by Gina Fournier, Instructor Sample Book Review, 27 January 2008
Some things are as ubiquitous as the atmosphere in which we live and equally taken for granted. The dominance of men in the arts is one, though some may groan at this contention, like those who heckle the fight for clean air: “What’s the big deal? I can breathe!”
This sort of selfishness is a drag, yet some individuals do become uncomfortable with the suggestion that something outside of their personal radar is really very wrong.
Ready or resistant, reading Camille Claudel: A Life: A Life by Odile Ayral-Clause (Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publisher, 2002, 280 pgs.), one must imagine what life is like for a person—in this case a woman artist—born at the wrong time. Look at the timeline of her life from the present, and observers can see that Claudel was born too early to take advantage of advances brought by modern feminism. Roughly forty years after her death at age 79 in 1943 (she was born in 1864), seventy years after she was sequestrated in a mental asylum against her will and common decency (she was locked up in 1913 and held consistently through 1943), and one hundred years after she arrived in Paris to study (in 1881, when she was 17 years old), the 1980s saw the first major exhibition of an artist deemed “genius” by her contemporaries. The long-time-coming show first opened in France in 1984 and arrived in the U. S. at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., in 1988. Ironically, Claudel finally began to receive a trickle of the acclaim due to her at the end of the Reagan years, a period of time termed “backlash” years for women’s advancement (Faludi), when moviegoers worldwide were still shaking from Glenn Close’s role as career madwoman in Hollywood’s Fatal Attraction (1987).
Yes, female French sculptor Camille Claudel is the one who had an affair with far more famous male French sculptor Auguste Rodin, the artist who sculpted The Thinker (a copy of which sits in front of the Detroit Institute for the Arts) and who is today remembered with a museum all his own. He’s the one who became famous for his art, while her art and life have been largely ignored.
This story is not unusual. So little is known about women artists like Claudel. Society knows about Vincent Van Gogh (cut off his ear, sunflowers) and Michelangelo (painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, man touches the hand of God) but the world barely bothers itself with the lives of Artesmisia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur, Mary Cassat and Sonia Delaunay. Such names may be known by folks who buy, send and receive art postcards sold at museum giftshops. But how many female artists can the average person name?
Hardcover and filled with photographs, Camille Claudel: A Life features a confident, straight-backed, strong shouldered Camille on the front. The picture was captured when she twenty-two years old, in 1886, five years after she arrived in Paris, when Claudel’s life still looked promising. Imagine life in European city just getting a sewer system, after revolutions overthrew the reign of monarchies (the beheading of Marie Antoinette took place in 1793, for example), when the stuffy Victorian era was ending and the more culturally open modern era just beginning. Marked by new symbols such as the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower, change was sweeping France and the western world. Exercising her limited but growing free will as a female, Claudel was one of the many assistants—most of them males except for Claudel’s friend and roommate Jessie Lipscomb—who worked in Rodin’s studio and contributed to his pieces, The Gates of Hell and The Burghers of Calais. Simultaneously, Claudel was beginning to forge her own path as a sculptor by creating pieces such as Jeune Fille a la Gerbe (Young Woman with a Sheaf) and Giganti (the bust of a male Italian model). As well, to add a certain complexity to her story, Claudel and Rodin had become lovers, though he was twenty-four years her senior.
Inside the text of Camille Caludel: A Life, author Ayral-Clause quickly states her goal: to replace “misunderstandings and fallacies” and “dispel myths” about the artist. Modestly, Ayral-Clause promises to provide a “stepping stone forward”—not to solve all the mystery surrounding Claudel, but to help move “toward a better understanding” (6) of her subject, who has otherwise received very little attention from historians and cultural commentators simply because she was born female. Library Journal calls Ayral-Clause’s Camille Claudel: A Life “fascinating” and commends the author for researching “much new data” and exercising “admirable objectivity.” Likewise, Woman’s Art Journal labels the work “the most authoritative to date.” In Camille Claudel: A Life, Ayral-Clause makes good on her promises and in the process delivers a portion of justice to help right the wrongs of the past. The biography fascinates and haunts its readers.
