My friend and I are looking at a squared-off lump of marble that is four or five feet tall. A woman’s head protrudes from the top of the block. She wears a coif—a small cap that brings to mind a puritan.

“Handmaid’s Tale,” I think.

The small sign beneath the sculpture informs me that it is credited to Auguste Rodin, and it is the likeness of Camille Claudel—Rodin’s apprentice, prodigy, competitor, and lover.

If you are wondering, as I did, who is Camille Claudel, the description of the exhibit of her works in the Getty Center brochure provides the following two titillating details about the early twentieth-century sculptor:

She had a tumultuous relationship with Auguste Rodin.
She spent the last thirty years of her life in an asylum.

Obviously, the staff of the Getty Center mean for us to understand that these two facts are related.

As we look at the woman encased in stone, a man approaches us out of the blue, or rather out of the lavender. The gallery is tastefully lit in ethereal tones and draped in crisp sheets of hazy purple and cream. The subtle purple is reminiscent of the intimate shadows in the curves of a marble statue. (If you have ever tried to sketch or paint a marble form, you know marble is a thousand colors besides white.)

“Marble is very difficult to carve,” says the man. “Rodin couldn’t do it. So he would sculpt in clay, and one of the women working in his studio would reproduce the sculpture in stone. Often Camille would do it. This one [the block with the head sticking out of it] is credited to another woman.”

At first, I think the tall, graying man in a dark navy polo is a docent. But he doesn’t have a lanyard or a name tag. I look around and spot the exhibit attendant standing off to the side. He doesn’t seem to mind the self-appointed guide that has attached himself to my friend and me.

The finely sculpted head in the marble stares toward the center of the room, her features open and serene, despite being buried to her neck in rock. The line of her gaze just misses a bronze bust of Rodin by Camille herself.

Our self-appointed guide continues his lecture on various pieces in the gallery.

Camille became part of Rodin’s studio, struggling against an art world that was uncomfortable with women sculpting nude forms and did nothing at all about the open secret of a middle-aged Rodin’s sexual advances on his young apprentices, muses, and colleagues.

Our guide casts doubt on the exact nature of Camille and Rodin’s relationship—one liaison among many, a passionate affair, a predatory master using his vulnerable student?

The exhibit presents the two artists side by side to illustrate how Rodin copied Claudel’s concepts, sexualizing her innocent and beautiful sculptures of the female body into the contorted, grasping forms that made Rodin’s name.

Our guide passionately defends Camille, calling her “the most tragic figure in art.” His seriousness is undercut slightly by a pen in the shape of Tigger from Winnie the Pooh clipped to his shirt. Who is this man?

He follows us from room to room in the gallery.

In masterpieces like The Waltz and The Mature Age, Claudel achieves and perhaps surpasses Rodin in capturing a romantic dynamism and wild movement in her figures.

The art world of her day did not agree, however, pressuring her to modestly drape her female figures. What success she achieved was hard won and always in the heavy shadow of Rodin.

Our guide describes The Mature Age as “the piece that ended it all.”

In The Mature Age, an aged figure drags a bearded man away from an anguished, pleading young woman on her knees. Our guide reads this as an allegory. Rodin and Claudel had ended their sexual relationship, and Rodin married his long-time mistress.

It’s not an unpopular interpretation, I find out later online. The sculpture certainly played some part in the rift between Claudel and Rodin that finally ended their professional relationship as well as their romantic one.

Camille’s mental health began to decline. In 1913, Her family committed her to an institution where she remained until her death in 1943 at seventy-eight. According to our guide, she seldom received visitors and, as a result of scarcity in war-time France, died cold, hungry, and alone.

“But she’s in heaven now,” he says, “and very happy.”

It’s a strange thing to say. I hear in his voice protectiveness, a courtly love for the unreachable, untouchable, unknowable, long-dead Camille Claudel.

As I turn to read a nearby sign, I hear him approach two other female museum patrons, repeating his lecture verbatim. He is this artist’s guard and herald, stewarding her memory with priestly care. It’s a strange sort of love on display. It must be love, right?

The story told to me about Camille Claudel, both by my guide and the various signs, was very black-and-white, composed of villains and saints.

But marble is prismatic, containing a thousand shades.

Camille Claudel was an artist in an era of upheaval, war, and stigma. Her suffering was real. But is that aspect of her what makes her work worth looking at, her story worth knowing?

I can’t help but think that we do people a disservice when we view their gifts only or mostly through the lens of their pain, as if it is the suffering that endows the work with meaning. The Starry Night has a similar mystique.

The museum is closing. I will not be able to see it all.

As I hurry as slowly as I can past the final sculptures of the exhibit, I am frustrated with myself, with the strange man, and with the museum brochure for straining this woman’s significance through the sieve of Rodin. And I guess I dislike Rodin too.

Certainly, even with a whole afternoon, a whole ton of marble, even with a whole exhibit, you can never tell someone’s full story.

I think, though, that if you loved someone, really, you would tell more about their life than their victimhood. It seems to me you would chisel out more than their resigned, restrained face from the weight of the marble in which they drown.

Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Scott Lanphere (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Emily Joy Stroble

Emily Stroble is a writer of bits and pieces and is distractedly pursuing lots of novel ideas and nonfiction projects as inspiration strikes. As an editorial assistant at Zondervan, she helps put the pieces of children’s books and Bibles together. A lover of the ridiculous, inexplicable, and wondrous as well as stories of all kinds, Emily enjoys getting lost in museums, movies old and new, making art, the mountains of Colorado, and the unsalted oceans near Grand Rapids. Her movie reviews also appear in the Mixed Media section of The Banner and her strange little stories of the fantastic are on the Calvin alumni fiction blog Presticogitation. Her big dream is to dig her hands deep into the soil of making children’s books as an editor…and to finally finish her children’s novel.