Camille Claudel. Anatomie della vita interiore

Over fifty works document the entire career of Camille Claudel, a sculptor of great talent and extraordinary technical skill who is best known for the sad story of her life, from her tormented love affair with Auguste Rodin, her teacher, to the final thirty years of her existence spent in a mental institution.
The volume, catalogue of the exhibition at Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia, provides an opportunity to explore, thanks to the presence of 13 of Rodin's sculptures as well, the close and troubled relationship between the artist and the great French master. Also included is a selection of 37 of his erotic drawings and watercolors, coming from the Musée Rodin in Paris.
As a counterpoint to the sculptures of Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, the catalogue presents eighty black-and-white photographs taken by Vasco Ascolini and Bruno Cattani at the branches of the Musée Rodin in Paris and Meudon, on commission from the institution itself.
Camille Claudel was born at Villeneuve-sur-Fère on December 8, 1864, and started to model her first figures in terracotta in the second half of the seventies. In 1881 she moved to Paris. In 1883 Auguste Rodin gave lessons to Camille and the year later, at the age of twenty, she entered his studio. In 1887 Camille and Auguste traveled in Touraine together and the following year they opened a joint studio at 68, Boulevard d'Italie. The same year she met Claude Debussy. In the early nineties she produced some of her most important works, such as La Valse, La Petite Châtelaine, Les Causeuses, La Vague and L'Âge mûr. In 1898 the relationship with Rodin became stormy. Camille's health grew worse and, in 1913, she was committed to a mental asylum, where she stayed until her death, on October 19, 1943. Auguste Rodin had died 26 years earlier.
The extraordinary work of Camille Claudel remained in the shadow for a long time, even though an exhibition of it had been held at the Musée Rodin as far back as 1951. It was the exhibition of 1984 that sparked a new interest in the work and tragic figure of Camille: various books were published and a film was made (directed by Bruno Nuytten, it starred Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu) about her tempestuous relationship with Rodin. Camille emerged from the stereotype of the talented pupil overshadowed by her great master, and came to be seen as a sculptor capable of instilling in her works an acute sensibility and a language that was absolutely modern in its forms.