Was Claudel naturally crazy or did life conspire to drive her crazy? That’s the central question surrounding the artist’s disappointments and tragedies. If the pictures collected in Camille Claudel: A Life convey accurately, life definitely tried to get the best of her. Whether spending time with her family, working in Rodin’s studio or languishing in the insane asylum, the look of steel and command in Claudel’s eyes does bend and wither over time, as depicted in successive images, but her mind never appears to break completely. A picture taken by Lipscomb’s husband just before Claudel’s death—purposely positioned upfront in the text—suggests that her hard life did not trump the artist. From the start, Camille Claudel: A Life believes that sculptor was driven crazy, not born crazy. “No sign of madness mars her dreamy eyes,” Ayral-Clause assesses (8), a fact which readers can corroborate.
Camille Claudel: A Life features twenty-three relatively brief chapters and moves forward at a modern pace. Before readers are ready, Chapter Twenty-Three “Camille‟s Bones” stands for “The End.” However, as told by Ayral-Clause, Claudel’s story begins with a flashforward reminiscent of Hollywood. In the prologue, readers see Claudel at 65, near the end of her thirty year lock up, when she is successfully subdued but has somehow managed to survive. In a letter to a friend, Claudel calls her jail the “abyss” and generously describes “a world so curious, so strange” (9). Claudel’s plight may remind readers of the similar tale of actress Frances Farmer played by Jessica Lange in the early 1980s film Frances, in which another real-life woman’s bold independence is used as a weapon against her. Though Claudel, like Farmer, acted rather mad at times (the sculptor once sent a state official an anonymous letter packed with cat feces in protest of a cancelled commission), any shred insanity seems induced and temporary.
Ayral-Clause concedes that Claudel seems to have carried the “seed of illness” (6), but Camille Claudel: A Life champions the artist by maintaining credible distance from its subject in order to review both the laudatory and the unfortunate aspects of her story. The biography’s preface previews the central points of Claudel’s life, which soon grow disturbing: the woman could have been a contender in the art world during her lifetime and well-remembered in art history after her death, but instead Claudel was unfairly destroyed by her family and a world that rejected female artists. “As recently as twenty years ago, in France, Camille Claudel was known only to handful of admirers,” Ayral-Clause begins. She continues, the “brief moments of applause she had enjoyed during her lifetime had never led to important commissions, and the sale of her pieces remained few and far between” (6). As English writer Virginia Woolf points out in her classic 1929 book-length essay, A Room of One’s Own, money and independence are necessary for any artist’s survival and success. Without economic and emotional sustenance, artists have been known to fail painfully, as did Claudel eventually.
Camille Claudel: A Life
by Odile Ayral-Clause
Camille Claudel: A Life exquisitely conveys the perplexity of Claudel’s story: hers is a three-way tug between the ever-present question of her sanity (thanks mostly to her family who initiated and insisted upon her lock up), the fact of Claudel’s talent (which was all but smothered due to her gender) and her fiery relationship with Rodin (which both helped and hurt Claudel). At the start of the text, a secondary focus on the plight of women artists is also established. Issues of gender could not be ignored by Claudel’s biographer. In the artist’s day, women were restricted by laws regarding dress (quite literally), they were barred from smoking in public though men could, and like children, they needed chaperones to move about in the world. Don’t forget this scene takes place just over a hundred years ago, a mere blip of time.
According to the text, Claudel wished to exist beyond all categories, political or otherwise, and to be known only as a “sculptor.” Interestingly, to contradict the assumption that artists lean liberal, Claudel was conservative in some of her views and biases. For example, as the book addresses, she was not an early adopter of pants and chose instead to uphold the tradition of woman wearing skirt, unlike other early French feminists such as writer and contemporary Marguerite Durand. Some Parisians at the turn of the twentieth century, in the early days of motor cars and moving pictures, were ready to accept women dressed in slacks, though begrudgingly. But the public was not ready to equally embrace female artistic expression with all the messy baggage—ideas, emotion and sexuality—that comes with it.
Unfortunately, things haven’t fully improved for women artists since Claudel’s good days in Paris. Now, in an era of sight and sound, film directors are held in esteem instead of sculptors and painters, but the public is still far more familiar and accepting of the Steven Speilbergs of the world rather than the Nicole Holofceners, who recently directed the non-blockbusters Friends with Money (2006) and prior the emotionally-explosive Lovely and Amazing (2001). Francis Ford Coppola is well known for his blockbuster award winning gangster and war films such as the The Godfather series and Apocalypse Now (1979). However, without his fatherly influence it is less likely that talented daughter Sophia Coppola would have been allowed to direct Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2001) and Marie Antoinette (2006), simply because she is a female and the chances of a female directing a major Hollywood film are slight.
