly hers.”

Next, from Mathias Morhardt, her first biographer, who presents her as Rodin’s equal: “Right away, he became not a teacher but a brother to the young artist who was later to become his devoted and intelligent young associate.” And now that she has her own museum in her childhood home in a village 100 kilometers from Paris—but it contains only half of her voluminous output—perhaps the question has been laid to rest.

But not yet quite, for me. The tragedy of her life is still a looming possibility for women with passion and talent, especially if they remain to some degree dependent on their birth family. I am especially bothered by the hold her brother, Paul Claudel, a well-known poet, had on her; he made the decision to have her committed to a madhouse where she spent the last thirty years of her life, yet she seemed to remain devoted to him and hopeful he would release her, even twining wildflowers in her hair when he visited her. I find the 1951 photo of him clutching a bust of his destroyed sister cringe-making and find a vindictive satisfaction in the fact that as she finally becomes well known, he is almost forgotten.

But in the end only the work matters, and the work remains.

In Women, Art Camille Claudel