Relationships between male artists and their wives or lovers can be fraught. Think of Francoise Gilot and Pablo Picasso or Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera or Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.
Artistic identities can become intertwined and confused. Worse, the woman’s talents can be suppressed, as was true with French Impressionist Marie Bracquemond, who abandoned painting in 1890 in large part because of resentment from her husband, the noted printmaker Félix Bracquemond.
Few artists have suffered more in this regard than Camille Claudel (1864-1943), an assistant, adviser, muse and, yes, lover of Auguste Rodin. She fell under the shadow of the celebrated, influential French sculptor, and her work never has fully escaped it.
A stunning, impeccably researched solo exhibition, which opened Saturday and runs through Feb. 19 at the Art Institute of Chicago, achieves what few such offerings have before. It sets aside her romantic entanglement with Rodin and her tragic personal life, which has been the subject of movies and all manner of other retellings, and examines Claudel’s artistic output on its own terms.
“I think, in this moment where we are redressing the historical lack of inclusion of women artists in museums, it felt like the right time,” said Emerson Bowyer, curator of painting and sculpture of Europe at the Art Institute.
That said, this is in no way just some empty, quota-filling exercise in diversity and inclusion. Though her work was recognized in her time by critics, patrons and fellow artists, she never reached her full potential because of sexual discrimination and her abandonment of art-making during the last 30 years of her life, following her institutionalization for mental illness.
But if Claudel was not able attain the level of accomplishment or impact of Rodin or certain other artists of her time, she still was a significant, forward-looking sculptor who only now is getting the recognition she deserves.
This new exhibition, titled simply “Camille Claudel,” features 58 sculptures, including studies and completed works in terra cotta, plaster, stone and bronze. It was organized by Boyer and Anne-Lise Desmas at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where it will travel later next year.
Any doubts about Claudel’s talent and skill are set aside right at the beginning, with the presentation of two versions of “Young Roman,” a bust in which she depicts her brother Paul. He comes across as very human, with an intriguingly faraway look in his eyes.
One of these is an 1887 bronze casting, and the other is an 1882/83-87 plaster that Claudel painted with layers of red, brown, yellow and green to suggest an ancient patina. The latter piece, acquired by the Art Institute in 2022, is her first work in the collection.
Because of the shortness of Claudel’s working life and the sculptor’s destruction of some of what she produced, the number of extant works is limited. So Bowyer had to work to find and acquire one of this quality. Even with that addition, still only seven American museums own works by her.
The exhibition includes abundant examples of Claudel’s technical sophistication in modeling and constructing her works, including the climactic 1902 bronze cast titled “Age of Maturity” from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The 45-inch-tall group of three figures is suffused with a palpable sense of drama and movement.
Some of the arguably most compelling works are some of her earlier, and, in some ways, simpler ones. And none is more striking than “Crouching Woman” (ca. 1884-85), with its startlingly kind of turned-in, almost anatomically impossible crouching pose.
This clash of the naturalistic and non-naturalistic in this 14¾-inch-tall plaster piece, which is related to a slightly earlier piece by Rodin, gives it a modern feel that looks ahead to Constantin Brancusi and others.
Indeed, Claudel’s sense of proto-modernity explains why she is the first artist working before 1900 to be shown in a first-floor gallery in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, which typically hosts contemporary art exhibitions.
The gallery has just two main rooms, but Bowyer has done a masterful job of dividing it into smaller thematic sections so that it feels bigger, and the curved partitions echo and accent the in-the-round three-dimensionality of these works.
The last major exhibition featuring Claudel in the United States, in 2005-06, had the title, “Camille Claudel and Rodin: Fateful Encounter.” This time, it is just Claudel front and center. Clearly, she is ready for prime time.
