The opening this year of the Camille Claudel Museum in Nogent sur Seine, 65 miles southeast of Paris, not only brings the sculptor out of the shadows of her teacher, lover and nemesis Auguste Rodin, it also shines light on Claudel’s work as a talented and innovative sculptor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in her own right.

In an interview with Janet Hulstrand for France Revisited, Camille Claudel’s great-niece, Reine-Marie Paris, one of the driving forces behind the museum’s creation, explains how she came to appreciate Camille Claudel’s work and to understand the mental illness that caused her to destroy much of her own work and led to her eventual confinement in a series of psychiatric institutions, where she spent the last 30 years of her life.

Reine-Marie Paris is an art historian and the author of a number of books on the life and work of Camille Claudel (1864-1943).

This original interview, conducted in French, has been translated by Janet Hulstrand.

Janet Hulstrand: When did you first learn that your great-aunt was a famous artist? Or was she not really so famous when you learned about her for the first time? What did you learn about Camille Claudel, growing up in your family?

Reine-Marie Paris: My first encounter with Camille Claudel, my great-aunt, was, you might say, somewhat accidental. In fact, until I was a married woman no one in the Claudel family—my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my mother, no one ever mentioned her in front of me. Later I understood that the subject was taboo, because bringing it up might reignite an old argument about her internment in a psychiatric asylum, which was considered abusive.

My earliest memory of her work goes back to when I was 10 years old. I was returning from a swimming lesson not far from the home of my grandfather, Paul Claudel, on the Blvd. Lannes, and I stopped to visit my grandmother. There, on the chest where she had put the cookies for my treat, was La Petite Chatelaine in bronze. I couldn’t take my gaze away from this little girl, who seemed to me to be lost, facing the mysteries of life.

My curiosity about the artist who had created this sculpture wasn’t awakened until much later, when a dealer specializing in Art Nouveau objects asked me if I would be interested in acquiring some of the work of Camille Claudel. From that day on, I have never stopped being interested in her life and work. Is it because of familial devotion? It’s not only that. The objects I bought from the dealer seemed to me to express a kind of beautiful melancholy. I decided to plunge in blindly and to learn whatever I could about the personality of this great artist, who was so little known.

JH: When and why did you decide to study the work of Camille Claudel and to learn about her life?

RMP: Once again, it was by chance. I encountered the historian Jacques Cassar who, in his pioneering work, had come across the name of Camille Claudel while doing research on Paul Claudel. It was he who put me on my path of exploration and gave me my first questions to research. His first work on Camille Claudel should have been signed by the two of us, but he died, putting an end to our joint efforts.

Initially my work consisted of putting together documents I found scattered among the innermost depths of libraries, museums, family archives, psychiatric hospitals. I was able to read Camille’s letters, so filled with terrible suffering. I was also given permission to consult her medical records, and I was able to feel, almost physically, her pain, a pain without hope of healing—30 years with no visitors except those of her brother Paul, and two visits from her English friend Jessie Lipscomb. In a word, a living hell.

JH: The story of Camille Claudel’s life is very dramatic, even tragic. There is also some controversy as to the way her life unfolded, who was responsible for what happened to her. There have been accusations leveled against Auguste Rodin, and also against your grandfather, her brother, Paul Claudel. Knowing what you know about her life, both as a member of the Claudel family and as a historian who has dedicated many years to learning about her life and her art, what would you like people to know about her? What misunderstandings or false ideas would you like to have corrected?

RMP: Who was responsible for her situation? It’s a good question. Was it her family? Her brother? Society? Rodin?

Camille is considered to be an artiste maudite. Her work gives evidence of the drama she lived. From the age of eight, she sculpted her dreams, and her heroes—Bismarck, Napoleon. She was drawn to them because of their strong character and because of the powerful feelings they inspired. As her mother’s least-loved child, she enclosed herself in a shell to defend herself, to allow herself to escape into a life in which she could fight the injustice of which she saw herself as a victim.

