Camille Claudel went from Rodin's pupil to his rival
She walked into Auguste Rodin's workshop in 1883 as a gifted student and left as a sculptor whose vigour some critics rated above his. Camille Claudel died forgotten in 1943, yet her marble and bronze figures now fill a museum of their own and a room inside Rodin's.
Claudel was born on 8 December 1864 in Fère-en-Tardenois in northern France. Her father handled mortgages and banking; her mother came from Catholic farming stock in Champagne and strongly disliked her daughter's ambition to be an artist. By 12, living in Nogent-sur-Seine, Camille was modelling the human figure in local clay. Her father showed the work to a neighbour, the sculptor Alfred Boucher, who judged her talented and urged the family to back her.
In 1881 her mother moved the children to Montparnasse. Because the École des Beaux-Arts refused women, Claudel enrolled at the Académie Colarossi, which not only admitted female students but let them draw from nude male models. She shared a studio with three British sculptors, among them Amy Singer, whose family ran a bronze foundry in Frome, Somerset. When Boucher left for Florence, he asked Rodin to take over his pupils.
Claudel became Rodin's assistant, model and lover, working in plaster, bronze, marble and onyx, though she never lived with him because he would not leave his long-time partner Rose Beuret. She ended the physical relationship in 1892. Afterwards she struggled to fund bold projects in an era of sex-based censorship and found herself reliant on Rodin's money and reputation, particularly once her supportive father died. When Rodin first saw her piece The Mature Age in 1899 he reacted furiously and withdrew his support entirely, and one biographer suggests he may have lobbied to kill her bronze commission.
Critics nonetheless saw a distinct voice. Octave Mirbeau hailed her as a woman genius, and Louis Vauxcelles thought her style more forceful than many men's. Her Clotho of 1893 portrayed one of the Fates as a very old woman, embracing the grotesque in a way her male peers avoided, and The Waltz from the same year remains her best-known work. Her mental health declined from about 1905, and in 1913 she was confined to a psychiatric institution for the rest of her life. A museum devoted to her opened in Nogent-sur-Seine in 2017.
Source: Camille Claudel
