Word: claudels
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...Rodin was quick to recognize not just Claudel's pensive beauty but also her talent and to promote her to collectors and critics. She was just as quick to absorb the lessons of his work, in which figures could seem as though they were modeled from magma, erupting from the earth in anguished or compelling postures. Her early portrait bust of Rodin, with the fiercely modeled turmoil at its base, might almost have come from his hand. In a sense, of course, it did. But in time his example would prove too formidable. Rodin had rethought the human body more...
...This is the lesson of "Camille Claudel and Rodin: Fateful Encounter," the fascinating and even moving new exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts through February 5. The show is simultaneously a choice selection of Rodin's work, a thorough survey of Claudel's and an intricately woven account of their artistic and romantic interaction. It brings together 155 examples of their art, plus photographs, letters and journal entries, to trace the arc of a heated, exhausting attachment that came to an unhappy end, but not before it left its mark on some of their most enduring work...
...When they met, Claudel was 17, the daughter of a provincial French bureaucrat so dedicated to his gifted children that he moved the family to Paris to further their education. (It paid off twice. Camille's younger brother would grow up to be the famous poet, diplomat and archconservative Catholic Paul Claudel.) Rodin was 41, on the brink of fame after decades of frustration. He was also a dedicated satyr. The dancer Isadora Duncan, whom he would meet some years later, once said that whenever they were together she felt like "a nymph in front of a centaur." Though Rodin...
...Seen together, the most striking works that emerged out of Rodin and Claudel's long entanglement make a fever chart of their afflicted romance. At its height they both produced delirious representations of sexual passion. The acrobatic lovers of Rodin's I Am Beautiful -the male figure hoists a bundled woman into the air-are emblems of himself and her. So are the dancers in the erotic cyclone that is Claudel's The Waltz...
...happened, the definitive version of The Waltz was not completed until 1893. By that time Rodin had decided not to marry the increasingly erratic and accusing Claudel and instead to return to his old mistress Beuret. Claudel would respond with her masterpiece of abjection, The Age of Maturity, a commission from the French government that Rodin helped her to obtain. A near life-size bronze, it shows a young woman on her knees reaching out vainly to a man being led away by another woman. This desolate ensemble was supposed to be an allegory of man's inevitable journey toward...