Interest in the work and life of the late-nineteenth-century French sculptor Camille Claudel is making a new set of rounds in the art world and popular culture. Much of Claudel’s professional career was haunted by the public opinion that her work was supplemental to popular and famous works of the sculptor Auguste Rodin, who had been her mentor as well as her lover for over a decade. To be sure, his work did constitute a critcal influence in her development as an artist, but after having apprenticed and worked in Rodin’s studio for over a decade she felt the need to get out from under his shadow. This, as well as his refusal to give up his mistress Rose Beuret, lead to a bitter break up with him in 1898. Attempting to set up her own studio and career without male support (whether it came from the public credibility that Rodin lent to her work, or from her father who died in 1913) proved to be too difficult in a male-dominated and sexist society. This resulted in tragic conditions of isolation and poverty that eventually led to her institutionalization.

        Bruno Nyutten’s 1989 film features Claudel as Rodin’s muse and lover, focusing on her sex appeal and romantic scandal more than the expressive innovations she forged in her work. A more feminist-oriented 2013 film by French director Bruno Dumont—Camille Claudel 1915—focuses on Claudel’s first two years in a mental asylum accounting the despair and agony of her confinement. The intense drama of her life has been a consistent theme in popular culture, but often at the expense of understanding the expressive singularity of her artwork and how it developed. This recent exhibit of 60 of her sculptures at the Art Institute of Chicago, out of only 90 in existence, brings a much-needed in-depth engagement with the work itself, revealing the true innovations she forged that popular culture treatments consistently ignored.

 

 

        The exhibit opens with Young Roman (1882-3), a portrait of her brother Paul offering a serious frontal gaze and a thoughtful psychic fixation behind the eyes. The psychological depth in her portraits is quite distinctive, reflecting the same intense gaze that can be seen in Ceasar Stengner’s 1884 photo of Claudel in the exhibit. In fact, all her busts are laced with a sense of pensiveness and inwardness, sometimes masking a provocative defiance within. Giganti or Head of a Brigand (1885) is particularly forceful with its expression of audacious self-confidence, even as it bears a mysterious sense of inward thought in its gaze.

 

 

        Included in the exhibit, Rodin’s Crouching Woman (1880–82) presents a woman glancing, her face off to her right while exposing her opened thighs and breasts, suggesting an object of male sexual desire. By contrast, Claudel’s Crouching Woman (1884-85) evokes an intense emotional vulnerability and subjectivity. The expressive contraction of the woman’s body is heightened by the protective sheltering of her face cradled within her bent arms, as though preparing to ward off some unknown threat. The defensive foreboding in this remarkable figure is underscored in Torso of a Crouching Woman (1884-85) with a figure in the same pose but with head, arms, and one knee lopped off, as though to show the resulting violence from which her Crouching Woman was trying to protect herself.

 

 

        Claudel’s Man Stooping (1886) presents a male figure in a similar crouching protective pose that elaborately entwines his arms and legs. He has a pensive and wistful face, as well as expressive rib muscles sensitively rendered on his slender back. This emotional treatment contrasts with the elastic muscular modeling on the back of Rodin’s famous sculpture, The Thinker (1904)(not in the exhibit). Rather than creating a heroic mythical symbolization of “thought” the way Rodin does, Claudel evokes a sophisticated mood of subjective inwardness and isolation.

 

 

        Claudel’s famous The Waltz series (1885–1905) portrays a male and female couple dancing in a mesmeric circle as an abstract skirt of liquid bronze entwines their bodies, as if to symbolize the irrational and heedless emotional torrent which love brings. In the exceptionally complex version of The Waltz (with Veils) (1893), masses of flowing molten metal surrounding the couple both cover and expose the limbs and backs of the figures, even forming a nebulous wave above their heads. Claudel’s innovation is presented in how she conveys intense emotion through this almost incoherent tangle of bodies and abstraction, expressing the passionate intensity of what being in love can feel like.

 

 

        Her masterpiece marble sculpture Vertumnus and Pomona (1905), based on the ancient Indian myth of Sakuntala, portrays a young couple with a man kneeling and embracing a seated woman who swoons in a state of entranced unconsciousness. Once again, the complex rhythmic composition of limbs creating the embrace, as well as the rigorously rendered slender musculature of the figures, sets Claudel’s intimately subjective approach apart from Rodin’s heroic style and muscular rendering.

 

 

        The Implorer (1898–99) depicts a young woman kneeling with outstretched arms who is also depicted in the three figure work entitled The Age of Maturity (1899). This remarkable sculpture is interpreted as an allegory of Claudel’s break up with her lover Rodin over his refusal to stop seeing his long-time mistress, Rose Beuret. The young woman reaches for the hand of her older lover who is being pulled away by a grotesque, elderly woman. This old crone who resembles Claudel’s figure Clotho (1893) (not in the exhibit) symbolizes one of the three fates of Greek mythology who spins the thread of human life before it is cut. In modern feminist terms, The Age of Maturity is also a reflection of the hypocritical oppression that women have typically endured, where authoritarian social standards and patriarchal sexual conventions consign women to positions of powerlessness and shame as second-class citizens.

