Camille Claudel, Rodin's Muse, Vanished for Thirty Years

Sometimes someone says something to us that, for some reason, imprints itself in our memory, and you remember it decades later.

I can still see and feel the scene when Helen told me, “One day, you will see how you will start to fade to black in the eyes of others.”

She wasn’t wrong.

I couldn’t tell you when I started to realize how, because I was an older woman.

Still, I could tell you that somewhere along the line, I started to notice the accumulating disregard, disinterest from some people, and, in some instances, full willful ignorance of my presence.

How can someone willfully ignore me?

How about being at a quaint outside terrace of a Greek taverna in Crete and asking for an order, only to be fully ignored by a young waiter?

There’s no noise but for the gentle whispering breeze.

Still, he doesn’t hear my strong New York voice ordering an iced tea, but he can hear my husband, who orders it for me in a lower tone.

In my quest to uncover and learn about the female artists who have been mostly forgotten, I realized that Camille Claudel most certainly didn’t lose her mind.

Yet, her name was almost entirely erased from art history.

Claudel was Auguste Rodin’s student, and then she became his lover, and finally ended up in an asylum for 30 years because she became an inconvenience.

There comes a point in a woman’s journey, if she is fortunate to reach a certain age, where she sees that, at times, she may be viewed as a pesky inconvenience.

Sometimes, there’s nothing more annoying than a woman past her prime, with her wrinkled, furrowed brow, not remaining quiet as she used to do when she was younger and served others.

For Claudel, her “sin” came in her inconvenience.

She was a gifted, prodigious sculptor who studied under Rodin by her twenties. She moved from Champagne, France, to Paris to study in his studio.

Let’s remember that the art world of the latter half of the 19^th century wasn’t one where women were celebrated, regardless of their artistic talent.

Still, Claudel entered Rodin’s studio, then collaborated with him, pressing her fingers into his works, and then became his lover.

Romances are often complicated, and this affair, which lasted about fifteen years, was true to form. Rodin never left his longtime partner, Rose Beuret, for Claudel.

But during those years, his artistic power, name, and connections grew, while her artistic leverage grew only through her association with Rodin.

Rodin himself credited her as the muse behind some of his finest works, but in her thirties, she began claiming that he was stealing her work without attribution.

Eventually, she broke with him as an artistic collaborator and lover, which ended any funding she could have received for her works and ideas.

Unfortunately, she grew paranoid and stated that Rodin stole her ideas, but this remains a matter of debate.

However, when her father died, who was her protector, her brother, Paul, and her mother committed Claudel to a psychiatric asylum.

Whatever psychological breakdown or episode she may have experienced at the collapse of her relationship with Rodin, the belief that he had stolen her works, and the passing of her guardian and father, she remained behind the asylum walls until she died in 1943.

What is worse is that during the thirty years she spent institutionalized, the doctors repeatedly recommended that she be released, only for her family to refuse to do so.

And more painfully, she begged for her release in letters to her family and stated she would never sculpt again, but not even that could move them.

Thirty years.

How can a family keep a daughter and sister who doctors said should not be institutionalized behind those walls for thirty years?

Could it have been their shame of what she said…once…or could say again in relation to Rodin stealing her works?

After all, Rodin was a renowned artist.

Was it to erase an inconvenient truth in the form of Camille Claudel?

I think of all the years I spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where one of Rodin’s The Thinkers sits.

How many times have I passed the sculptor, especially when my daughter was little, and we spent an afternoon there?

I always loved it, but candidly, I didn’t know about Camille Claudel at the time.

I only knew of Auguste Rodin—the great sculptor.

But in looking at Claudel’s works now, I see her genius and versatility.

When I return to France, I hope to have the opportunity to visit the Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent-sur-Seine, which opened in 2017.

Still, I can’t help but think that the next time I see a work by Rodin, I won’t immediately think of Claudel and the reality that she was kept behind asylum walls for no other reason than the fact that she was inconveniently difficult.

One day, I will likely sit at a table and be ignored by a waiter again, only to have my husband order for me.

Perhaps my mind will flash to Claudel.

A moment of insignificance for me, but fortunately, I know myself now, and I long since found my way back to my inner self and strength.

Claudel had thirty years of deliberate invisibility, and she never got the chance behind asylum walls.

She never sculpted again, saying she was “in no mood to be deceived any longer by the crafty devil”—Rodin.

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