“Genius is female and it terrifies the viewer,” states an old epitaph.
The sounds of stones echo in the abyss filled with bent sculptures. The marble is streaked, waiting for the viewers to feel its smoothness on their faces, it chases the dust. It doesn’t want to be criticized for having fragmented and perished veins, it must always be bright and fluid as cream. The bronze winks at the stones and bitterly sheds the blood from their lips’ edges, eagle noses, and elbow curves of the hardened bodies it transformed into. They all sing for the jade further away from the sculptures. They heave a sigh by looking at the stone which is hard, even impossible, to sculpt. Though the bodies which are placed on the bases over the scratchy parquets of long corridors and deep rooms despise the clay, they do not touch its cracked surface, knowing how solemn it is. The head kneaded from the clay is still looking at the window it has been facing for years. If it had hands, it would spruce the crooked cap and pull its mouth open with its fingers. It would smile. It wants to sing along with them, but it can’t take heart from its lines. It can’t move its solid skin. Its neck gently moves and its jaw leans, are they the blinking eyes? Its eyelashes touch its eyebrows, the head turns and looks at a similar face nearby. So that’s how he saw me, that’s how he kneaded me. It opens its mouth, takes heart from the depths of its body which cannot open its mouth. Closing its eyes, it waits. Its voice will drown the others’ voices, the faceless body on the ground will rise and walk towards it and put the head on the space between the shoulders. They will reunite, it will be reborn from the union of marble and clay. It is Camille whose voice is richer than the song of the sculptures. She lifts up, goes out of one of the rooms of Rodin, and stands by the stairs. Holding the handrail, she stretches its thin body. She reabsorbs her soul which hopes to awake from the sleep that doesn’t have a grave.
The Kneading Hands
She had navy blue eyes which piercingly looked at what she faced. The fleshy lips, the long hair down to her waist, and simple clothes on her fragile body made her look more beautiful. She discovered trembling with pleasure when she touched the soil, rubbing between her fingers when she was a child, then she found the clay near the stream and collected as much as she could in her skirt. She grasped the mellow soil without knowing any method or craft. That was her soul, shaping the soil below her feet was the harbinger of spring or winter, and she learned existing in this way. She was born in 1864 and she grew up by embracing the carelessness, impulsiveness, and creativity of that little girl who was wrapped in her father’s scarf not to get cold. Her father, who had a spiky beard, was her only chance. Without listening to the objections of her nagging mother, he consented to spend all he had by embracing her desire for the clay, he sent Camille to the school of fine arts and even moved from the village he lived in. When she started studying at the atelier under dim light, she looked so different from the other girls, with her wild hair, thin complexion, and black attire, and she repeated what she was sure of to herself, “I am a sculptor!”
Would she open the door to Monsieur Rodin if she could turn back to the days she worked for him as a young lady whose eyes were disciplined by the agility of shady parts of her body and face? Would she try to hide her blushed cheeks against the fancy of admirers again? Would she accept working at his atelier again? Would she prefer the destructive blind love instead of her exiled genius?
Perhaps she could say no amidst enthusiasm and tranquility. “I wouldn’t pass his doorstep, touch his sculptures, borrow marble, accept his salary, or let him knead me. I would never let him look at me, despise me by averting his gaze, and make my bust in secret. And I would never let him tell ‘her name is L’Aurore (Aurora)’ to the ones who asked whether it was Camille by looking at my bust lightened by the red winter sun.”
Camille was a woman who didn’t lose her childhood’s excitement which led her to make moulds when she was six until the time when she touched the walls for hours with the desire of demounting the stones of the asylum’s walls in which she was imprisoned. They didn’t see her, her hands, feet, and the things she kneaded.
