Claudel and Rodin in Quebec. The Musée national des beaux-arts has high hopes for its exhibition Camille Claudel and Rodin: fateful encounter (26 May-11 September). The last show on the French sculptor at the museum in 1998, "Rodin in Québec", attracted a record 525,000 visitors. This examination of the personal and professional aspects of the relationship between the two French artists, who were lovers, is billed as the first North American show to present their works side by side. Most of the 140 sculptures and 150 archival documents and photographs are on loan from the Musée Rodin in Paris.
The curators, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain of the Musée Rodin and Yves Lacasse of the host museum, have grouped the works into five sections with overly sentimental and deliberately populist titles: "Before meeting"; "Happiness", "Stormy times", "Emancipation" and "You were his only love".
Camille Claudel born in a modest family, sister of the famous writer Paul Claudel(1868-1955 ), Camille was born to Fere-en-Tardenois on December 8, 1864. She spent a part of her childhood to Villeneuve-sur-Fere ( Aisne) in the family house where was born Paul. She decided very early to become a sculptor; she went to Paris in 1881, sure of her fate and her beauty.
"A magnificent forehead, overhanging magnificent eyes, this rare blue so rare to meet somewhere else that in novels ", noted Paul in 1951.
In 1883, she meets Rodin and joins his studio the next year. Very fast the bright pupil becomes the love of Rodin, then in full effervescence with the creation of the "Door of the Hell" and the "Bourgeois of Calais".
The most profoundly original part of Camille's work is situated in the bend of this rising century when, with among others the "Conversationalists" (1897) and the Wave (1900), it approaches a new style stemming from the then fashionable japonisme and profoundly anchored in Art nouveau. Using the onyx, the rare building material, she bases the compositions on elegant games of curves; Camille is then a sculptor in relation with the art of her time. Regrettably, the disease of the maddness increase.
Rodin did not remove his support for Camille, even when their personal relation was in the lowest.
In 1913 madness becomes more marked, she is then interned to Montfavet and where she lived until she died 30 years later.
Image: "Vertumne et Pomone", Claudel (1905)
May 2005
