Camille Claudel’s ‘Revolt Against Nature’
In a new exhibition, the sculptor escapes the shadow of her mentor Rodin, and claims a place as one of the finest artists of her era.
In 1892, the French sculptor Camille Claudel applied to France’s Ministry of Fine Arts for a block of marble. As was customary, the ministry sent an inspector to decide whether her planned work was worth the state’s support. Her plaster model, showing two nude figures waltzing, was a “virtuoso performance,” the official wrote. Not even Auguste Rodin, Claudel’s mentor, could “have studied with more artistic finesse and consciousness the quivering life of muscles and skin.” But although the ministry commissioned equally sensual works from Rodin in that era, it refused to support one by a female artist. In Claudel’s composition, the “closeness of the sexual organs” went too far.
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Claudel spent months on a version that veiled the female figure. The resulting bronze, The Waltz, was a triumph—an ethereal work of romance, air, and sweeping movement. The composer Claude Debussy, a friend of Claudel’s, acquired a plaster version and kept it near him. The Waltz became her most celebrated work, produced in many different iterations, several of which are gathered in a new exhibit of Claudel’s work, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in October and will move on to the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, in April. But Claudel never did get the marble she had applied for.
Claudel bent every effort to make a name for herself, undeterred by the restrictive mores of her time. Though she won acclaim at the height of her brief career, her reputation faded in the decades after her death. Despite renewed interest in Claudel’s work in the 1980s, her tumultuous life story and Rodin’s role in it tended to deflect attention from her art, particularly in the United States. “Her best pieces,” H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson wrote in their canonical History of Art, “might pass for his.” But Claudel’s oeuvre, especially its sensitive and moving evocation of women’s interior lives, is not so easily dismissed. The new show presses the argument that Claudel ranks among the greatest French sculptors of the 19th century.
Gathering dozens of pieces in terra-cotta, plaster, bronze, and stone, the exhibit spurs reflection not just on Claudel’s singular talent, but on the extraordinary determination that her successes required. When Rodin pressured her to become his mistress, she demanded he support her career. When she became pregnant during their relationship, she had an abortion, not a safe or easy undertaking. In the years after their partnership ended, Claudel created some of her most compelling work.
Yet Claudel remained dependent—for patronage, for materials, and eventually for her freedom itself—on the men in her life. Prompted by her erratic behavior, Claudel’s family, led by her brother, Paul, committed her to an asylum at age 48. There she stayed, long after her doctors urged her release, until her death 30 years later, in 1943. This was a penance, her conservative-Catholic brother would write, for the abortion. She never sculpted again. The exhibition leaves us wondering what else she might have shown us had she been allowed to pursue her vision.
Claudel’s talent was already evident by the time she entered Rodin’s studio, around 1884. “Right away,” recalled Mathias Morhardt, a critic who closely followed her career, Rodin “became, not a teacher, but rather a brother of the young artist who was later to become his loyal and intelligent young collaborator.” Rodin consulted Claudel “about everything,” deliberating “each decision” with her and proceeding “only after they [were] in agreement.” Walking through the exhibit’s rooms, one can easily see why.
The show opens with some of Claudel’s earliest work—pieces Rodin may well have seen on their first meeting in 1882, when she was a 17-year-old art student and he was 41 and starting to enjoy commercial success. Here we encounter Young Roman, Claudel’s tender portrait of Paul, the brother who would become her jailer. Already showing her sense of aesthetic play, Claudel flattened her brother’s brow and broadened the planes of his cheeks to better imitate the Roman ideal, while maintaining the idiosyncratic details of his face—the slight twist to his bottom lip, his elongated earlobes, his abstracted gaze. To complete the classical illusion, she even painted the plaster version in the exhibit, a recent Art Institute acquisition, to mimic the patina of an ancient bronze found at sea, with algal blooms of green and yellow where it might have rested at the bottom of the Adriatic.
Though Young Roman and other works of this period show Claudel’s potential, her rise as an artist was hardly a given. Early feminist ideas had begun to circulate in cafés, lecture halls, and even the popular press. But many in France regarded ambition like Claudel’s with suspicion. To bureaucrats responsible for doling out ever-vital state support for sculpture, a woman in the male-dominated art was an interloper. The invitation to work in Rodin’s studio, then, was not just a learning opportunity. It was a lifeline that offered Claudel access to the expensive materials and large-scale commissions she needed in order to establish herself as an artist.
Her precarious position cannot have been far from Claudel’s mind when, not long after she started working for him, Rodin began to pursue her relentlessly. They soon became lovers, but Claudel seems to have set certain terms. In a document that survives among his papers, Rodin agreed to promote Claudel’s work among his influential friends, to pay for her to be professionally photographed, and to turn away his other students, “to avoid,” he wrote, any “risk of rival talents, though it’s unlikely one would encounter anyone so naturally gifted.” In return, she would let him visit her studio four times a month and live with him for certain parts of the year. They never married. Rodin would never make up his mind to sever ties with his other lover, Rose Beuret, with whom he shared a son. But the sculptors’ creative and romantic alliance held for about a decade.