The tendency might be to think society has progressed more than it actually has. The recent exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts, from October 2005 to February 2006, which featured the only U.S. stop of the latest international tour featuring Claudel’s work, emphasized romantic partnership not a woman of genius. The show’s title “Camille Claudel and Rodin: Fateful Encounter” was purposefully reminiscent of the backlash era film (Fatal Attraction). Note the unequal qualities of the names as presented: first a no name who needs an introduction followed by a legend, but progress must begin somewhere and somehow, even if melodramatically. The museum hyped to potential visitors, “Romeo & Juliet. Anthony & Cleopatra. Rodin & Claudel. Among the world’s greatest love affairs, theirs is the only one carved in stone.” The DIA adopted and disseminated the view that Claudel was crazy, ignoring Ayral-Clause’s work. Online the museum promoted that “psychological problems” caused Camille “to be institutionalized for the last three decades of her life,” and did not mention her family’s role in sequestering her, which contradicted her doctor’s advice. Instead, the museum became “the first in the United States to shed light on these sculptors ‟mutual influences.” In other words, the museum glorified the romantic relationship between a man of genius and his crazy but talented female lover. In a town searching for self-significance and a return to prominent national and global leadership, the DIA looked backward to Glen Close and Michael Douglas’s onscreen affair to help them stir up enthusiasm for Claudel’s work.
Presently, the tour is in Madrid and due to return to the Musee Rodin in Paris in April 2008. Unlike the states, in France (“Une rétrospective exceptionnelle: Camille Claudel une artiste, une destine”), Claudel is being viewed as an artist apart from Rodin. “The art of Camille Claudel is now considered to be profoundly original, intense and radiant in its own right,” the French museum explains in its English language press release. Online promotional materials continue:
The goal of the French exhibition is to examine the work of this free-spirited artist outside the context of her love affair with Rodin. The time has therefore arrived, finally, to study the work of Camille Claudel and her place in the artistic movement of the late 19th century. Did Camille Claudel succeed in creating a decidedly modern sculpture, on the fringe of the work of Rodin? How did she develop as a woman, student and sculptress in the studio? What kind of strategy could a sculptress pursue at the end of the 19th century? These are the kind of questions that the exhibition will seek to answer.
Her native land has started to take Claudel’s work seriously. Ayral-clause’s book is part of a larger effort to transform the public snub given to Claudel when she was alive. With grace of Claudel’s carved marble and onyx, Camille Claudel: A Life mimics its subject’s sublime qualities, which are evident in Claudel’s artwork and at times within the artist’s remaining letters. Unfairly imprisoned for decades, Claudel did not strike out against her guards, though she would have been justified. Likewise, in this biography, Ayral-Clause is forward but still restrained regarding the larger battle incumbent upon woman artists. “When women were barred from nude studies,” Ayral-Clause explains, “they were de facto excluded from the mainstream of art and from the commissions available at the time” (18). The author addresses political, cultural and social issues of the day with a light but clear touch in order to maintain her foreground emphasis on Claudel. To anyone reading who may fear “feminism,” relax. Ayral-Clause, a French professor at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California, does not use the f word.
To please scoffers and other careful sorts, Ayral-Clause does not easily fabricate or guess about Claudel’s inner life. Camille Claudel: A Life researches the existing clues about Claudel‟s world. The biography is well documented, which is possible because its subject lived in an age of old fashioned letters. What a treat the book is in this internet age, with no aesthetically-adrift short cuts like “4U” or “lol.” Comparatively, readers discover just the opposite: nostalgia for a slower, less hectic pace. In Claudel’s day, people waited on the post and returned correspondence in kind with handwritten responses. Reading this biography is like slipping into a reverie of the past, during a not-too-distant era when people took the time and developed the focus to devote themselves to a calling—something Claudel did with enormous passion, drive and talent.
Eventually, however, as the book details, the fight for recognition got the best of Claudel, who destroyed some of her letters as well as her artwork. Why? is an interesting question.
Perhaps she could foresee a future (as it turned out, long after her death) when people would finally care. In effect, by destroying her own creations, Claudel seems to have screamed “*^&#@! the world!” Perhaps Claudel had something to hide or she was crazy; thankfully, Ayral-Clause’s biography does not travel far into conjecture or melodrama. Printed sources used to research Camille Claudel: A Life include newspaper and magazine reviews from famous art and social critics of the day, as well as official paperwork and personal correspondence. “Since letters and telegrams were the only means of communication in the nineteenth century, many educated people kept careful records of their correspondence,” Ayral-Clause comments (57). As treasured items, letters were sometimes lost, stolen, or like Claudel‟s destroyed. Some of her letters have disappeared and mysteriously reappeared, the author explains, such as the following example from Rodin, who apparently wrote many love letters to Claudel, some of them quite tormented:
My Camille be assured that I feel love for no other woman, and that my soul belongs to you. . . .don‟t threaten me and let me see you. Let your soft hand show your kindness for me and sometimes leave it there so that I can kiss it (60).