        The framework of this exhibition made me aware of a distinctive quality in Claudel’s work that differed significantly from Rodin’s: the intensity of the gazes of her subjects and the depth of emotional connection in her couples. Whereas Rodin’s famous sculpture The Kiss (1882) (not in the exhibit) focuses on the physical intensity of sensual experience between male and female, Claudel’s couples emanate a powerful sense of subjective intimacy that is unmistakably different. Art historically speaking, comparing Rodin and Claudel’s works demonstrates a significant difference in the way men and women address emotion and physicality through the body and sexuality. An interesting way of interpreting this comparison is described in Louann Brizendine’s 2007 groundbreaking study, The Female Brain, whichis based on scientific research revealing how testosterone develops parts of the male brain to be more focused on sex and aggression, whereas female brain development devotes more growth to areas of communication and processing emotion. This results in profound differences in how men and women correlate emotion and sex drive.

        Under a microscope of an fMRI scan the differences between male and female brains are revealed to be complex and widespread, in the brain centers for language and hearing for example women have 11% more neurons than men. The principle of both emotion and memory formation— the hippo campus—is also larger in the female brain… women are, on average, better at expressing emotions and remembering the details of emotional events. Men, by contrast have 2 1/2 times the brain spaced devoted to sexual drive as well as larger brain centers for action and aggression.1

 

(Left) Camille Claudel, Young Girl with a Sheaf (1887). Terracotta, 15.75 x 7 x 6.25 inches. Musée Rodin, Paris. (Right) August Rodin, Galatea (1888). Marble, 23.9 x 16 inches. Musée Rodin, Paris. Photos Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago.

 

        This study provides a means of interpreting the psychological difference between Rodin’s and Claudel’s depiction of women and sexuality. For example, the face of Claudel’s Young Girl with A Sheaf (1887) shows a delicate inwardness and vulnerability, reflecting her sexual awakening—with closed eyes and a half open mouth which seems to be on the verge of divulging a mysterious secret. Rodin’s Galatea (1888), inspired by Claudel’s sculpture, has a more impersonal face, presenting an older adult woman with closed lips. His objectified version of symbolic womanhood contrasts with Claudel’s depiction of mindful self-possession, expressing how women feel when emotions of love and desire awaken. Claudel’s marble sculpture, The Chatterboxes (1896-98), also forcefully portrays women’s intense capacity for emotional connection. Three women listen in rapt attention to a fourth who seems to be relating a mysterious secret. All are deeply connected in an intense and intimate bond of mutual communication.

        Many have commented on the emotional intensity of the male-female bond Claudel expressed in masterworks such as the Waltz series or Vertumnus and Pomona. Brizendine’s study describes how women tend to bond with their male partner after even a single sexual encounter, whereas men do not necessarily. Women have larger areas in the brain dedicated to gut feelings—which can lead to greater sensitivity reading emotions in others and in themselves and also why they have the need to be close when they bond with a male partner. According to Brizendine:

        Men’s self-esteem derives more from their ability to maintain independence from others, while women’s self-esteem is maintained in part by the ability to sustain intimate relationships with others. As a result, perhaps the greatest source of stress in the women’s or girl’s brain can be the fear of losing intimate relationships, and the lack of vital social support that might ensue.2

        This helps explain the profound emotional anguish expressed in The Age of Maturity, which signals Claudel’s deep anxiety over her separation from Rodin. Indeed, the lack of vital social support for Claudel did ensue, eventually leading to poverty, isolation, and mental illness. Her condition proved so severe she ended up destroying many of her sculptures, part of the reason why so few exist today.

        Unfortunately for Claudel, she did not live in an era when feminism was part of social awareness. The oppressiveness of French society denied the development of consciousness about women’s experience and subjective reality, which makes the emotional and subjective achievement of her work all the more profound and courageous for its time. It was only with the rise of feminist activism and liberation in the 1960s, inspired by Simone De Beauvoir’s groundbreaking work of feminist philosophy, The Second Sex (1949), that women sculptors like Louise Bourgeois would come to prominence in the 1970s. This in-depth retrospective for Claudel reveals her consummate skill–engaging public audiences with an intensity that is rare to find in today’s post-skilled artworld. Overall, this also places Claudel’s work in a unique and even radical position within Western art history. As a highly skilled artist, she was able to transmute the complex and the profound psychological truth and sexual reality of the female body and mind as few had ever done before. Her work disrupts the near ubiquitous historical tradition of the female body as a sexualized object of the male gaze and patriarchal power. It is also a testament to the truth of women’s psychological and sexual reality that stands as a breakthrough for women’s consciousness, defying centuries of patriarchal oppression and ignorance—a change which has only recently come to be understood both within recent scientific study and the larger social consciousness.

 

1. 1. Louann Brizendine M.D, The Female Brain, Morgan Road Books, 2006 p. 5

1. 1. Ibid, p.41

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She is a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant Recipient who exhibits internationally. Her work is in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the National Hellenic Museum, the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Illinois Holocaust Museum, among many others. For more information, visit dianethodos.com.