A young woman’s hands—curled, tense, supplicating—grasp for another’s just millimeters out of reach. Gnarled and veined, his hand, too, reaches limply for hers. All in vain: their connection has been irrevocably severed, immortalized in their moment of separation.  

Camille Claudel, Age of Maturity, modeled 1899, cast 1902, bronze, Art Institute of Chicago. Photo by the author.

In Camille Claudel’s The Age of Maturity, 1899, love and anguish unfold from every crease of skin and rumple of flesh. The staggering, three-figure sculpture group depicts a beseeching Youth reaching for Old Age personified, as he is led away by a jeering Death; time makes the rupture between them final. Nowhere is this finality more evident than in the pregnant gap between Youth and Old Age’s fingertips.

The Age of Maturity joins dozens of other sculptures in the Art Institute’s phenomenal new exhibition Camille Claudel, the first U.S. exhibition on the artist in nearly twenty years. Camille Claudel is a powerful reproof of sensationalist, misogynist past framings of the artist, which disregarded Claudel’s indisputable talent in favor of melodramatizing her admittedly tragic life—especially her volatile love affair with her teacher, sculptor Auguste Rodin. Curator Emerson Bowyer’s approach counters this miasmic legacy by shifting emphasis to Claudel’s unrivaled expressive skill.

Curator Emerson Bowyer and students at Camille Claudel, photograph by Christine Mehring.

Take The Age of Maturity. For many, the work is a perfect representation of Claudel’s tragic circumstances: Youth is Claudel, Old Age Rodin, and Death Rose Beuret, Rodin’s long-term partner and eventual wife. The Age of Maturity, then, could be partially autobiographical, a stirring rendition of Claudel’s failed affair with Rodin. Historians tend to agree on this interpretation; Paul Claudel, the artist’s brother, himself identified the suppliant Youth as “my sister! My sister Camille. Imploring, humiliated, kneeling, this superb woman…” 

The exhibition briefly addresses this interpretation in an adjacent wall text, but Bowyer is clearly more interested in probing Claudel’s almost alchemical capacity to breathe not just life, but passion into bronze. Far from a mere copycat of her teacher Rodin—a charge frequently leveled against the struggling female artist—Claudel was a veritable virtuoso of sculptural technique, one who helped carve many of Rodin’s most celebrated works. (Rodin never made his own sculptures, relying instead on a throng of assistants.) The Age of Maturity radiates with Claudel’s astonishing emotive skill. Yearning contours every tendon, every knuckle of Youth’s imploring hands. Old Age’s chest, deflated against his protruding ribs, droops with the sorrowed flesh of senescence. Nearby preparatory studies are included to reveal the painstaking care with which Claudel approached especially her sculpture group’s heads. In the final work, Old Age’s crumpled face is a masterful aggregation of wrinkles and folds, his flesh incised with the ruinous passage of time. Bowyer fittingly titles this portion of the exhibition: “No Longer A Student, A Rival: Age of Maturity,” positioning Claudel as a formidable challenge, rather than a debtor, to the celebrated Rodin. Other sculptures selected for the exhibition, including The Waltz, 1893 and The Abandonment, 1905 equally demonstrate Claudel’s skillful fusion of virtuosity and emotion. Gathered here altogether, these standout works carve the image of a masterful artist in her own right—one easily deserving of further, and more serious, consideration than she has heretofore received.

Curator Emerson Bowyer and students at Camille Claudel, photograph by Christine Mehring.

The Age of Maturity allegorizes time’s transformative power: with time, Old Age breaks away from Youth; with time, Rodin discarded a heartbroken Claudel. With time—and with the commendable efforts of Bowyer and his team—Claudel’s much beleaguered reputation may finally begin to recover. No more the promiscuous woman with a pitiable life, the artist, in Camille Claudel, is portrayed as a virtuoso sculptor and a fiercely committed artist, whose achievements, evidently, have been ignored for far too long.

Yves Cao