Apart from fighting off Rodin’s advances, Claudel must have grown very tired in her own right for sculpting is a physically demanding profession, as Ayral-Clause relays. Before modern conveniences, including well-stocked stores like Dick Blick’s or Pearl Art Supplies that deliver, a sculpto’‟s materials were extra weighty and not easy to lift. This point was also driven home nicely in the 1988 French film, Camille Claudel, starring Isabelle Adjani and Gerard Depardieu, in which viewers see Claudel dirty and worn out, with muddy smears across her face, and her skirts ragged and sullied from stealing her supplies. As Joan D. London of Villanova University pointed out while reviewing the film:
The clay is her life, but the filmmakers suggest through the imagery of the grave in which Camille is standing that will also be her death. The pit has been dug for the new Parisian sewer system, one of the many images of modernity in the film. Camille, herself, is caught between the old ways and the new.
As both London and Ayral-Clause understand, everyday Claudel faced an overwhelming number of weighty obstacles, some of them quite physical. For one, clay is heavy and must be lugged around. Marble is even heavier, requiring sculptors to stand as they chip away for long hours that stretch over months and years, all the while battling rock to reveal dreams. However, the work does not show a hint of the effort involved. This reviewer was lucky enough to see the 2005 DIA show, “Camille Claudel and Rodin: Fateful Encounters,” the second major exhibit of the artist’s work locally in Detroit at the DIA. In a master’s hands like Claudel’s, lovers dance (La Valse); women become more than mere flesh (Les Causeuses, Niobide blessee). In Oberlin College art historian and critic Patricia Matthews‟ words, “Claudel’s women have the power of voice,” which is something Claudel was eventually denied.
But what about her affair with Rodin? In Camille Claudel: A Life, the artist’s relationship with Rodin complicates matters for Claudel even further, though it also helps build the appeal of her story. People love a fiery romance that ends badly like viewers enjoy watching footage of natural disasters on the Weather Channel. As Ayral-Clause explains, to his credit, Rodin treated Claudel best as an artist, beginning with free private lessons and for decades giving recommendations and offering the highest praise for her work— even when Claudel considered Rodin her number one public enemy. As one reads, it appears that Claudel’s talent was nurtured consistently by Rodin, though with increasingly less involvement after their breakup. Claudel pushed him away rather forcefully after he broke a written vow promising marriage, which was a huge no-no of the day. Ayral-Clause believes there is enough evidence in a 1939 letter Claudel’s brother Paul wrote to a friend (“To kill a child! To kill an immortal soul,” he laments, “it is horrible!”) to “lift all doubts” that Claudel aborted a child around this time (114). Since Rodin promised a legal union in writing but never made good, Claudel risked being completely ostracized from society, as Rodin was already a married and a father.
In 1892, to finalize the end of their affair, within a letter to her admirer and journalist Mathias Morhardt, Claudel asked that a message be passed to Rodin: Stay away! “Why make all my ideas known before they are ripe?” Claudel argued, declining to show her work in progress. Furthermore, she wanted a complete break from her ex-lover in order to concentrate on her career.
If you could . . . delicately and shrewdly instill in Monsieur Rodin the idea of not coming to see me anymore, you would give me the greatest pleasure that I have ever felt. Monsieur Rodin is not unaware that many nasty people have said he made my sculpture; therefore why do everything possible to give credence to such calumny? (119)
When their relationship never formalized publicly, Claudel ferociously defended her own interests, both verbally—calling Rodin “the knight of the underworld,” for example (178)—and artistically. In the L’Age Mur, a three figure piece representing the arc of a man’s life from birth to death, the figure playing Middle Age recalls Rodin, with his wife Rose playing Old Age stealing him away from Youth, who is represented by a Camille-like female. An official state art inspector unaware of the piece’s subtext commented, “It really is, from a woman, a very noble and well thought-out work” (128). As Ayral-Clause concedes, after seeking retribution Claudel eventually became prone to paranoia where Rodin was concerned. “Camille was not mad,” she explains. “She created, she exhibited, and she interacted socially. But she had moments of irrationality that scared the people who loved her” (138), particularly when she turned against her supporters.
