A Room of One’s Own

In the public imagination, Camille Claudel (1864-1943) is remembered mostly as Auguste Rodin’s lover--the one whose ideas Rodin may have stolen or the one who stole his, the one whose career and life were ruined by their torrid affair. Heartbroken at failing to break up Rodin’s relationship with his longtime companion Rose Beuret, Claudel stopped sculpting and succumbed to bouts of irrationality and paranoia. Her embarrassed family had her committed to asylums, where she remained the last 30 years of her life.

This is the subject that has most fascinated Claudel’s previous biographers and exemplifies how a life and career can become obscured in the effort to devise a simple, coherent narrative, highlighted by popular romance and social and political agendas. And while Odile Ayral-Clause’s new biography, “Camille Claudel: A Life,” may not be groundbreaking, it is, mercifully, myth-dispelling. By excavating Claudel from the edifice of victimization, Ayral-Clause frees us to focus on her work and the factors, both Rodin- and non-Rodin-related, that nurtured and hindered her career.

Claudel was a beautiful and intense young woman. Certainly she suffered the constraints of the period’s conservative attitudes toward women and of a mother who subscribed to the provincial values of the day: Her mother was scandalized by her daughter’s desire to sculpt nudes and was so cold that Claudel’s brother, Paul, would write, “Our mother never kissed us.”

But while Claudel’s mother was discomfited by her daughter’s bohemian lifestyle, Claudel’s father fully supported her career, even pushed her to assert her independence, which Ayral-Clause observes in a measured and nuanced way. She acknowledges how Rodin, dominant by virtue of his fame, his age (he was 24 years older than she), his role as teacher and her role as assistant, was also a staunch supporter, arranging for exhibitions and reviews and even helping financially. After her death, he established a room for her work in the Musee Rodin in Paris.

The moment seems right for a surge of interest in Claudel, whose artistic achievements were largely neglected during her lifetime. In an art environment as eclectic as today’s, the past can look fresher than it did in its own time. Ironically, Claudel’s work can seem more modern than Rodin’s, owing to its rawness, angst and vulnerability. Where his works are characteristically balanced, composed and smooth, hers can be angular and marked by violent plays of light and shadow. Her strongest sculptures are her portrait busts, which seem to owe little to Rodin and much to the personalities of their subjects. Rodin called her 1892 bust of him “the finest sculptured head since Donatello.”

A professor of French and the humanities at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Ayral-Clause has drawn from abundant unpublished materials, including photographs, letters and medical records, along with the diaries and journals of Claudel’s brother, the playwright and poet Paul Claudel (1868-1955). She offers considerable information, sufficient to stand as an armature for more expansive studies. In fact, with its plain, sometimes almost naive language, the book serves best as an introduction to the subject. What is missing is a more vivid picture of Claudel’s intellectual milieu, her interactions with other contemporary artists and writers and a more in-depth consideration of her relationship with Paul and how his notoriety and ideas affected her work.

Claudel’s artistic inclination was apparent before she was 12. In school, she became noted for her drawings, mostly portraits. But she was also interested in sculpting, inspired by the red clay and the gnarly rock formations near her grandparents’ home in Villeneuve sur Fere. Noticing her talent, the sculptor Alfred Boucher offered to assist her, and finally, along with her tutor, recommended that she and Paul study in Paris.

It was 1881, and Claudel was 17. The family got an apartment in Montparnasse, and she enrolled at l’Academie Colarossi. Artists were everywhere in Paris, and Ayral-Clause paints a smart, occasionally cliched picture of the atmosphere. Women could not enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, but they could study at the all-female atelier of Charles Chaplin, or at Julian’s, which offered women access to nude models and visits by prominent artists. Exclusion from depicting nudes had denied women access both to the mainstream and to commissions. Claudel shared a studio with two British women and Boucher visited regularly, giving them free advice. He introduced Claudel to his friend Paul Dubois, director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and she studied with him for a year. She then studied under Rodin for two years and proved to be especially adept at modeling hands and feet, which Rodin later had her do in his “Burghers of Calais.” Claudel entered Rodin’s studio as an assistant in 1884, when he was sculpting “The Gates of Hell.” They quickly developed an intense artistic and romantic relationship that was to continue for 15 years. Ayral-Clause points out that “much has been made of Rodin’s ‘exploitation’ of Camille’s work because ... when she became his assistant, he finished and signed a number of her sculptures.” The truth is, it was often hard to determine authorship since it was the nature of the studio system for all works to essentially belong to the teacher. But just as Claudel had responded to the strength of Rodin’s work, it is apparent that he was influenced by some of her softer, more expressive figures.

In the early 1890s, Claudel was gaining her own voice, even as her relationship with Rodin began to deteriorate. (It ended in 1898.) She produced her famous “Clotho” (1893), a figure her friend Claude Debussy considered fearsome. In mythology, Clotho was one of three sisters who wove the fate of man. Claudel represented her as an old woman caught in the threads of her manipulative weavings. For writer Octave Mirbeau, it was a vision of death with “nimble and nervous legs whose strides cut human lives, she laughs in her death mask.” She looks like a figure out of the Baroque, and like a lacy rock in art nouveau guise, a grotesque inversion of the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.”

And though Claudel continued to produce such potent works as “La Valse” (1892) and “L’Age Mur” (the first version of which she produced in 1895), “Les Causeuses” (1897), and “La Vague” (1900), the latter two showing the influence of japonisme and art nouveau, she was also growing increasingly paranoid. Rodin had promised at one point that after six months he would leave Beuret and marry Claudel, but he never did.

Claudel expressed her anguish in “L’Age Mur” (The Age of Maturity). The sculpture portrays a middle-aged man moving toward an elderly woman and turning from a beautiful young one. People immediately recognized that Rodin was the subject. He became infuriated and tried to prevent it from being shown. This only fueled her paranoia as she accused Rodin of interfering with her career and stealing her ideas.

In 1907, Claudel began destroying her work with a hammer. Her paranoia was such that when the French bureaucracy did not pay her promptly for the bronze version of her “Niobide blessee” (1907) she launched into a tirade, blaming Rodin first, and then attacking the art inspector for the Ministry of Culture Eugene Morand “with such vulgar postcards, and with envelopes containing such foul-smelling filth, that I want to have nothing to do with Mlle. Claudel.” The filth was cat feces.

Ayral-Clause describes how only days after Claudel’s father died, her mother and brother committed her. She spent much of her time in complete isolation, cut off from her family, though Paul saw her twice. She had abandoned her art, did some gardening and was allowed few visitors and often no mail so as not to excite her.

As a poignant summary, Ayral-Clause quotes Louis Vauxelles on the occasion of a 1934 Claudel retrospective at the Salon des Femmes Artistes Modernes, recalling the words of art dealer and Claudel defender Eugene Blot: Claudel “was to Rodin what [Berthe] Morisot was to Manet. Each one working next to a crushing master, keeps her own personality ....this rustic woman from Lorraine, hard, willful, untamable, remained herself.”