My Thoughts on Heather Webb's RODIN'S LOVER

                                         

Camille Claudel in her atelier.

            Camille Claudel, who was to become Auguste Rodin's lover, was a late-19^th c. French sculptor, a woman of a particular time and place and medium. But she had much in common with women artists throughout history.

             Many women would never have had artistic training without the support of fathers who were proud of their daughters’ seemingly anomalous talent. Artemisia Gentileschi’s father, a Renaissance humanist who believed that women possessed intellect as well as souls, hired a tutor for her. That support for their feisty, income-earning daughters often dissipated when it came time to marry, however.  Even the proudest father could not change the status quo. In Rodin’s Lover, Camille’s Papa arranges for a sculpting instructor when she is 17. Later, he pays for her studio and materials. But by the time Camille is in her mid-20s, Papa changes his tune.

Damn it, Camille!...[We] want you to be settled and loved like other women. 

That is all.

            Paternal backing was often supplanted—or supplemented—by the support of a mentor. Camille Claudel's was Auguste Rodin.

            It seems obvious that two artists working together would be engaged in an on-going conversation about ideas and techniques. Sophie Tauber-Arp and Jean Arp developed Orphism together. As Camille says, in Rodin’s Lover:

                        Rodin has fashioned his works around my ideas and I have done the

                        same with his.

            But that sharing could cross the line into theft. Fathers and husbands of especially successful artists signed their names to women’s artwork in order to earn more money for those works. Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun’s husband, a mediocre artist, signed his name to her superior paintings in order to improve his own artistic reputation. And art gallery owners were also guilty of fudging the facts. Paintings formerly attributed to Franz Hals, once cleaned, revealed the distinctive signature of 17^th c. Dutch artist Judith Leyster.

            Here is how author Heather Webb describes the moment when Camille discovers that her works have been appropriated by Rodin:

And then she saw them—her Young Girl with a Sheaf, but it was called

Galatée, and her Slave bust was now Tête de Rieur. She froze.

Auguste had stolen her ideas and created his own exact replicas.

Girl with a Sheaf, Claudel

Galatea, Rodin

    

        Misattribution and appropriation, added to the onus of living outside a woman's socially accepted role. Two artists of equal genius, one eclipsed by her partner’s colossal presence. Is it any wonder that Camille Claudel ended up in an asylum? Sadly, the story of Rodin’s Lover was all too common in the history of women artists.