The Love Started with Divine Comedy
Who could reject Rodin who went to her house in order to get permission from her father to work on The Gates of Hell? The father entrusted her daughter under his tutorship. They moved to Paris. Camille started working at the atelier of the great creator. Though she learned how to deal with plaster and marble types in the company of the nude models, Monsieur Rodin was aware of her fantastic genius and there was nothing to teach her. He was still pleased with being mentioned as her tutor and he watched her moving around. He loved her rage and passion uprising while working. One day, he told her that she could choose a marble from his atelier – marble was expensive – Camille yearned for working with that raw material she couldn’t purchase and she chose the parian marble, which was the most difficult to sculpt. After a while, she carried the marble wrapped in cloth in her arms to the atelier and she put it before Monsieur Rodin. Rodin looked at the marble which turned into a flawless foot, gently touched it, and caressed the erupted veins. At that moment, did he embrace the capricious girl’s talent or did he accept that she was the most successful artist who could imitate, even surpass, his genius? Did he fall in love with her and want to enchain his soul along with his love, because that young girl overtook his genius though they had nearly an age gap of 25 years?
It was obvious The Gates of Hell would be inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. One night, when Camille took the book from her sibling and knocked on the door of Monsieur Rodin, the only thing she could utter was, “For you!” Looking at the blushed girl, Monsieur Rodin took a step back and said, “I understand now. These are my images, you are splintered, you are the salvaged one once again, sentenced but always tempting, the flesh that revives evermore, you are the resurrection of the flesh, the young girl and death, and you are the torture, damnation and pain. Fugitive Love, I am Beautiful, Crouching Woman, The Falling Man, Illusions Received by the Earth, Eternal Springtime. I see everything now. An infinite night of love, you are an infinite goddess.” He buried his face between her breasts. “My infinite goddess.”[1]
How was it possible to tolerate the touch of a sculptor whose talent was undoubted and was always rumored to be a womanizer? Camille didn’t know that. Would femininity be hurt by the possibility of being one of the women of a genius who was accepted and gradually flourished? If she suppressed the head between her breasts, wouldn’t she be the same with the ordinary ones who exhibited and shaped their flesh for money and crouched down with spread hips for hours? Consent and possible pain intersected on a thin line made of cheesecloth, requiring the risk of a sudden pain, and the unbearable pulse of the movement of butterflies turned into pain in the stomach.
She pulled him closer to her, she let him tear her skirt away, take her on his lap, slip in her amidst the infinite abyss of walking, thinking, and sitting men, the whishing thoughts of curious eyes and the bases, and she let him vivify her, provoke the thoughts in her blood and ejaculate them in her with his fluids, erected, she let them ejaculate together towards the lengthy ceiling. Now she knew how she would knead her own body which rose upwards on his lap if she could get out of her body; at heart she only imagined this, and in the lunatic atmosphere of this dream, she offered her own taste to him by wrapping her legs around his neck.
The Bent Sketch
Though she said, “I would never pose like the other girls,” she let him make sketches of her in all positions he put her into. Eternity… Eternity somehow came by kneading, chiseling, or body offering, by turning into marble. Spreading the limbs that absorbed the penetrating looks of each era, arms over the head, eyes looking down. She turned her back to him, leaned forward, as he held her ankles, then she lied down, buried her face on her armpit and crossed her legs. A few hours later, her legs were spread as if she were giving birth. Without thinking about the wetness and the master of sketches who would penetrate her soon, she looked at the flames and was grateful for everything she conduced.
During the time when she worked so hard for his works in the morning, they behaved as if nothing happened between them. Camille tried not to look at the pale face of his faithful woman, Rose, who occasionally visited the atelier.
One day, her father’s resentful words made her realize that she didn’t set aside time for her own works and she had been working only for Monsieur Rodin for such a long time – Camille sculpted the hands and feet of most of the sculptures. Where were her dreams? Where were her works for which her family spent money, moved to another city, and her mother got angry about? She was more than a sketch that bent in front of the master. She thought of that for days, but she protected her love. She was thinking of both the baby in her belly and her works that she didn’t yet bear when she said, “Rose or me.” Camille was on a bridge with no ends. Rodin would never be free of the strange weakness towards the kind-hearted Rose who lived in misery with him and devoted her life to preserve the wetness of his clay, but Camille couldn’t know that, she had firm belief love’s madness would defeat that. Like all men who didn’t have the courage of leaving a woman who stood behind him and could die near him, Monsieur Rodin uttered the same words for centuries. Rose had nobody but him, she didn’t have someone to lean on. What could she do without Rodin? He couldn’t leave Rose, but they could work in harmony at the atelier they built together.