Camille Claudel: A Life definitely heats up when the romance begins to turn sour, making the DIA‟s decision to foreground the love affair an unsurprising first step toward introducing the artist to current U.S. audiences. Claudel’s position was that Rodin stole her youth and very her worth as an individual and an artist, through supposed machinations (nixing commissions, for example) that the artist swore Rodin had contrived. Most of Claudel’s concerns about Rodin appear to be paranoid, though Aryal-Clause leaves a little room for doubt, since no one knows for sure what exactly happened in the past. “For the first time, Rodin had the opportunity to view L’Age Mur,” Aryal-Clause details, “and what he saw was his private life made public.” The author continues, “Shocked, hurt, and angry, he probably used his power to make sure it would never happen again: the commission for the bronze was canceled” (148). Claudel blamed Rodin for all of her career-related problems, including the purported theft of the marble version of a bust called Clotho, which Ayral-Clause reports is mysteriously still missing.
Whoever and whatever was responsible, the fact that Claudel was handed a raw deal because of her gender remains undeniable, so she should be allowed a little paranoia in response. In the eyes of the majority of her contemporaries, Camille Claudel: A Life argues, the sculptor was viewed as no more than Rodin’s illicit companion who possessed questionable artistic skills borrowed from the great master. Claudel was rarely considered a muse, an equal, or—god forbid—the more talented of the two, though her supporters (a minority voice including major art critics of the day such Gustave Geffroy, Roger Marx and Charles Morice) were otherwise influential, intelligent and ardent in their praise. Regarding La Valse, which depicts a romantic partnership, a 1889 report written for the Minister of Fine Arts denied to grant Claudel a commission, complaining that the “closeness of the sexual organs is rendered with surprising sensuality, which is considerably reinforced by the absolute nudity of all the human details” (102). Yet six years later, in 1895, Octave Mirbeau, a journalist for Le Journal, labeled Claudel “a woman of genius.” A supremely frustrated artist, Claudel did apparently suffer from some paranoia, but in Ayral Clause’s view the uncaring public was complicit, which validated the artist’s feelings.
Only after laying sufficient evidence does Camille Claudel: A Life chance theorizing. Her romantic break-up with Rodin forced Claudel to focus on her plight as a female artist, a condition that sorely irritated the “seeds” of her mental illness. In short, the combination of love gone bad and bad luck eventually made Claudel angry and full of spite. She had wanted to attend to her career in a much more positive fashion, Ayral-Clause depicts, but Claudel was held back solely because she was woman who sculpted revolutionary pieces unlike any before seen or accepted by the art establishment. Ayral-Clause explains, “Her sexually daring pieces shocked the academic art world and turned state officials against her.” As a result, the author relates, referring to Niobide blesse, Claudel “solicited state commissions in vain, until she finally proposed an acceptable piece: a woman alone—vanquished and dying” (181).
The show to hit Claudel’s native France this spring will mark the first time Parisians will be able to see Wounded Niobed, or Niobide blesse. Take a look at this piece and others online. Sadly, public and private rejection of her exquisite work plus poverty equaled more than Claudel could bear. As Matthews laments, “One mourns for the anguish and loss of such a passionate artist.” One must wonder, how many potential Claudels has the world bypassed entirely?
And ironically Claudel was lucky. For as much as readers are lead to believe that Claudel‟s story is tragic, simultaneously Ayral-Clause positions Claudel’s father as her warmest ally. He let her go to Paris and paid for her studies, which he might not have done if he was made of a lesser mind and heart. Even within the socially advanced western world, fathers legally ruled households until the modern era, so Claudel’s father would have been acting quite normally if he had refused his daughter’s wishes and forced her to get on the marriage/motherhood track. Unfortunately, like some sort of Grimm’s fairy tale, once Claudel’s father passed away, family relationships deteriorated at an alarming rate. Claudel was abducted and forever locked up against her will (beginning at Ville-Evard, later during World War One, at Montvergues) on March 10, 1913, a scant eight days after her father died.
