Camille Claudel showed artistic promise at a young age, and she seemed to have the support of her family members, who served as assistants and models for her when she was a child. When she was about fifteen, Camille met the sculptor Alfred Boucher, who recognized her talent and urged her family to have her educated in Paris. Though her father’s job transferred him to another town, he must have thought enough of Camille’s talent himself to consider Boucher’s advice important, because he set up his family in Paris, where Camille was able to pursue her art lessons. At seventeen, Camille was studying at the Académie Colarossi, a private school that allowed female students, and Alfred Boucher introduced her to the director of the École des Beaux Arts. Also about this time Camille shared a private studio with some fellow art students, and Boucher enlisted Auguste Rodin to supervise these students while he traveled to Italy to receive an award.

Camille soon became Auguste Rodin’s model, his assistant, and his lover. Before long, whatever talent she had before meeting Rodin seemed to have been forgotten by so many, and it seemed that her talent was subsumed by his. Many believed she was Rodin’s protégé in every way, but I don’t think a man of Rodin’s reputation, both as an artist and as a “ladies’ man,” would have been involved with Camille for such a long period of time if he had not recognized and been inspired by her artistic genius, as well as that indefinable quality that being with her brought to his own work. Their relationship seemed to be symbiotic in many ways, and it was often through Rodin and his connections that Camille gained her early recognition and commissions. This must have been both gratifying and supremely frustrating for someone of Camille’s talent and emotional temperament. While Rodin’s fame grew, inspired by Camille, Camille herself lived in Rodin’s shadow, seen primarily as his collaborator and his muse. Perhaps it was inevitable that her work was rarely recognized for its own merits, even when it won awards at exhibitions, because she was so closely involved with Rodin and because their individual works so often reflected similar themes. 

Camille attempted to distance herself from Rodin’s artistic influence in order to develop a more personally recognizable style, and she was influenced by Japanese motifs that became popular during this time. Although she received many commissions, such as the one for Clotho, and she earned the support of gallery owners and sponsors such as Eugène Blot and Maurice Fenaille, ultimately her psyche seems to have been too bound up in her attachment to Rodin, because she writes to Fenaille of her regret that after fifteen years of hard work, she feels she is no further along in her artistic vision than she was when she began her career.

No matter what she did she couldn’t fully extricate herself from her relationship with Rodin. Camille became more and more emotionally unbalanced, doomed to failure even in her own personal and internal artistic competition with her former lover. Ultimately Camille was institutionalized in an asylum, where Rodin sent money to help support her. Whether he did this out of guilt or out of his own brand of love is not known, but Camille was never able to truly establish her own identity, either as an artist or as a person, separate from that of Auguste Rodin.

Rodin is perhaps best known for his sculpture The Thinker, which I feel could also serve as the theme describing his artistic style, while Camille’s sculptures exude raw and unabashed emotion like few others of this time period. She could easily be called “The Feeler,” and as an artist I feel she was ahead of her time with her classic realism blended with the depth of emotion.

From the pictures I’ve seen of her sculptures, I’m hard pressed to choose a favorite, but I can narrow it down to two: L’Age mûr and La Valse. Both capture the intensity of Camille’s emotions in different ways.

L’Age mûr is painful to look at because of its desperation, not only because it portrays a naked and vulnerable woman abandoned by her lover, but also because it provides a glimpse into the mind and heart of an artist abandoned to the criticism and scorn of the art world of her time, a world that could not recognize her worth separate from Rodin. The fact that one piece of this sculpture, the begging naked woman-L’Implorante-was often featured separately seems to attest to the intensity of the separation and sense of incompleteness that ultimately robbed Camille of her sanity.

La Valse, on the other hand, portrays to me the message of the Biblical “one flesh” relationship of love, the dance of twin souls, because it’s difficult to tell where one figure begins and the other ends in this graceful vortex of emotion. This piece also reminds me of the myth of Pygmalion-the creator and his beloved creation, the two inseparable as the woman’s perfect and graceful body rises from unformed clay.  Both concepts provide the perfect metaphor for Camille Claudel’s stormy and complicated relationship with Auguste Rodin, and they also remind us of the risk there is in giving so much power over our souls and our self worth to another human being.

Photo: L’Age Mur, Camille Claudel (1902)
Bronze. Musée d’Orsay, Paris 
Photo by William Allen – http://www.clt.astate.edu/wallen/digits/