French sculptor Camille Claudel’s bronze, believed to symbolize her breakup with lover and fellow artist Auguste Rodin, sold for nearly $3 million at auction in France on Sunday.
Before her brother locked her up in a mental hospital in 1913, Claudel destroyed a lot of her work. Her life and her tumultuous relationship with Rodin have served as the basis for multiple films.
After working as Rodin’s assistant for years, the artist decided to make a reputation for herself on her own and broke off with the two-decade older artist, creating “The Mature Age” in the process. The sculpture, which has multiple duplicates, shows a young woman on her knees pleading with an elderly man as she drags him away.
According to art historians, “The Implorer” depicts Claudel in a state of despair as Rodin is ripped from her. When auctioneer Matthieu Semont lifted up a dust sheet in a 15-year-old apartment near the Eiffel Tower in September, he happened to find the most recent copy, he told AFP. He didn’t specify who owned it. Semont said that Rodin had “never stopped loving her and cried when he discovered ‘The Implorer’ at the foundry” based on his investigation into Claudel’s life.
Feminist icon.
The bronze he found was sold for 3.1 million euros ($3.2 million) at an auction house in the city of Orleans south of Paris, an AFP reporter there said. It had been estimated at 1.5 to 2 million euros.Two other versions of “The Mature Age” are on display at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Camille Claudel Museum outside the capital.A trove of sculptures by Claudel broke records at auction in Paris in 2017, going for $4.1 million — three times their estimate.
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“The Abandonment” bronze, the auction’s headliner, sold for about $1.4 million. The original edition of her sweeping bronze “The Waltz” sold for $8 million in 2013, while only few of her pieces have survived. As her reputation recovered, Claudel became a feminist symbol, especially after a French biopic of the same name, starring Isabelle Adjani opposite Gerard Depardieu’s Rodin, received two Oscar nominations in 1989.
at a 2013 movie about her abandonment at the asylum, Juliette Binoche portrayed her. Claudel was kept in the asylum on her family’s orders until her death at the age of 78 in 1943, despite physicians’ and friends’ insistence that she was sane and did not require hospitalization. Rodin’s treatment of Claudel, who helped create some of his most well-known pieces and who many feel was his artistic equal, has never been forgiven by feminist critics.