Her father, Louis-Prosper, protected her for as long as he was alive: he paid her rent, her expenses, collected unpaid invoices for the work she sold, in short, he did what he could, all the while treating her as a raving madwoman. Her mother preferred her sister Louise, who was destined to lead an ordinary life as a wife and mother. And Louise resented her.

Her brother Paul’s feelings for her oscillated between admiration and repulsion. As a child he was fascinated by this older sister, so beautiful, so intelligent, so authoritarian that he couldn’t escape the orders she was always giving him: he would pose for her for hours, bring her the clay she needed for modeling, and if ever he balked at her commands, there were endless battles. And yet, he loved the escapades they had together at a place called “Le Geyn” a sort of rocky promontory that reminded him of Wuthering Heights.

For Paul, Camille was his first image of woman, his model of femininity, “the promise that can’t be kept.” For Paul Claudel, as for Baudelaire, “all loved ones are vessels of bile that one drinks with closed eyes.” When he discovered that Camille had betrayed him in a sense, by becoming Rodin’s mistress, and especially after she admitted to having had an abortion, which he considered the worst of crimes, he rejected her as if she were diseased. He would portray her in his play La jeune fille Victorine as Victorine-Camille, a lepress. To a journalist he once said, “Oh, my sister Camille, that’s a subject that it’s difficult for me to talk about: the pain, the spectacle of this magnificent personality, and the failure that condemned her.” Later he would speak of her with remorse, and regret for not having done everything for her that he could have done. But for him, the main one responsible for Camille’s fate was Rodin. Rodin took everything from her: she gave him everything and got back nothing. I think so too. In return for all she gave, all she got was misery, poverty, solitude, despair–and in the end, 30 years in the obscurity of a psychiatric asylum.

Was it society? Camille was born too soon. In our day she would have known success as a woman and as an artist. Nevertheless, in her day, among her peers she was recognized and admired. Some critics referred to the “glow” of her genius, others simply said that she was a genius, Octave Mirabeau for example. He was indignant after having admired her Causeuses at the Salon. “And who is not left on their knees before such an artist?“ he asked. “If we were living in another time, a woman like Mademoiselle Camille Claudel would be covered with honors, and well rewarded.”

As for Rodin? As I said above, I think that he was partly responsible for Camille’s downfall, because he didn’t understand her, because her character was too strong for him, and because, consciously or unconsciously, he was afraid that she might surpass him, which I think she did in some of her works. I believe strongly that Sakountala is more powerful than l’Eternelle Idole, that Clotho is more interesting than La Vieillesse. I also think that Camille stayed far too long in Rodin’s studio, that she didn’t know how to rid herself of her anti-Rodin obsessions, and that art didn’t save her.

JH: Can you tell us a little bit about the new Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent sur Seine? Were you involved in its creation, and if so, how?

RMP: The opening of the Musée Camille Claudel is a miracle: now her work can finally be presented to the whole world. It’s a beautiful, light-filled museum in the center of Nogent sur Seine, this small city that was home to the Claudel family for three years (1876-79), a period that was crucial in the launching of Camille’s career. She is not the only artist featured in the museum: her works are surrounded by those of her first teacher, Alfred Boucher, who was a discoverer of talents and founder of la Ruche, and of Paul Dubois, who once made a prescient remark to Camille: “Have you studied with Monsieur Rodin?”

For a long time I had the idea of creating a museum dedicated to the work of Camille Claudel. I had spoken about it in the 1980s with Michel Baroin, who was then mayor of Nogent. He agreed with me that this would be a good idea. Time went by, and the idea eventually took hold. In 2003 Gerard Ancelin, who was mayor of Nogent for 25 years, and is passionate about sculpture, organized an exhibition of her work. It was a resounding success, even though Nogent is an hour away from Paris, and the weather was snowy and cold. More time went by, and then finally, in 2008, Gerard Ancelin decided to launch the municipality of Nogent in a museum project, after hearing me complain once again, during my speech at the opening of a Camille Claudel exposition in Dijon, that it really was time to find a place to house the work of this artist. Along with Gerard Ancelin—who had the courage to launch this adventure by having the city and patrons of the arts buy the collection I had put together through the years, along with about a dozen works of art owned by Philippe Cressent—I finally had the satisfaction of seeing this museum created. Now her admirers can see La Valse, Le grand Persée, Les Danseuses, portraits of Rodin and of Paul Claudel, and all this in an enchanting space, neither too big nor too little, the jewel of a small city rich in artistic and literary history.

