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WOW2: December 2023 Women Trailblazers and Activists – 12-1 thru 12-8 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-12-02
December 8, 1864 – Camille Claudel born, notable French sculptor; studied at the Académie Colarossi, one of the few art schools open to women, and with sculptor Alfred Boucher, who became her mentor. When Boucher moved to Florence, he asked Auguste Rodin to take over instruction of his students. Claudel and Rodin became lovers, and around 1884, she began working in his workshop, and sometimes as his model. But he never gave up his relationship with Rose Beuret, a seamstress who was his son’s mother. In 1892, Claudel had an abortion, and ended their sexual relationship, but still worked with Rodin until 1898, especially after her father’s death, when her family stopped the financial assistance her father had given her. She needed Rodin’s financial aid to continue her work, and sometimes had to collaborate with him in order to bring her ideas to fruition, then let him take the credit for their work. She is regarded as a woman genius, an equal in talent to the better-known painter Berthe Morisot. In 1899, she produced a sculpture entitled The Mature Age. When Rodin saw it, he was shocked and angry, and suddenly and completely stopped all his support for Claudel. After 1905, Claudel appeared to be mentally ill, destroying many of her sculptures, disappearing for long periods of time, and showing signs of paranoia. She accused Rodin of stealing her ideas and plotting to kill her. By 1906, she was living as a recluse in her workshop. In 1913, her brother Paul arranged for her to be committed to the psychiatric hospital of Ville-Évrard in Neuilly-sur-Marne. Although the form said she had been "voluntarily" committed, her admission was signed only by a doctor and her brother. Apparently, she was still lucid while working on her art. Doctors tried to convince Paul and their mother that Camille did not need to be in the institution, but her mother and brother were adamant that she remain confined. For a while, the press accused her family of committing a sculptor of genius. Her mother never visited, and her brother only came to see her seven times in 30 years. In 1929, sculptor Jessie Lipscomb, who shared a workshop with Claudel before she met Rodin, visited her, and afterwards insisted "it was not true" that Claudel was insane. Camille Claudel died in October 1943, after 30 years in the asylum. Her remains were buried in a cemetery, but after 10 years, they were re-buried in a communal grave at the asylum, mixed with the bones of the most destitute. The Musée Camille Claudel was opened in March, 2017, as a French national museum dedicated to Claudel's work. It is located in Nogent-sur-Seine, where she lived as a teenager. It displays approximately half of Claudel's 90 surviving works.
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