In his own words, Auguste Rodin – one of the most prominent sculptors
of the nineteenth century – was like a moon that shone on an immense, unknown
sea where ships never passed. He was born in 1840 in Paris in a family with a modest
background, and his artistic interests – centered on pencils and clays – were
supported by his father. In his late adolescence, he was refused thrice admission
to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris’s leading school of art, because of his early
old-fashioned taste in arts. He belonged to traditional school of sculpture,
while judges at the Ecole had Neoclassical taste. The refusal, however, turned
out to be a blessing in disguise for the artist in order to be what he became known
for later in his life.
Known to be a naturalist, Rodin believed conflict and
suffering to be trademarks of modern arts. This helped him depart with the
traditional Greek idealism of sculpture and monumental expression in his works and
focus more on emotion and character. Immensely renowned for a wide range of his
works, including The Thinker, The Age of Bronze, The Walking Man, The Burghers
of Calais, The Gates of Hell and The Kiss, Rodin, in his heyday, was associated
habitually with high-profile artists, intellectuals and social influencers. His
social circle included Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the eminent French Impressionist
painter, and Claude Monet, a founder of French Impressionist painting, with whom
he shared a lifelong friendship. Rodin said that it was Monet who helped him comprehend
clouds, light, sea and cathedrals.
"Nothing, really, is more moving than the maddened
beast, dying from unfulfilled desire and asking in vain for grace to quell its
passion." While Rodin may have professed this to express the importance of
suffering and emotions in his works, his statement somewhat depicts the circumstance
of Camille Claude – Rodin’s muse, assistant and mistress – in his life. Camille
met Rodin when she was seventeen, and he forty-two or forty-three.
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| Copy of Rodin's 'The Kiss' at Rodin Museum in Philadelphia |
The duo, in their more than ten years of affairs, formed an
intense but blustery relationship and artistically impacted each other. Camille
served as a model for several of Rodin’s works and assisted him on various assignments,
becoming his most talented pupil. However, her intense relationship with Rodin
was eclipsed by the latter’s unwavering association with Rose Beuret – Rodin’s
lifelong partner – who he eventually married a few weeks before her death.
Camille’s exasperation with Rodin’s refusal to abandon Rose finally led to separation
between the master sculptor and his pupil in 1898, years after which Camille suffered
a mental breakdown.
"I have fallen into an
abyss. I live in a world so curious, so strange. Of the dream that was my life,
this is my nightmare." - Camille Claudel
While there
may not be any equivalence between Camille’s tragic love and melancholic
elements and connotations of Rodin’s hugely famous work The Kiss, which depicted
the illicit love between Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta in thirteenth century
Italy, it’s worth reflecting on. Francesca, a high-class woman, falls in love
with her husband's younger brother Paolo, and both of whom are stabbed to death
by Francesca’s husband while the couple reads a book on courtly love. Rodin, in
his work, depicts the moment before the two lovers intended to kiss each other;
Paolo also holds the book in his hand, in the sculpture. Almost equally ailing was
Camille’s romance with Rodin.
Following her
separation with Rodin, Camille’s mental health worsened over several years. She
escaped Rodin’s umbra but succumbed to a nervous breakdown. In 1913, her family
confined her to a mental asylum and later to a psychiatric hospital where she
remained for around thirty years until her death. In her seclusion, she rarely
received any visitors; Camille’s mother refused to see her daughter again,
while her brother visited only occasionally in thirty years.
Rodin had
always shown his desire that there would be a room showcasing Camille’s works when
a museum dedicated to his own work started in Paris. The Rodin Museum was inaugurated
in 1919, two years after Rodin’s death. However, Rodin’s wish to have a Camille
Claudel room in the museum took more than thirty years to materialise; in 1952,
Camille’s brother donated four major sculptors by her to the museum.
Recently, in a major recognition to the sculptress’
talent, a museum entirely dedicated to her, the national Camille Claudel Museum,
opened earlier this year in the north-central French town of Nogent-sur-Seine. Although
Camille destroyed several of her sculptures when she was alive (“I took all my
wax studies and threw them in the fire... that's the way it is when something
unpleasant happens to me. I take my hammer and I squash a figure.”), the newly
opened museum boasts of a collection of around 90 of her works, dispelling the gloom
of isolation and obscurity that besieged her entire personal and artistic life
more than a hundred years ago.