JH: How much do you think things have changed for women artists since the end of the nineteenth century, when Camille was trying to make her way as a sculptor? What still needs to change?

RMP: I don’t know if women artists have more of a chance today than at the end of the nineteenth century, but they certainly have more freedom. I only know one woman sculptor, really talented, who is climbing bit by bit, step by step, the ladder of success. But I am sure there are others who are practicing this art, in principle so unfeminine, but so enriching for those who have the will, the courage, the determination that it demands, to arrive at the desired result.

JH: If you could somehow, magically, be able to say something to Camille Claudel, and she could hear you, what would you want her to know?

RMP: If somehow, by magic I could communicate with Camille, I would say to her, “You’ve given me lots of trouble, lots of work, many worries, but also many joys. For these joys I thank you, and I hope that you for your part you would want to thank me for having paid you the homage you deserve, as one of the great sculptors of the nineteenth century, along with Rodin and Bourdelle. Who, according to their own testimony, saw in you nothing but an equal.”

Musée Camille Claudel, 10 Rue Gustave Flaubert, 10400 Nogent-sur-Seine. Closed Mondays April-October, Mondays and Tuesday November-March. Nogent is 65 miles southeast of Paris. Trains run frequently from Gare de l’Est and take about an hour. The museum is a 10-minute walk from the train station.

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature who divides her time between France and the United States. She writes the blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road.  Other articles that Janet Hulstrand has written for France Revisited can be found here. 

The post Camille Claudel’s Great-Niece Shines Light on the Sculptor’s Life and Work appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.

By Janet Hulstrand

1880: On the Rue St. Georges in Paris’s 9th arrondissement, a painter of growing renown in both avant-garde and fashionable circles is having lunch at the crémerie where he often takes his meals. At nearly 40 years of age he is finally beginning to make his mark in the art world: his painting of Madame Charpentier and her children made a splash a year earlier at the Salon of 1879, which has provided needed income; and his other work, experimenting with new techniques of painting en pleine aire, is going well too.

He sees a pretty young woman enter the place with her mother. He sees in her instantly his ideal type: not too thin, rosy-cheeked, and with skin that “takes the light.” He introduces himself—his name is Auguste Renoir—and asks her if she will model for him….

The young woman, Aline Charigot, 21 years old, was from the village of Essoyes in the deep south of the Champagne region, near its border with Burgundy. She had begun her life in this village as an abandoned child: her father had walked out of their home one night before she was two years old and never returned to the family, leaving her mother without any means of support. Unable to pay the rent, or to provide for her child, the mother, like so many other poor women in rural France at the time, left for Paris to earn her living as a seamstress, leaving Aline with relatives, who would raise her. At age 15 Aline joined her mother in Paris and began to learn her trade. And that is when she met the man, the artist, who would change her life.

Aline accepted the invitation to model for Renoir and shortly after, they became lovers. In 1885 their first child, Pierre, was born. As the years went by, Aline made two significant requests of Renoir. One was to make their union legal by marriage. The other was to buy a home in Essoyes, the village where she had grown up.

He had no objection to the first request: by this time in his life he was ready to settle down. And so the marriage was performed in the district hall of Paris’s 9th arrondissement on April 14, 1890.

However, he was much less enthusiastic about the idea of spending much time so far away from Paris, the center of the art world, as well as the place where he had spent most of his life. Essoyes, today just 2½ hours away from Paris, was at the time a long and tedious journey, first by rail, then by horse-drawn carriage, that would have taken most of a day.

