Customer Reviews

Camille: The Life of Camille Claudel, Rodin's Muse and Mistress

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I purchased this book to write a paper for a sculpture class. I had bought one other but tossed it aside and spent the majority of my time soaked up in this book. It is full of images of Camille's works as well as some images of Camille herself. Aside from the information about her life before, during, and after Rodin, there are also many personal letters to and from Camille that have been translated into English. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and still spend time looking through it even though that sculpture class is history.

-- and greatest teacher.

Mme. Paris has written a brief but affectionate, even zealous book on the life and career of Camille Claudel. It summarizes her upbringing in a bougeois but emotionally austere houshold. Perhaps she was never encouraged in her art. At least she was never actively discouraged, and did find some creative kinship in her brother Paul.

Her rise was meteoric. By her twenties, she was producing major work of remarkable expressiveness. Art was a man's world then. With its physical demands of stone and foundry work, sculpture was considered the most masculine among arts. Still, Boucher and then Rodin took her on as student and muse. According to Mme. Paris, Rodin's style owes much to Claudel - perhaps acknowledged in his "Eternal Idol," where the male figure kneels in obeisance and passion before the female.

The passion was real. Claudel lived with Rodin for more than a decade, and it has been claimed that his art stultified when she left him. Rodin remained fond of her until he died, but her leaving may have marked the start of Claudel's tragedy. Her mind gradually turned against itself. Irrational fears took command of her life, and her ability to tend her own needs slowly failed. About age forty, she was committed to an asylum for the insane. She never recovered, and died after more than thirty years of custody. Part of this book reproduces the letters from her years of confinement, and correspondence relating to her care.

The small body of work she left documents that tragedy. There's no sign in it of her illness, but her ouvre shows what she was and hints at what she could have become. Her illness stole her talent, not only from herself, but from the world as well.

//wiredweird