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Genius, Interrupted
The life, times, and trials of sculptor Camille Claudel
By Emma Garman
The ground-floor apartment at 19 quai Bourbon, on the Ile de St. Louis in central Paris, was unlike anything the two hospital wardens had ever seen. Amid filth and clutter, dried-out clay, and a festoon of spider webs was not furniture, save for one broken and torn armchair, but sculptures. Weaving through the squalor were more cats than you could count, while the fourteen Stations of the Cross — the series of images depicting Christ on the day of his crucifixion — had been cut out of a newspaper and pinned on the wall. Elsewhere wallpaper hung down in strips. To deter intruders, the shutters and blinds were kept closed, and security chains were in place.
But on that Monday morning in March 1913, the intruders — two strapping men from the Ville-Évrard mental asylum just outside the city — forced their way in. The sobbing and terrified resident was physically removed, bundled into a waiting vehicle, and driven away. Her captors probably neither knew nor cared that the disheveled woman in their charge, forty-eight-year-old Camille Claudel, was a renowned sculptor — even, in the eyes of some, a genius. Around the turn of the century, at the peak of her career, she exhibited work at the most prestigious salons and galleries and was applauded by critics.
