As I read again her birthday I could hear Francis saying it is because of that! It is because we have our birthdays in 3 days distance that I like her, that I have her in my heart, that i stand up for her. She is gone, but her essence is all in her works. I receive a lot of strength any time I look at them. I deliver myself to unlimited internal freedom anytime I think of her.
I thought of her again few days ago when passed in front of a modern psychiatric centre, on the road between railway station and the nicest cafee houses with which was enhanced a crossroad in the old city of Limoges.
The therapy centre is dedicated to Camille Claudel and so she came again on the surface of my consciousness.
I did not know about her existance untill the film Camille Claudel came out in the 1988 with Isabell Adjani in the part and herself as co-producer too.
An obsessed artist, obsessed with her art. A cultivated person that brought finess to the previously obvious Yob-iness of Rodin. My father was an admirer of the sculptures of Rodin. When I have seen the film, I have thrown to his face all about Camille against men's chauvinism and 19th century man-dominated society. Soon after I found also a book, 'Le miroir et la nuit' by Gerard Bute, with all about Camille Claudel.
Much later I found out about her brother, an art historian, a fine aesthet of his time. In the film I liked also a detail, the fact that she made her own beautiful and eccentric dress to go to the exhibition salon.
The doctors repeated to her mother to take her out of the clinic, but she died there after 30 years of asylum isolation.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Camille Claudel!
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Comments: 22
I thought of a secondary water path of her soul: Her mother, bigote catholic, her father, immaterial financier ... herself loved stone and terra since her childhood. It makes me think how she wanted to become 'real' through her sculpture; how she tried to capture the world in a three-d form that came out of her expressive hands. She needed the basis, the substance of the stone and plasticity of wet earth to exteriorise herself, to confirm her veritas against the falsity and frugality; her hard hand work, against lies, repression and money moving around without the process of visible work. She has chosen love as sexuality and creativity against social convensions. All came out in her work; her art and her life are flowing in each other.
IUf she put up her voice to protest against her parents, her lover, those in secure positions, she was considered a dangerous mad. certainly, people like her made the break, opened the avenue for us. But if we want to create we still have to go into the narrow path of our own discoveries, our hard efforts, our isolation and concentrated work.
I became interested in her when I heard she was a student of Rodin and Boucher. Hope you don't mind my posting this Alkistis, I don't meant to compete with your article! I am interested in the 'turn of the century' female artists, writers, and poets.
Thank you again for a great article.
Her brother was a respectable art historian and her infame was also disturbing his carrier. The doctor said to her mother that she was very clear in mind both in conversations and when she was doing ehr sdculptures. Ravaging for being ignored was not a condition of mental illness for the doctors but her mother and her brother prefered to keep her locked. her fatrher died before all that started. It costed them also much less tyhan to pay her atelier and for her cloths in Paris.
I am glad I have been received with open arms for ten years in Austria where I ahd exhibitions more than one a year. I will try again as soon as I will not want to keep my paintings just for illustarting my books. And If I get angry and cry nobody calls the ambulance to lock me in. That makes a big difference to that life back in the 19th century.
I like many thigns of the 19th century. but then they are the achievements of the upper middle class and the royal public buildings and museums. I will not ignore either the poverty and unhealthy life for the masses in london and industrial England, neither the way women in the world were pushed down in any effort to show their talents.
a) These are no reasons to characterize a person as mentaly ill
b) consider all the pressures that bring her to such a state: bourjois family, her own upbringing and expectations, her own talent and high skills and then, poverty, silence, abandon ... Mind you, I would take it easier and instead of going on sucking up to this ars ...l of Rodin, i would put two fingers up early enough and not expect anything from him and his click. Did you notice: Not her and nobody else of his students emerged ... And, in the film shows that very soon he said to he that she had more to teach him than to learn from him!
I was telling you of the facts (?) that I found online. Not that I believed them!
I have read much of what women of that era went through for the sake of their art and it is truly shameful what it brought upon them! One of my favorite poets committed suicide and I mourn her, though I only knew her through her writing. She spoke to me in her poetry as Camille spoke to you through her art.
Movies do nothing but entertain people who don't know the true story.
Sorry if you took offense to what I posted, none was meant.
Camille ... my sister, my mother, my friend, my collegue, my self!