The exhibit’s treatment of Claudel’s years in Rodin’s studio reveals at once the depth of their artistic collaboration and the emergence of Claudel’s vision. Though her style is sometimes dismissed as an imitation of his, the show’s curators, Emerson Bowyer and Anne-Lise Desmas, demonstrate convincingly that the borrowing and influence went in both directions. An eloquent bronze hand by Claudel evokes Rodin’s well-known preoccupation with that subject. It may even seem derivative—until one considers that Claudel fashioned so many of the hands and feet of Rodin’s sculptures that she complained those labors left her little time for her own work. Elsewhere, Claudel’s terra-cotta figure Young Girl With a Sheaf is shown alongside Rodin’s celebrated marble Galatea. The close resemblance between the two works confirms Rodin’s influence. But Claudel’s Girl is no copy; her sculpture preceded his.
At the same time, the artists’ styles diverged in important ways, and strikingly so in their depiction of women. Compare, for example, their crouching female nudes, so similar in composition and yet so different in final effect. Rodin’s Crouching Woman, paired in the exhibit with Claudel’s later work of the same name, is locked in an unlikely, bestial position. Her neck strains forward with her eyes closed, and her sharply bent knees are spread, thrusting her genitals toward the viewer. Rodin has perhaps captured an idea, but he has not shown us a person. One influential critic nicknamed it “the frog.”
Some art historians have made much of the fact that Claudel had Rodin’s as an example when she made her own Crouching Woman. But a glance at Claudel’s nude dispels any notion that it’s purely derivative. Claudel’s woman curls into herself. Her clasped hands cross her head, covering her face in a gesture of self-protection and self-effacement. The folds of fat in the belly, the arm resting on the knee, the hollow space between armpit and thigh—the realism of the rendering is startling, the pressure of flesh on flesh palpable. “It is impossible to convey the care that went into the sequence of these lines, the choice of these planes, the subtlety of these contours,” Morhardt wrote. “The arms, the back, the stomach, have a suppleness in which life shudders.”
Claudel’s bronze of the same sculpture—made after she and Rodin parted company—distills its power even further. Claudel sheared off the head and arms and one knee, leaving the feet planted on the ground to support the woman’s body, a choice that emphasizes the agonized curve of her back, with its perfectly articulated spine. The viewer may sympathize with the figure depicted in plaster, but she feels that she has been the figure portrayed in bronze. And one cannot help but think that this compelling final version drew on Claudel’s own experiences of anguished helplessness within a woman’s body.
Unfortunately, the otherwise comprehensive exhibit doesn’t include Clotho, another important example of how sharply Claudel’s vision diverged from Rodin’s. Rodin had earlier used the same elderly female model for She Who Was Once the Helmet Maker’s Beautiful Wife, a figure sitting demure and hunched, her head bowed under the viewer’s gaze. Rodin’s figure is an allegory of time, but also its victim. Claudel’s Clotho is time’s master.
One of the three Fates, Clotho spins the threads of men’s lives. The wool, its texture like ancient gnarled vines, sits heavy on her head; she lifts the tangled masses with her arm as she steps forward, revealing an expression of calm self-possession. To have crafted Clotho’s pose, Claudel would have had to imagine the intimate darkness under those weighty skeins of yarn. It was this ability to put herself in her subjects’ place, particularly when she depicted women, that gave modern sculpture some of its most provocative early monuments.
First exhibited alongside the sensual Waltz at the 1893 Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Clotho showcased Claudel’s creative range. Debussy, who so loved The Waltz, found Clotho unsettling. A critic described Clotho’s breasts “drooping like dead eyelids” and her legs made for “terrible, never-ending” strides that “mow down human lives.” The sculpture shows that Claudel did not shy away from exploring the female grotesque—that she could find power in grotesquerie. Coming after decades of graceful nymphs, stately ladies, and shapely Grecian goddesses, Clotho is exhilarating because of its utter indifference to the male gaze.
Claudel’s critical success at the 1893 Salon marked the start of a new chapter in her life. Her place in Rodin’s studio had connected her to a network of artists, journalists, and collectors, many of whom became her own enduring supporters, helping her place her sculptures in museums and win commissions and patrons. But by 1892, Claudel had grown resentful of Rodin, and she took steps to end their relationship. She moved into her own studio, determined to prove her independent merit as an artist.