Camille looked at him as if she were looking at a stone impossible to sculpt. Without hesitation, she said that she would work alone from now on and left him.
113 Avenue d’Italie
Camille wrote from the asylum, “I wish I could be at home and securely close the doors. I don’t know if I can do this, being at home…”
She had a house. They wrote, MADEMOISELLE CAMILLE CLAUDEL, SCULPTOR, 113 AVENUE D’ITALIE.
Were losing mind for a moment and going mad forever the same thing? She knew it best. Like all creators who were defeated in the war of existence. She would wait for orders for a considerable amount of time at her atelier-house at avenue d’Italie, gather cats in her living room, and she would shoulder all work though she had to hire more workers for her sculptures. Everyone laughed at her for breaking loose from Rodin, but she vainly knocked at the doors of curators in order to sustain her name which couldn’t pass beyond a miserable mistress. Her hands were cold, she was in need of some wood. At this moment, we must take a pause and look at her family.
Camille was the first child born after a despot mother’s first child died. She grew up being scolded by her mother who thought her occupation with sculpture was unnecessary and obscene. When Camille met Rodin, her mother said, “This girl must be secluded!” This mother, Louise Claudel, who always reproached and nagged her family and Camille’s father, was more sympathetic towards Camille’s younger brothers Paul and Louis. It seemed like she felt anger merely for her daughter, she didn’t want her to go to Paris, she didn’t come to her atelier, and she wanted her husband to stop supporting her financially. She didn’t help her when Camille left Rodin and lived in misery, and, worst of all, she thought the trances of her daughter who had chronic depression would end by sending her to asylum (the trances would perhaps end with a depression treatment today). She signed the papers without thinking. Was it finally the end of incessant envy towards her daughter, or was she happy because she finally restrained the wild nature of her independent little horse? In addition to the devotion of her husband to her elder child, perhaps she secretly envied her daughter for being talented and sleeping with Rodin, the genius at the time.
It was also hurtful when his sister needed him most – of course he couldn’t predict that – his younger brother Paul Claudel went to America and then China as a diplomat and returned as a poet. The timeless separation of siblings who supported each other against their mother and grew up together ended up with Camille crying. In her abandoned house, she usually shouted, “Where are you my little Paul?” and wrote him letters.
In her house at 113 Avenue D’Italie, it was cold and there was nothing to eat, and she couldn’t go to most of the invitations because she didn’t have a proper dress. Clotho took shape there, the marvelous sculpture which made the viewer run away with dread at first glance. The happiness which came up with finding a place for it at the exhibitions was overshadowed again. There was The Waltzers near Clotho. Both sculptures got reactions, Camille was devastated too much despite Mirbeau who wrote positive reviews about the sculptures, such that, she started to feel fatigued towards the end of the exhibition and Debussy, who was her only friend then, could hardly take her out from the exhibition’s garden. Why didn’t Mirbeau’s reviews find approval? Did Rodin’s shadow obscure her that much? What the art critic who understood Camille wrote for her sculptors was, “… They hug each other. But where are they going with their spiritual drunkenness and close-knit skins? Is it love or death? The skins are young, full of life, but the cover on them is like a cerement with them. I don’t know where they are going to, whether to love or to death, but the only thing I know is, an impressive lament rises from that couple, or maybe a sorrowful love from death as well… Who knows? Perhaps Camille is inspired partly by her heart and her soul… Mademoiselle Claudel is one of the attractive artists of our time. Auguste Rodin can be proud of his student, and the writer of Téte d’Or can be proud of his sister. It is obvious that Mademoiselle Claudel shares the same surname with one of them, and the same family with the other.”[2]
The Woman Who Pierced Jade
Camille’s Women Chatting represented the ongoing gossip of four reckless women carved from the heart of the green stone, which terrified the viewers. The viewers were talking about the genius. But Rodin didn’t say anything. Everyone regarded them as completely separate, they became extinct, and the relationship broke off. Did anyone block the roads through which the complimentary words on newspaper columns had to go?