Even in Camille Claudel: A Life, where Ayral-Clause’s tone is calm, the artist’s family drama reads like a soap opera. The official psychiatric diagnosis requested by the family and upheld for decades was “persecution delirium” (210). Ayral-Clause believes that for the Claudels, however, a more probable reason for deeming Camille mad had to do with her independent lifestyle of which they disproved. Lynch reminds, “At this period the majority of inmates of insane asylums were woman. Families had the right to commit their most troublesome members without recourse,” as did the Claudels. Despite the family’s claims of care, mostly they wanted to protect themselves and avert public scandal, for at the time of her capture, Claudel did need help, as she was living in isolation and squalor. Yet actions speak louder than words: Mother never visited daughter in over fifteen years (mother died in 1929); sister Louise visited once over the course of thirty years; brother Paul managed to visit only a handful of times. Though Paul bought a house in the area of Montdevergues where his wife and legitimate children summered, meaning he could have treated his once-beloved sister with much more care, he did not do so. He even refused the offer to devote a room into what was become the Musee Rodin solely for displaying his sister’s artwork. In response, Morhardt called Paul “an idiot” who “always believed that he was the only one had genius” (203). Publishers Weekly finds that Ayral-Clause “fully accepts Rodin as a great artist and great man” while “reserving criticism for Camille‟s brother, the far-right-wing poet and diplomat,” which appears to be a reasonable decision.
Perhaps family members are least likely to judge one another fairly. Paul viewed his sister with utter ambiguity, praising her work like few others and signing her away to the madhouse. Once there, Claudel was purposefully ignored. For the most part, she was not allowed visitors or to send and receive mail, all under the pretense that such actions would help her condition improve. Yet when her mental health actually did improve and she lost her paranoia, according to official state paperwork penned by her caregivers, Claudel’s mother refused a doctor’s suggestion to release her daughter. Thanks to Ayral-Clause’s research, Claudel’s caregivers support a picture of the artist’s return to sanity. In 1920, a Dr. Brunet advised, “Madamemoiselle Claudel is calm . . . I believe . . . we could try to let her out,” but her mother remained opposed, even when the doctor pleaded for—at the very least—a transfer to an asylum closer to family members since the “absence of visits” was “indeed very painful” (218). Later in the book, a nurse calls Claudel “polite” and never “angry” (242).
Reasonably, Ayral-Clause believes that jealousy was the family’s true motivation for acting so horribly. Like in the film Francis, the heart of this battle rested between female relations. Mother and sister Louise were conventional women who did not understand Claudel and did not accept her individuality. Making unsubstantiated claims, mother wrote the director of Montdevergues, “I am seventy-five, I cannot assume the responsibility for a daughter with extravagant ideas and full of bad intentions toward us; a daughter who hates us and who is ready to do as much harm as possible” (213). For no good reason, Camille Claudel: A Life details, sister Louise tried to ignore a request for a visit from Claudel’s old friend Jessie (who persevered and visited anyway). Legally taking over the family’s business upon his father’s death by virtue of his gender alone, Paul condemned his sister for her sins, while he walked free and carried his own anguish privately. No better than Rodin, Paul had an affair and a child out of wedlock, which tormented his Catholic sense of guilt, though he didn’t feel compelled to commit himself for his transgressions, as he so easily did to his sister. Paul became a famous diplomat and writer, though history and Ayral Clause agree that his sister was by far the more talented.
Tragically, as Camille Claudel: A Life makes clear, the artist was persecuted for rightfully feeling persecuted. She feared that Rodin was an overly jealous competitor out to annihilate her, when really she was destroyed by her family and an ambivalent society, of which Rodin was simply an imperfect but caring a part.
In the epilogue of Camille Claudel: A Life, Ayral-Clause points out how towards the end of her freedom Claudel was “defiant” in reaction to society, while she was amazingly understanding and patient towards her undeserving family the entire time she was confined. “Defiance was probably the most visible characteristic of Camille Claudel” (256), the author concludes, speaking of the woman’s choice of profession, her revolutionary actions and her bold approach. Yet the author also includes other instances—after the artist’s relationship with Rodin ended and before she found herself trapped in the asylum—when a rational-sounding Claudel tried to appease marketplace demands by permanently draping stone robes over her dancing nudes and making larger pieces like successful male artists. Claudel was willing to work within the establishment not against it, though she preferred her unique smaller work (such as the astonishing bronze and onyx La Vague, displayed in the “Fateful Encounters” show) and in that regard was considered a pioneer, a “genius” as some said, including her brother, Morhardt, Rodin, and art critics of the day.