But eventually Aline’s entreaties won him over, and her dream of living a bourgeois life in her hometown came true. They initially rented a small house at the edge of the village during the summer of 1888, for a stay that lingered into the fall and even through the end-of-year holidays. In time Renoir became very fond of Essoyes, of the butter, the wine, the bread made there, declaring it superior to that in Paris. He said he loved being among the winegrowers “because they are generous.” He painted portraits of his family, of villagers, of the surrounding landscapes. The family was still spending much of the year in Paris, but from the late 1880s they began to regularly spend summers in Essoyes, the boy playing, the painter painting, the wife cooking. (She became famous among his artist friends for her culinary skills, in particular for her bouillaibaisse.)

Gabrielle Renard

By now, in his early 50s, Renoir’s work was selling well: he had achieved middle-class respectability, a position he balked at, but his wife took comfort in. By the time their second child, Jean, was born in 1894, they were able to hire a nanny, and Aline, now Madame Renoir, looked to her home village, and her family, for an appropriate person to fill this role. She found her in Gabrielle Renard, a young cousin living in Essoyes.

Like Aline, Gabrielle had not had an easy start in life: her mother was a widower who became pregnant out of wedlock, which subjected her to the disdain and disapproval of many villagers and even caused her own family to take her two older children away from her. So for Gabrielle too, the connection with Auguste Renoir would become a means of escape: she traveled and lived with the family in Paris, and later in Cagnes-sur-Mer, a town along the Riviera where the family would winter. Gabrielle became one of Renoir’s favorite models, the subject of literally hundreds of his paintings and drawings, including some of his most famous portraits—and a lifelong, dearly beloved maternal figure for Jean Renoir.

In 1896, the Renoirs bought the first home they had ever owned, on the edge of Essoyes. A two-story home with an open courtyard facing the street, and a spacious garden at the back of the house, this house became the center of the domestic life Aline had craved and Renoir scarcely knew he wanted but did appreciate when he had it.

For Jean Renoir, the second son, a filmmaker, the time spent in Essoyes became a kind of idyllic memory that he treasured all his life. “Essoyes, where my mother was born, has remained more or less unspoiled,” he wrote years later. “There is no other place like it in the whole wide world. There I spent the best years of my childhood…Every summer we would go back. My mother would invite friends and surround Renoir with this life that he loved so much…”

Ambroise Vollard, who became both the dealer and a friend for Renoir, as well as the dealer for many of the other artists in his circle, also recognized the importance of the ways in which Aline provided support to the artist in her own simple way. “I wonder if it is generally known that it is largely due to his wife that Renoir painted all his wonderful still lifes of flowers,” he wrote. “She knew what pleasure it gave him to paint flowers, but she realized that the trouble of going to get them was too much for him. So she always had them about the house…”

Jean also saw how important his mother was in his father’s life, and how well she understood him: “With her intuitive, rustic understanding, she saw that Renoir was made for painting the way vines are made to produce wine…” he wrote.

At first Renoir painted in a ground floor studio in the house. Nine years after they purchased the house, he built a studio at the far end of the garden, further evidence of their growing roots there. He built the studio, he said, so that he could paint “without disturbing the children at their play.” It was in this studio that he also worked on his first sculptures. Of course many of the works he did in Essoyes began en pleine aire. (Today several of those spots are marked with easels displaying reproductions of the works he painted there.)

Though by now he loved being in Essoyes, the damp climate in Champagne, with its cold winters, was not good for his increasingly severe case of rheumatoid arthritis. By 1907 his doctor had ordered a move to the South of France, and the Renoirs found a place in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where the the family began spending their winters in 1908. It was in Cagnes that Gabrielle met her future husband, Conrad Slade, an American painter. During the Second World War the Slades moved to the U.S., and in 1955, after her husband died, Gabrielle moved to California to be near Jean Renoir, who had also moved there during the war. They maintained a close relationship for the rest of Gabrielle’s life. “She taught me to see the face behind the mask and the fraud behind the flourishes,” said the filmmaker whose work shows great insight into both.

