camille claudel

camille claudel: first student, then muse, finally co-creater with auguste rodin.  camille sculpts a languished, supine, female nude while wearing a full bustle and covered from her neck, to her wrists, to her ankles.

rodin, ever the unrepentant womanizer, drew up a contract for camille.  it was as bizarre as it was untrue.

In the future and starting from today 12 October 1886, I will have for a student only Mademoiselle Camille Claudel and I will protect her alone through all the means I have at my disposal through my friends who will be hers especially through my influential friends.

I will accept no other students so that no other rival talent could be produced by chance, although I suppose that one rarely meets artists as naturally gifted.

At the exhibition, I will do everything I can for the placement and the newspapers.

Under no pretext will I go to Mme.... to whom I will not teach sculpture anymore. After the exhibition in May we will go to Italy and and will live there communally for at least six months of an indissouble liasion after which Mademoiselle Camille will be my wife. I will be very happy to offer a marble figurine if Mademoiselle Camille wishes to accept it within four or five months.

From now until May I will have no other woman otherwise the conditions of this contract are broken.

If my Chilean commission comes through, we will go to Chile instead of Italy.

I will take none of the models I have known.

We will have a photograph taken by Carjat in the outfit worn by Mademoiselle Camille at the Academie, day clothes and possibly evening clothes.

Mademoiselle Camille will stay in Paris until May.

Mademoiselle Camille promises to welcome me to her atelier four times a month until May.

Rodin

after 1905, claudel appeared unwell and mentally distressed.  she suffered a miscarriage and the perfidy of her lover.  her brother (and benefactor) married, moved to china; she lost her financial support and moved into her studio.  she destroyed much of her work and accused rodin of robbing her ideas.  shortly after the death of their father, her brother had her committed against doctors' advice and she spent the next thirty years of her life in an asylum.  throughout that time, her brother referred to her in the past tense.  her funeral was attended by hospital staff.  her family did not attend her interment or claim her body.

around 90 works by claudel have survived the purge of her studio. in 1951, eight years after camille claudel's death, her brother organized an exhibition of her surviving works at the musee rodin.  safety in the ground, claudel could not protest her brother's ownership rights to the works nor their display- paraded in the rhetoric of rodin's tutelage.

 

left: Camille Claudel (1864-1943), La Petite Châtelaine, 1895, Marble - 34.6 x 28.4 x 22.7 cm
right: Camille Claudel (1864-1943), The prayer (Psalm), 1889