It’s not really surprising that Claudel’s mental state wore out when she wasn’t able to support herself and she didn’t receive her due recognition. Still, in a letter to her cousin Charles Thierry, written inside the asylum, her voice absolutely haunts:
I am scared . . . I think I am going to end badly . . . What was the point of working so hard and of being talented, to be rewarded like this? Never a penny, tormented all my life. (190)
Immersing oneself in Camille Claudel: A Life, readers can’t help but feel compassion for the artist. Her life was very difficult though she never gave up her goal: sculpture and a life of her own. No coward, she did not kill herself due to hopelessness. To her tribute, as Ayral-Clause takes care to do, Claudel put up with the awful deal life presented her, though she refused to sculpt in the asylum. Forced into isolation, the only thing left to Claudel was to exercise her free will, which she took as “an opportunity to reassert her personal freedom,” in Ayral-Clause‟s words (221). Likewise, one can’t forgive the family for trying to do in their own, ironically acting in the name of decency in such a terribly cruel manner. Claudel’s sole goal for thirty years was to obtain her freedom, one that she never gave up but never won either. Even after death, her bones where dumped on asylum premises in a squatter’s grave, though her family certainly could have afforded a fitting monument. Before the public or anyone else had a chance, those closest held Claudel down.
If there are Camille Claudel’s alive today, they probably live in the third world.
(Note: I am no longer sure I agree with this contention AT ALL.)
In the western world, though things have been slow to change in Hollywood for female directors, female actors have made employment gains toward employment equality on the big and little screen by following in the footsteps of men—by starring in action adventure crime sprees like Thelma & Louise (1991) and enlivening fictional presidential politics. More recently, readers hopefully caught Geena Davis‟ historic role in ABC‟s short-lived Commander in Chief. But art activists, the Guerrilla Girls (who wear gorilla masks designed to conceal their identities and better focus on ideas), still recognize the need to “re-invent the f-word” through actions such as their consciousness-raising billboards like the one asking for studio decision makers to “Unchain the Women Director.” In 2005, only 7% of Hollywood’s top grossing 200 films were directed by females. Claudel would understand the serious problems surrounding these employment figures.
Today, women artists and their supporters, like Ayral-Clause, are still trying to enlarge the world’s acceptance of female expression on its own terms. Camille Claudel: A Life does what it sets out to do and successfully reveals a greater look into Claudel’s life. Yet Ayral-Clause also respects the truth, that historical figures will forever remain mysterious to some degree. Thankfully, Claudel left around 90 pieces of artwork to best speak for herself. Much is made of the sensuality of lovers in pieces such as Vertumne et Pomone, which is magnificent, but Claudel’s more refreshing pieces focus on women as individuals apart from romance, pieces that, in Matthew’s words, “open a space in which women, neither idealized nor eroticized, act, think, and speak.” Though Ayral-Clause believes that the three women poised unbeknownst to them under a crushing wave of green marble in La Vague signify Claudel’s “shrinking world” and increasing isolation, which may be true, in addition Claudel’s work speaks for the enveloped status of women, especially in her day. As Louise R. Wittherell from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay understood in the mid-1980s, “the general outlines” of Claudel’s “life and work were known for many decades, but insofar as they related to Rodin.” Society’s preference for men in matters of commerce and culture causes devastation with tsunami-like effects.
For readers interested in further discussion about women and the arts, Youtube shares a nearly ten minute video of a recent appearance by the gorilla mask-wearing activities at western Massachusetts’ contemporary art museum, MoMA. The Guerrila Girls speak, though the poor quality of the tape hides their faces; ironically, whether they’re masked or not, it’s unclear and irrelevant. The event’s projected visual display in large screen format is quite clear. The presenters provide a brief but daring history of art museums, in which they severely criticize decisions biased against women artists, like Claudel, including decisions made by their host organization, MoMA. The YouTube reviews about the clip are equally interesting. Even in the new millennium, the public shares and spews a very wide array of responses to female expression and feminist criticism. As film critic Molly Haskell put it in the title of her groundbreaking 1973 book about women in film, the comments range “from reverence to rape,” offering an incredible range of reactions—from emotional support to threats of physical sexual violence.
Camille Claudel: A Life may inspire readers to hunt for more information about the artist herself. Though the full grouping is no longer available, the 1988 French movie (with English subtitles), Camille Claudel, directed by Bruno Nuytten, the 2005-2008 traveling exhibition of Claudel’s work, Ayral-Clause’s Camille Claudel: A Life together make a nice tryptich. Otherwise, the choices in the United States are limited. Apparently, an earlier biography by Reine-Marie Paris, a grandniece of Claudel’s, is out of print and said to reluctantly criticize the family. A 1985 article in Women’s Art Journal no longer offers thoroughly up-to-date analysis either, for example, by oddly labeling criticism of Claudel’s family “sensational.” More recently, authors Alma H. Bond, PhD. and Anne Delbee have written fictionalized biographical novels about Claudel, which some might find worthwhile. Those interested in more must travel to France’s Musee Rodin, where much of Claudel’s work has finally been housed—as an afterthought.