“…Camille Claudel, Rodin’s student, nearly as powerful as the master…” (Chronique de l’Indre)
“It surprises me so much that Mademoiselle Claudel is not among the great masters.” (Armand Dayoz)
Camille frequently uttered some things before being sent to asylum. She told everyone that Monsieur Rodin tried to vanquish her because he was afraid of her genius. Wasn’t it Camille who showed Rodin how to bend the lines for the great Balzac sculpture that was surely mentioned as ugly during its first days of exhibition? Then, what did Camille say in her letters she sent to her brother from the asylum?
“It’s really so hard! They sentenced me to life imprisonment to cease my wishes. All these happen because of Rodin’s devilish mind. He had one thing in his mind, he wanted me to leap forward as an artist and to outperform him; he had to have control over me after his death like he had when he was alive. As he was miserable in his life, I had to be the same after he died. He really accomplished, I’m so miserable! I’m tired of this captivity.”[3]
The Outburst of Mind
March 3, 1913. A short telegram. “Your father died last night.” The telegram which might be the climax of madness happening nearly for eight years. At night after hearing the bad news, she destroyed nearly 90 sculptures and sketches with a sledgehammer, and she waded through blood on the broken marbles while taking revenge for her inability of finding a source to perform her genius under the influence of not madness, but the tough revolt she kept for years. Her face was scarred. Rodin was to blame for her condition and she shouted his name while destroying the sculptures. She was killing the souls to which she devoted her days.
An ambulance stopped by her house. Two men with long white shirts held Camille by her arms. While Camille was looking in the eye of her mother and Paul, they tucked her in a box with horses. They restrained the creation, the kiss, the genius, making love, the dead baby of Rodin, the clay, sand, marble, bronze, jade, and Icarus with wire fences.
“Four years ago this day, at my atelier, I experienced the unpleasant surprise of two threatening, armed, long, helmeted policemen. It was a bitter surprise for an artist, I experienced this instead of being rewarded! I always have a run of bad luck…”[4]
She was a genius who spent her 30 years with soup made of floating raw vegetables in boiled water, stale bread, without being allowed to touch the soil and marble. Having an eternal talent, she was visited by Paul once in a few years, she thought nothing but of sculpting and she had sanity as much as her insanity. When she died at the hospital she was sent to because of the war, there was nobody to know where her grave was.
Then Paul Claudel wrote, “This naked young girl is my sister! My sister Camille. On her knees, like she’s begging, degraded, this great and proud person has personalized herself that way. She’s begging, degraded, on her knees and naked! Everything is over! She left us this to make us view it forever…”
What did she experience there for 30 years? Could we stand to see her with an exhausted face, without mud under her fingernails?
The Flight of Icarus
At Museé Rodin, I saw a woman who grasped the movement and line from the air, gave the inspiration of a third Jesus to Rodin while standing between two Jesus, and made the pencil dance with her sketches. She walked away from me, stood near the stairs, holding the handrail. I wanted to climb the stairs in one breath, hug her naked body, and bury my head in her stomach. But she turned into a piece of sun with her wings made of wax and her feet rising up. She stopped for a moment in the space of the huge building and disguised as each of her sculptures, I knew all of them. Then she flew towards me, the poor one standing aghast, and sprinkled something on my face from her fingertips. I touched my eyes and cheeks. The dry clay broke into pieces on my fingers.
[1] Camille Claudel, Une Femme, Anne Delbeé, Everest Publishing House, 2011
[2] Camille Claudel, Une Femme, Anne Delbeé, Everest Publishing House, 2011
[3] Camille Claudel, Une Femme, Anne Delbeé, Everest Publishing House, 2011
[4] Camille Claudel, Une Femme, Anne Delbeé, Everest Publishing House, 2011