Camille Claudel

Exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, 7 October 2023 - 19 February 2024 ;
at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2 April - 21 June 2024

The French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943) defied the social expectations of her time to pursue original and powerful explorations of the human form. At the time, few women achieved fame in sculpture, which, unlike painting or drawing, remained a predominantly male activity, and Claudel's ambitions in this field were transgressive.

Claudel's biography - his passionate and complicated relationship with his teacher, Auguste Rodin, and his forced internment in a psychiatric institution for the last 30 years of his life - is now well known, but his avant-garde works of art have received less attention in the United States.

This catalogue of the first retrospective of Claudel's work to be held in the United States in nearly forty years includes all sixty works on display - intimate and large-scale works in terracotta, plaster, bronze and stone. Essays tracing the many facets of his life, work and reception, a biography and documents by Claudel and his contemporaries help to reassess the artist's work and place his legacy in a more complex genealogy of modernism.