On a lighter note, as of this
writing, there’s time to book a flight and make the latest Claudel
retrospective when it returns home. Paris in the springtime is suppose to be
lovely.
Works Cited
Ayral-Clause, Odile. Camille Claudel: A Life. Boston: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002.
Bond, Alma H. Camille Claudel: A Novel. Maryland: Publish America, 2005.
Bruce, Mary. “Review. Camille Claudel: A Life by Ayral-Clause, Odile.” Library Journal
127.8 (May 2002): 94. General Reference Center Gold. Gale.
27 October 2007.
Claudel, Camille. L‟Age mur. 1902. Musee d‟Orsay, Paris.
Claudel, Camille. Les Causeuses. 1897. Musee Rodin, Paris.
Claudel, Camille. Clotho. 1893. Musee Rodin, Paris.
Claudel, Camille. Jeune Fille a la Gerbe. 1889. Musee Rodin, Paris.
Claudel, Camille. Giganti. c. 1886. Museums of Chebourg, Lille and Reims, France.
Caludel, Camille. Niobide blesse. 1907. Musee de Poiters, France.
Claudel, Camille. La Vague. 1897. Musee Rodin, Paris.
Claudel, Camille. La Valse. 1905. Private collection.
Claudel, Camille. Vertumne et Pomone. 1905. Musee Rodin, Paris.
“Camille Claudel Exhibition.” Press Release: English. Musee Rodin. 27 Jan. 2008.
http://www.musee-rodin.fr/communication/images/claudel_press_release.pdf. Fournier 22
“Camille Claudel: A Life (Nonfiction).” Publishers Weekly 249.14 (8 Apr. 2002): 212. General
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Camille Claudel and Rodin: Fateful Encounter. Detroit Institute of the Arts. Detroit. 9 Oct.
2005- 5 Feb. 2006.
Clifford, Graeme, dir. Frances. 1982.
Commander in Chief. ABC. 2005-2006.
Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. Apocalypse Now. 1979.
Coppola, Sofia, dir. Lost in Translation. 2003.
———.Marie Antoinette. 2006.
Delbee, Anne. Camille Claudel. San Francisco: Mercury House, 1992.
“The Detroit Institute of the Arts Camille Claudel and Rodin: Fateful Encounters October 9,
2005- February 5, 2006.” The Detroit Institute of the Arts. 27 Jan. 2008.
http://www.dia.org/exhibitions/claudel_rodin/.
Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The War Against Women. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.
Guerrilla Girls. 17 Nov 2007. www.guerillagirls.com.
Haskell, Molly. From Reverence to Rape; The Treatment of Women in the Movies. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Holofceners, Nicole, dir. Friends with Money. 2006.
———.Lovely and Amazing. 2001.
“The Guerrilla Girls At the Feminist Future Symposium, MoMA.” YouTube. 15
Mar 2007. 17 Nov 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHVBZh5HBgc.
Lynch, Joan D. “Camille Claudel: Biography Constructed as Melodrama.” Film Quarterly 26.
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Lynne, Adrian, dir. Fatal Attraction. 1987.
Matthews, Patricia. “Review. Camille Claudel: A Life by Ayral-Clause, Odile.” Woman’s Art
Journal 25.2 (Autumn 2004-Winter 2005): 38-40. JSTOR Archive. 30 Oct. 2007.
Nuyyten, Bruno, dir. Camille Claudel. 1988.
“Retrospective Camille Claudel Au Musee Rodin.” Musee Rodin. 27 Jan. 2008.
http://www.musee-rodin.fr/expositions/mapfre.html.
Rodin, Auguste. The Burghers of Calais. 1889. Musee Rodin, Paris.
Rodin, Auguste. The Gates of Hell. 1890. Musee Rodin, Paris.
Rodin, Auguste. The Thinker. 1881. Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, Detroit.
Scott, Ridley, dir. Thelma & Louise. 1991.
Witherell, Louise R. “Camille Claudel Rediscovered.” Woman’s Art Journal 6.1
(Spring-Summer 1985): 1-7. JSTOR Archive. 30 Oct. 2007.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Harcourt Brace, 1929.