A sculptress who carved sensuality from stone

MUSE, model and modeller, Camille Claudel was above all an Impressionist in three dimensions. This much is evident from a small, jewel-like exhibition that opened recently in a 19th-century Paris mansion, home to an incomparable gallery of Monets. Claudel's work reflects and reverberates with light, and she shares with the painter from Giverny a particular ability to capture natural forms and atmospheric moments in art.

Claudel's gift was her innate talent for creating sensual sculptures that pulse with life and seem to defy gravity. Her tragedy was to break all the rules of bourgeois society. Octave Mirabeau, a French writer, was astonished at Claudel's artistic genius, a talent that women at the time were thought not to possess. When Mirabeau wrote that Claudel was a “revolt against nature”, he meant it as a compliment.

Claudel's childhood love of modelling was nourished in school and she made powerful portrait busts of her family while still an adolescent. When her father, a provincial bureaucrat, moved his children to Paris in 1881 to further their education, a family friend exclaimed: “You must have studied with Monsieur Rodin.”

Claudel had yet to meet France's most famous sculptor; only later would her fame rest on their liaison. Twenty-four years Claudel's senior, Auguste Rodin took her on as an assistant in 1884, turning her into his model and mistress by the time she was 20. Rodin was at first besotted with her, and vowed to take no other student. He introduced her to the Paris beau monde and she gained prominent patrons. Famously, he wrote: “I showed her where to find gold, but the gold was within her.”

Claudel, on the other hand, gave him her life and her youth. Working daily in his studio, she created many of the figures in Rodin's most famous works, including “The Gates of Hell” and “The Burghers of Calais”. Rodin's art was rejuvenated by their love affair, with intertwined erotic couples appearing in his art after their relationship began. Theirs was a union of art, mind and body; the affair is the centrepiece of another small show in Detroit. Rodin promised to marry her, but he never did. In 1898 they separated when he refused to leave his long-term mistress Rose Beuret, an older woman who managed his studio and cared for him in his old age.

From this point on, Claudel's life begins to read like a Russian novel. Wracked with depression, yet still proud of her talent, Claudel took her own studio. But many of her patrons deserted her when she broke with Rodin, and official commissions were scarce without his connections. She fell into debt; in 1913, her neighbours began to complain of a madwoman in the basement, and her mother had nurses sent from a local asylum to take her away.

Rodin, though, never lost sight of Claudel's importance as an artist. A year later, while he was creating his Paris museum, he reserved a space for work by Claudel, which can still be viewed there today. Claudel, however, never saw the final result. She remained locked up, despite doctors' reports that she had recovered, until her death in 1943. Terrified of never being set free, Claudel wrote to her brother, by then a poet of some renown: “The dream that was my life has become a nightmare.”

Claudel's letters are particularly moving when contrasted with her expressive sculptures that evoke both pain and joy. She refers to her exquisite Perseus holding the head of Medusa as “he who kills without looking”. As you look at this Greek hero who defeated madness with reason, gazing at his conquest only in a mirror (looking at her directly would have killed him), the gorgon's features seem to resemble those of their artist-creator.

Claudel's work fights against sculpture's static nature. Light flickers across her supple forms and enigmatic spaces open up between figures, forcing the viewer to examine her pieces from every angle. This is most apparent in the room devoted to eight different versions of her most famous work, “The Waltz”, among the most erotic pieces in western art. A semi-naked couple is swept up in a whirlpool of music and passion, she swaying into his arms, while his arm encircles her, twirling them endlessly on in seemingly helpless fusion.

For more than 30 years Claudel's great niece, Reine-Marie Paris, has worked to retrieve the sculptress from oblivion, uncovering art and correspondence that was scattered across Europe. Most of the work in this show belongs to her. Claudel fits well into the Musée Marmottan's programme of exhibitions, which has been devoted to women artists of the 19th century, such as Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalez. But this exhibition is a disappointment. The museum presents Claudel's work accompanied by a few photographs, a brief chronology of her life and a mawkish film, without investigating her talent as an artist or attempting to understand how and why she made each piece. Quotes from Rodin and her brother, Paul, are scattered about the show, but there is little of Claudel's writing on display, even though her correspondence has been published and is for sale in the bookshop. It seems unjust that Claudel should still be seen but not heard. After all these years, surely she deserves better. (From The Economist print edition. Jan 5th 2006 | PARIS)