Exhibit of the week
Art Institute of Chicago, through Feb. 19
Camille Claudel has finally been awarded a showcase exhibition, and “we should all be thankful,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. The French sculptor (1864-1943) hasn’t been granted comparable attention in the U.S. in 35 years, and this gathering of nearly 60 works “makes a powerful case for her importance.” Was Claudel a genius? Her work, unfortunately, has always been overshadowed by the drama of her life: She was a student of Auguste Rodin who became his lover, and her career was cut short in her 40s by mental illness. But seeing most of her best work in one place does establish that she was brilliant. A couple of her works, including the two embracing figures in
The Waltz, “feel intensely modern in their abstract audacity.” Many of the sculptures are “powerfully expressive of deep emotion, charged with palpable eroticism, and enlivened by vectors of thrusting energy.”
If life had been fairer to Claudel, we’d be discussing her as “one of the most brilliant and celebrated sculptors in history,” said Frank Geiser in New City Art. Instead, she aspired to be a sculptor “in a time when it was almost unthinkable for a woman to do so,” in part because of the need to work with nude models. Claudel was already sculpting when she moved to Paris at 17 to study. At 19, she was working in Rodin’s studio, and she quickly transitioned from just another student to a collaborator and lover. Rodin was 24 years her senior and hugely successful, so we can’t ignore the power dynamic in their relationship. When Claudel was 22, Rodin was already promising to leave his longtime partner for her, but he reneged, and Claudel distanced herself from him, commencing a gradual slide into poverty that intensified with her descent into mental illness. In 1913, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she remained until her death. Today, her story “strongly resonates with an audience frustrated by museums celebrating the same tired cohort of white male artists.”
The Art Institute’s Claudel show is “in no way just some empty, quota-filling exercise in diversity and inclusion,” said Kyle MacMillan in the Chicago Sun-Times. Although she “never reached her full potential” because of sexual discrimination and her shortened career, she was “a significant, forward-looking sculptor,” recognized in her time by both patrons and critics. This “stunning” exhibition, which will travel to the Getty in Los Angeles next year, “includes abundant examples of Claudel’s technical sophistication in modeling and constructing her works,” from her simple but compelling early works to Age of Maturity, a “climactic” 1902 bronze. Only three Rodin pieces have been included, letting Claudel hold the spotlight. “Clearly, she is ready for prime time.”