The Path of Life of Camille Claudel
The work in question is one of Claudel’s emblematic pieces. It depicts three figures: a kneeling young woman, “the imploring one”, who stretches out her arms in a desperate gesture toward a man of virile build dragged like a wave by an elderly woman with the power to pull him away from her. This composition, like any work of art, lends itself to multiple interpretations, just as plural are the gazes of the one who observes.
When, at the end of September, the art appraiser Matthieu Semont, of the French auction house Philocale, was tasked with carrying out the inventory of an apartment near the Eiffel Tower as part of an inheritance, he found himself entering a place between shadows that had remained uninhabited for fifteen years. Without electricity and full of dust, with the help of his mobile phone’s light he gradually uncovered, behind sheets and plastic bags, furniture and objects. He could never have imagined that in a dark hallway, on a Louis XVI chest of drawers, he would find an exceptional sculpture that had disappeared more than a century ago: The Mature Age by Camille Claudel (1864-1943).
This sculptural group, also known as The Path of Life, was created by the pupil and lover of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) in 1898. A year of rupture in their relationship due to Rodin’s inability to abandon the woman who was by his side his whole life, Rose Beuret, whom he would finally marry two years before dying. This bronze is number one of the six that the art dealer Eugene Blot cast in 1907. And it will be auctioned by the auction house’s branch in Orleans on 16 February. Only three versions survive, one in the Camille Claudel Museum, another in the Musee d’Orsay and the last in the Rodin Museum; the rest are missing. The estimates are very high. Specialists calculate that it could be around two million euros, given that only three are preserved in French museums and it has not been on the art market. We have also been able to observe in recent times how international museums are interested in acquiring works by women artists due to the scarcity in their holdings.
The purity, balance and serene beauty of lines in Neoclassical sculpture, as a reaction to the Baroque and Rococo style, would be accused of being inexpressive and anti-modern by the Romantic current. In this historical period of great changes and overflowing energy, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) bursts onto the scene in a revolutionary way, becoming the symbol of a new visual era. The expressive force, movement and intensity of his sculpture would be followed by Camille Claudel. Existential fleetingness and the passage of time would be concerns manifested in her work, as is the case of The Mature Age.
The work in question is one of Claudel’s emblematic pieces. It depicts three figures: a kneeling young woman, “the imploring one”, who stretches out her arms in a desperate gesture toward a man of virile build dragged like a wave by an elderly woman with the power to pull him away from her. This composition, like any work of art, lends itself to multiple interpretations, just as plural are the gazes of the one who observes. But in this case it is difficult to strip the work of the biographical events that took place at the moment of its creation and of Camille’s pure thought that permeates this entire work: the separation between Claudel and Rodin caused by Auguste’s determination not to abandon Rose Beuret. It is inevitable not to see in this representation the universal manifestation of the heartrending pain of a passion that slips away.
Camille Claudel is a symbol of tragic destiny. A woman endowed with great beauty and genius, of independent character, powerful courage and talent, she lived in a society in which women were relegated to a situation of inferiority and defenselessness. A romantic life, marked by her passionate relationship with a titan of sculpture such as Rodin, who succumbed to her beauty and talent, dazzled by her ideas and visual skill, which ended up powerfully penetrating the work of her master. She had a tragic destiny, being forcibly confined by her mother and brother in a psychiatric hospital where she remained shut away and abandoned for the last thirty years of her life.
“Of the dream that has been my life, this is the nightmare”, she wrote to her faithful friend Eugene Blot from the mental institution of Montdevergues on 24 May 1935.
– The Path of Life of Camille Claudel – – Alejandra de Argos –