Claudel’s serious study of a young girl, The Little Lady (in French, La Petite Châtelaine), is the first masterpiece of this period. Begun in 1892 and completed in marble in 1895, the bust portrays the taut, upward-looking gaze of a child asked to hold still for an important purpose. Some have suggested that The Little Lady is a kind of redemption piece, given the timing of its completion—after her abortion. We cannot know whether Claudel believed she needed redemption. What she did need, however, and what this work provided, was an opportunity to distinguish herself from Rodin.
Though Rodin would pose for photographs with a chisel in hand, he relied on assistants to translate his plaster visions into stone. Claudel could carve, and in successive versions of The Little Lady, she shows her virtuosity in marble—changing the hair in one and hollowing another so that light could illuminate the features from within. But The Little Lady is not just a technical marvel. Its respect for the reality of girlhood sets the piece apart from many portrayals of young girls in 19th-century sculpture. There is no trace here of the pubescent figure with noticeable nipples or of the decorative, soft-cheeked cherub.
The same distinctive perspective shines through in The Chatterboxes. Here we find something rare in European sculpture of this period: a depiction of platonic female intimacy, not as an excuse to display a breast or a hip for the onlooker, but as women actually experience it. Featured in the exhibit in both white marble and green marble onyx, The Chatterboxes shows a group of three women listening with rapt attention to a story told by a fourth. The space between the women’s bodies as they lean into one another recalls Claudel’s emotive use of interior space in other works—the gap between thigh and arms in the plaster Crouching Woman, the dark area under the Fate’s skeins in Clotho—to create a sense of inner life. In an 1893 letter to her brother sketching her initial idea for the composition, Claudel exclaimed, “You see, it is no longer anything like Rodin.”
Age of Maturity, the most ambitious of her projects during this era, provides the visual centerpiece of the exhibit. It shows in one sweep her skill at portraying the human body, creating the sensation of movement, and conveying emotion through small gestures. The three-figure composition portrays a young woman pleading on her knees as a man turns away and walks into an older woman’s embrace—an allegory of man leaving youth behind and entering old age. Scholars believe that Rodin, embarrassed by the composition’s obvious reference to their relationship, may have used his influence to persuade officials to cut the funding promised to cast the work in bronze. It would be years before Claudel was able to secure private funding for its final casting. The grand and poignant sculpture was so much more than a breakup ballad, however. It finally established, one critic declared, that “we can no longer call Mademoiselle Claudel a student of Rodin; she is a rival.”
Even as Claudel attracted acclaim, her talent confounded many of her contemporaries. She was, a prominent critic marveled, “a revolt against nature: a woman genius.” Others groped to describe her expressive force—sometimes ending, in bafflement, by calling it “virile” or “male.” Rather than giving Claudel her due, many continued to find it easier to attribute her strengths to Rodin’s tutelage.
Rodin himself seemed to have deeply mixed feelings about Claudel’s emergence as a great sculptor in her own right. “When women have bronze and marble and clay, the stuff of which creation is made,” Rodin said of her in his old age, “they find a sculptor a mighty poor lover!” Perhaps he harbored anxiety about her creativity, a part of her that he never could control. Rodin taught that “we must unfreeze sculpture,” and that “life is movement.” Yet his portrait of Claudel, Thought, on view in the exhibit, imprisons her from the chin down in a solid block of marble. Another, The Farewell, which Rodin modeled in 1892, shows Claudel’s eyes wide and worried, her hands pressed against her lips as though withholding a confession, her features sinking as though drowning in a sea of stone. And although Rodin meant to honor Claudel by including a room devoted to her work in the Musée Rodin, one effect of that decision was to ensure that her artistic legacy would long be subsumed into his.
Rodin’s disturbing portraits proved prescient. By the early 1900s, Claudel’s mental health had begun to falter. Her father, who had stood out as an unwavering supporter through her artistic struggles and successes, died in 1913. Just eight days later, her remaining family had her committed to the asylum. Even after her health improved, they rebuffed both her entreaties and her doctors’ advice to release her, using a legal order of sequestration to deny her all contact with the outside world. “Of the dream that was my life,” she wrote, “this is the nightmare.” To her brother, this life sentence was punishment for the “crime” of killing “a child ... an immortal soul.”
Claudel took every opportunity to develop her skill and to experiment with color, scale, and texture while she remained free to pursue her art. But it is her emotional insight and range, not just the textures she borrowed from nature and her dramatic windswept angles, that truly set her apart. As talented as her male contemporaries, Claudel showed that she had something different to say, important truths to add to our understanding of the human condition. Her contributions, largely eclipsed in the years since her death, have rarely been accorded the respect they receive in this exhibit. The renewed attention is well timed: Claudel’s work confronts us with the power and vulnerability of the female body, and her life is a reminder of what is lost when women’s choices are wrested from their control.
This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Rodin’s Rival.”