Camille Claudel

The clay at Nogent

Claudel was born in 1864 at Fère-en-Tardenois, in the Aisne, north-east of Paris, into a provincial middle-class family. Her father's work moved them about, and in 1876, when she was twelve, he was appointed registrar of mortgages at Nogent-sur-Seine, a town on the Seine upstream from Paris. It was a pottery-making region, and the material was simply there: in the museum's phrase, she found the clay she needed on-site.

Nogent also held a working sculptor. Alfred Boucher, who had taken the second prize in sculpture for the Prix de Rome — the state scholarship that sent young artists to Italy — in the same year the Claudels arrived, detected the budding talent of the self-taught girl and set about teaching her the rudiments of sculpting, correcting and encouraging her. She had no other training and no art school. She had a man who came by to look at what she had made and tell her what was wrong with it.

Paris, 1881

In 1881 her father sent the rest of the family to Paris for a better education than the provinces could give: his wife, Louise Athanaïse Claudel, and their three children, Camille, her sister Louise, and her younger brother Paul, who would become one of the major French poets and playwrights of the next century. Camille was seventeen. She took courses at the Académie Colarossi, one of the private Paris art schools that trained the students the state academy would not, and shared a studio with a group of young English women who were studying there too.

Boucher kept teaching her, coming by twice a week from his own work to follow her progress. That lasted until 1882, when a gold medal at the Salon des Artistes Français — the annual state-sanctioned exhibition where French sculptors were judged — won him a study trip to Florence. Before he left, he convinced Auguste Rodin to take over for him. Claudel was eighteen, and Rodin, twenty-four years her senior, was an established sculptor with his own studio and assistants.

Ten years in the Rodin studio

The Musée Rodin, which holds both artists' work, sets the span plainly: from 1882, when they first met, until 1892, when they parted, Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin would enjoy neither peace nor stability. It calls the decade a passionate love affair that lasted ten years, filled with harsh exchanges, hard work, misunderstandings and disappointments, and it lists her roles in a single line — student, assistant, mistress and muse of Auguste Rodin.

That line is also the most exact statement of the asymmetry. Every one of the four roles is defined by him. He was twenty-four years her senior and had been her teacher from the moment Boucher handed her over. He had lived with Rose Beuret since the 1860s and never left her; he married Beuret in 1917, two weeks before her death and nine months before his own. Claudel worked in his studio on his commissions, modelled for his figures, and made her own sculpture in the same years, on her own account, with far less money and no institution behind her. When the relationship ended — the Musée Rodin dates the parting to 1892, the Musée Camille Claudel to 1893 — she was in her late twenties, and what she had was the work.

Her own sculpture

The Waltz gives a dancing couple locked together and leaning off the vertical, so that the whole weight of two bodies rides on a diagonal. The Gossips sets four small women in a huddle, three of them bent in towards the fourth, and began a series of intimate, delicate scenes taken from ordinary life. The Wave puts three bathers under a curling green wall of water, directly influenced by the Japanese printmaker Hokusai and by the taste for Japanese art the French called japonisme. Clotho is a gaunt, naked old woman tangled in her own hair, named for the Greek fate who spins the thread of a life.

The Age of Maturity is the one that gets read as autobiography. Three figures: an older woman leads a man away, and a young woman on her knees reaches after him with both arms and does not reach him. The Musée Rodin calls it a bitter allegory of the passing of time and the weight of destiny, and dates it to the period of the break-up. Viewers from the start have read the three figures as Rose Beuret, Rodin and Claudel herself, and her brother Paul Claudel read it that way in print. The reading is not the museum's, and the sculpture is a complete work about ageing and abandonment whether or not the names are attached; but the group was modelled by a woman in her thirties in the years immediately after she was left, and the kneeling figure is the one nobody argues about.

The Musée Camille Claudel dates her period of solitary creation from 1893 to 1908. In it she produced the work she is now judged by, including Perseus and the Gorgon, the only monumental marble she ever made. She was exhibiting and selling, and she was doing it while paying for her own marble, her own casting and her own studio.

1913, and the thirty years

In 1913 Claudel was committed to an asylum. She was forty-eight. She was taken first to Ville-Évrard, east of Paris, and moved in 1914 to Montdevergues, at Montfavet near Avignon in the south, where the remaining twenty-nine years were spent. Her biographer Odile Ayral-Clause records that the commitment was made on her family's application days after her father's death, that the asylum staff more than once judged her well enough to leave, and that the family declined to take her out.

She did not sculpt again. That is the fact to hold on to: not thirty years of a mad artist working in confinement, but thirty years in which a sculptor at the height of her powers made nothing, and knew she was making nothing. She wrote letters asking to be let out. She died at Montdevergues in 1943, aged seventy-nine, having spent the last thirty years of her life in confinement.

Nogent-sur-Seine, 2017

Two museums hold the work. The Musée Rodin in Paris shows around twenty of her sculptures, exceptional for their quality and great rarity, given by her brother Paul Claudel or bought by the museum. And the town of Nogent-sur-Seine, where she first got her hands into clay, now has a museum of her own.

It came about slowly and by a neat piece of circularity. The institution began in 1902 as the Dubois-Boucher museum, founded in his home town by Alfred Boucher — the sculptor who had taught the twelve-year-old Claudel — to show his own work and that of the sculptor Paul Dubois. A Claudel exhibition there in 2003 drew forty thousand visitors in three months and redirected the whole institution. The town bought the house the Claudel family had lived in, and the Perseus and the Gorgon marble, in 2008. The rebuilt Musée Camille Claudel, designed by the architect Adelfo Scaranello, opened in 2017, setting her sculpture among some sixty works borrowed from fifteen institutions so that a visitor can see what French sculpture looked like around her.