While they continued to spend time in Essoyes when they could, both of the Renoirs died on the Riviera: Aline in Nice in 1915, and her husband in Cagnes-sur-Mer in 1919. And though they were originally buried in the south of France, their remains were later returned to Essoyes for burial, in accordance with their wishes. Now they and all three of their sons, and some of the sons’ children and wives, are buried in the village cemetery, just a short walk away from the painter’s studio.

All three of the Renoir sons became artists: Pierre, a well-known actor of screen and stage; Jean, the director of La Grande Illusion and La Règle du Jeu, among many other films; and Claude, the youngest, a ceramist.

The house in Essoyes remained in the Renoir family and was used by Sophie Renoir, a granddaughter of Pierre Renoir, and her family until 2012. She then sold it to the municipality of Essoyes, which purchased the property in order to turn it into the centerpiece of Du côté des Renoir, Essoyes’ homage to the family. Renoir’s studio opened to the public in 2011: there is also a small but informative interpretive center next to the village hall.

Images of Aline and her young cousin, Gabrielle are prominently displayed in the streets of Essoyes. Several murals in the village reproduce Renoir paintings in which they appear: one, a portrait of Gabrielle and Jean Renoir as an infant, is on the site of Gabrielle’s birthplace.

The Year of Renoir

In honor of the public opening of Renoir family home on June 3, Aube, the department or sub-region in which Essoyes is located, has designated 2017 as the Year of Renoir. One of the major events is an exhibition entitled Un autre Renoir (Another Renoir) presented at the Museum of Modern Art in Troyes from June 17 to September 17 featuring portraits of the Renoir family and of Gabrielle, along with landscapes of the region.

Several Renoir works, on loan from museums in Bordeaux, Rouen, and Cagnes-sur-Mer, will be displayed in the Renoir home during the summer months. A weekend celebration called “Essoyes à la Belle Epoque” will take place on July 22 and 23.

Throughout the summer Bernard Pharisien, a local historian, will lead free walking tours of the village Sat., Sun., Mon. and Tues. mornings, in French only. Tours in English can be arranged for groups of 12 or more by writing to groupes.renoir@gmail.com

Champagne

The names Essoyes and Aube might be off the radar to most travelers, but the wines of champagne certainly aren’t. Indeed, Essoyes is one of the villages within the Côte des Bar growing area for champagne grapes. Visitors have the possibility to visit small grower-producers in Essoyes, as well as producers, from large champagne houses to small producers, in the surrounding area.

Getting to Essoyes

Essoyes is a 2 ½ hour drive from Paris. Troyes is an hour and a half train ride from Gare de l’Est in Paris: from there Essoyes is just under an hour’s drive southeast, through vineyards, fields of rapeseed and wheat, and beautiful rural villages. Trains run frequently from Paris’s Gare de l’Est to Troyes: some trains continue on to Vendeuvre sur Barse (one stop beyond Troyes) and Bar sur Aube. In Troyes you can rent a car from Hertz or Enterprise, both located near the train station (check opening times of rental agencies before purchasing train ticket). It’s also possible to take a taxi from Vendeuvre to Essoyes, about a 30-minute drive.

For further information

Essoyes Tourist Office: www.ot-essoyes.fr
Aube Tourist Office: www.aube-champagne.com/en/
Year of Renoir 2017: www.aube-champagne.com/fr/annee-renoir-2017/
Troyes Tourist Office: www.tourisme-troyes.com
Aube Champagne Growers: www.cap-c.fr

Another major art event in the department of Aube this year is the opening of the Camille Claudel Museum in Nogent-sur-Seine.

A Renoir Route that follows in the painter’s footsteps and naturally include Essoyes has been outlined as one of a dozen Impressionism Routes by the French association Eau et Lumière.

© 2017, Janet Hulstrand

Janet Hulstrand is a writer, editor and teacher of writing and literature who divides her time between France and the United States. She writes the blog Writing from the Heart, Reading for the Road. Other articles that Janet Hulstrand has written for France Revisited can be found here.

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The post The Painter’s Wife: Aline Charigot Renoir and the Renoir Home in Essoyes appeared first on France Revisited - Life in Paris, Travel in France.