Katy Hessel on the Pioneering Sculptor Camille Claudel

“Excuse the dust on my blouse. For it is I myself who carves the marble…” stated sculptor Camille Claudel to a journalist who visited her Paris studio at the turn of the 20th century. 

Historically, to be able to carve marble was one of the most difficult artistic skills (in every way). Not only did you have to have acute knowledge of the body (and hire such models to study from), but also strength, stamina, often a large studio with assistants, and a wealthy patron who could afford a giant marble block for you to chisel away at. 

Unsurprisingly, this was very difficult for women. It took until the 1890s for them to be allowed to study the nude figure ‘from life’ (an essential training for someone who wanted to ‘sculpt’ the body) and rarely did they run studios with assistants. Marble was extortionately expensive, and, in terms of patronage, they had little market success (still today, a woman’s work fetches, on average, at just 10% of the price of a man’s). 

Yet, working predominantly on their own, some women, like the great Claudel, succeeded. 

Born in 1864 in a small town outside Paris, Claudel, even as a child, liked to play “artist’s studios”, where she instructed her siblings to pose for her and act as her team of assistants. Her talent (and drive) was evident, so, in 1881, (not unlike the Swift Family for Taylor) the Claudels got up and moved to Paris, then the artistic capital of the world. 

At the time, women were still banned from studying at the most prestigious school of the day, the École des Beaux-Arts, but smaller academies such as the Colarossi and Julian accepted women (Claudel attended the former). Renting and sharing a studio with a group of young art students following her studies, she began to form her sculptural language: emotive, intimate, and full of psychological-depth. 

Her early sculptures were of her family, such as her brother Paul, who she captured as stoic and dignified. Back then, she only had access to cheaper materials, like plaster, but painted it brown and gold (with hints of green) to give it an ancient bronze effect. 

At aged 19 or 20, she met Auguste Rodin, the pre-eminent French sculptor of the time, who would go on to be her collaborator and lover. In the late 1880s, she sculpted him in bust-like form. You can tell that she admired him: look at how intimate and emotionally attentive her portrayal of him is. From the pronounced forehead (evoking his wisdom) to the depth of his nose, every hand-carved mark feels like an emblem of her love. 

(While Rodin also captured likenesses of her, they were, to my mind, somewhat colder. It should also be noted, that unlike Claudel, Rodin never carved a single marble in his life.)

Her passionate works continued. In 1893, she made The Waltz, of two lovers dancing, emerging from (or into) a sea or twisted flames, entwined in their embrace – suggesting a love both uniting and fading. 

Or Sakuntala, of a kneeling man with his arms raised up to his female lover. Their heads are conjoined, with the front of his face moulded into her (or perhaps whispering something in her ear), while she turns towards us. Her eyes are closed as her hand rests on her heart. The work takes its name from a play of the same by the 4th/5th Indian poet and playwright, Kālidāsa, and captures the moment the couple are reunited. 

Like so many women artists, Claudel has often been overshadowed by her male lover. Despite her influence on Rodin, critics continued to position her as his follower. Her frustration at this injustice led to her distancing herself from him and taking her work in a new direction. However, following this departure, Rodin and his community cut her off, cementing her outcast status in a tight-knit art world. 

While I can only speculate, the sculpture I find most fascinating is her Perseus and the Gorgon, that pictures the famous moment in the Ovid tale at the point when Perseus decapitates Medusa. Tellingly, Claudel modelled the Medusa on her own face. Not only does this speak to Medusa as a sculptor (as she had the power to ‘turn people to stone’), but I also see it as an act of silencing a powerful woman, who was denied agency and used against her own will. 

In 1913, Claudel entered an asylum, where she remained until her death in 1943, almost entirely alone having been visited by her family a handful of times. 

Although her brother staged a posthumous exhibition of her work eight years after her death, it was derided and dismissed. Her work was not taken seriously again until after the feminist era, in the 1980s. And only in the last few years has her work reached new heights of acclaim, thanks to exhibitions last year at the Art Institute of Chicago and Getty, in LA.