L’Age mur (1898), Camille Claudel
I’ve been fascinated by Camille Claudel ever since I visited the Hôtel Biron, now the Rodin Museum, in Paris, where until recently her work was not represented or honored. To me, her story represents in heartbreaking terms the problems faced by talented women who depend on recognition by a better-known man. Claudel, who was Rodin’s student, then his lover, and then the insistent mistress whom he cast off and ruined, suffering decades of imprisonment in a French mental hospital and never sculpting again, is a warning. And her statue, pictured above, “L’Age mur”—maturity—illustrates another dangerous mistake: that our physical beauty when young is a sort of coin of the realm that will buy us love and artistic acceptance. It didn’t work that way for Claudel, shown in this sculpture naked on her knees, stretching out her hands in a desperate plea to hold onto Rodin, who is turning away.
I’m planning to base a novel around her story and the story of the old house in Paris that housed Rodin, Rilke, Martha Graham, Nijinsky and many other fascinating characters in the early decades of the twentieth century. Claudel must have visited Rodin there although she never lived with him, and now there is a room devoted to her work. So, sixty years after her death, she is beginning to be known.
Thinking about a big new project is always a little painful. Can I do it? Will I do it? That pain is part of the motivation for getting started, and yet it can also induce anxiety and haste, neither of which is useful in a writing project.
That pain was somewhat reduced when I visited the Turner Carroll Gallery here in Santa Fe and came upon Claudel’s beautiful nude kneeling woman, stretching out her hands to Rodin who was essential to her life and to her career; through his greater renown, he’d been able to introduce her to galleries and buyers, no longer interested when he cast her off.
L’Implorante, Camille Claudel. Turner Carroll Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The gallery owner explained that this statue was the original, not a later cast, acquired through a serendipitous meeting at a Christian Dior show with Claudel’s great-great nephew. It is going next to one of the big museums where I hope it will not be stored in the basement. After all, Rodin’s statues are displayed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and surely this kneeling woman should be there, too.
“You can touch it,” the gallery owner told me, and the glowing black surface seemed to call for touch. As I ran my fingers across her smooth back, I felt a decrease in my anxiety about my next project. Whatever happens, Claudel is now known and respected as the arc of time bends towards the truth.
Oh Ms Bingham, I am so glad to hear of your plan to write about her. I have been inspired by her since first visiting the Rodin museum a decade ago. Sadly, her story is one that repeats itself. The glass ceiling entrapping and torturing women artists.
This paste from the net may be of interest to some:
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Juliet Capulet Statue (Munich, Germany)—This bronze statue represents Juliet, the heroine from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. It was a gift from the city of Verona in 1974. It is believed that touching her right breast brings good luck. People sure do like to touch this voluptuous breast as it is noticeably bronze colored unlike the rest of the statue which is still oxidized.//
I’m glad to see another of your comments on Camille Claudel. And Patricia Watkins’ comment was absolutely, tragically true…the results of misogyny worldwide.
From the time I first heard (in the Bay Area feminist community) that there had always been women artists and was struck as by lightning, a passion for what women had/have done in any field, but especially the arts and sports (physical things…girls and women reclaiming their own talents and bodies) making my heart and mind leap when I hear of such things. But the cruel side of misogyny that makes tragedies of female lives is there, too, and Camille C.’s life matches that of so so many women in the arts.
As you read and talk with others and look at CC’s art and life, I hope, Sallie, that you’ll keep a close watch on the patriarchal assumptions that surround us, and how you (we all) interpret CC’s situation while she was young and in her family (a dreadful lot) as well as when she broke away, driven, I think, by her strong talent, to live as an Artist. I noticed that you wrote in today’s comment that CC was Rodin’s student. It’s been so long ago that I can’t tell you where I read it, but one feminist art historian wrote that, as a child, CC had been making small sculptures from the muddy earth in the area where she (and her brother Paul C.) used to play. There remained a portrait sculpture of an older woman who was a servant of some kind, I think, and it’s style was that for which Rodin is famous. This was long before CC ever heard of or met Rodin. So, I want to say, Watch out for the common attitude that CC had to have been Rodin’s student. You know, the old disrespectful saw of “She had to have been taught to do that by a man”. I offer this not in an irritated, critical way, but in a way of sharing insights about the endless parade of unconsciously absorbed attitudes which the patriarchy fills everyone with, and which we feminists try never-endingly (sigh, it is tiring) to wash out of our own minds. The point being that , judging from what CC did before she went to Paris to be an artist, her own style was already in place within her, emerging from her and, while she may well have “learned” more about developing her style with (I won’t say “from”) Rodin, she and he were two artists whose styles were similar. The criminal refusal of her mother and father (and, yes, brother Paul) to let CC step outside the demanded female gender role (that Iron Maiden) because she (and any girl who did that) was a threat to the social status climbing that her parents were obsessed with, left CC alone in Paris without friends, money, teachers, a roof over her head, food in her mouth. Being an Artist, of course she would have sought out the Paris artists who were prominent, but I think it’s incorrect to tell her story from the attitude that she needed an art teacher and a male lover. She may well have been vulnerable to “falling in love” with Rodin, given his self-serving personality and his predation on any female who did travel to Paris to study with him. The other women whom he tried the sex thing with and, as I recall, the one who left Paris, mad that he behaved that way instead of behaving as a teacher, all left comments in some form about him. It sounds to me like picturing CC as the one who threw herself at him and remained dependent on his “loving” and teaching her is just more of continuing the patriarchal mind set about females and males. Did she did pressure him to let her have the use of the unheated, bad-shape house she lived in for some time, and for money for clay and food, and for doing what men sometimes did for each other–including her among the men he hung out with, and so give her a leg up re: selling her work? He did not help her advance through contacts and selling in galleries or to patrons as far as I have read. With no contacts, it would seem that she might well have pressured him in those ways, especially since their way of making art was so close. Not identical, but close in style. Her choice of subject was very different than his. Her Les Causeurs (The Gossips) is chilling, just like the “begging” poses which you mentioned.
Soooo, like so many, she took a great pounding from all sides in order to produce her art, and Rodin was hardly a beneficent mentor or booster of her work, her talent. From what little I’ve read about him, he wasn’t much liked by others and was blatantly selfish with CC and his wife. She surely must have looked like a wild child to the conformers when it came to openly supporting or praising her. She seemed to care zilch about the social graces, a little girl who refused to be “trained”.
Please do write about Camille Claudel. And the thousands of other women who somehow drove their way on to a professional artistic life. Please do add to what is known about them.