SHE has a museum dedicated to her works which have sold for millions of dollars but she was buried in a pauper’s grave, largely forgotten, unforgiven.
            Born to a world that did not easily make way for females outside the conventions of marriage, parenthood and obedience, Camille Claudel was  every bit as bound by Nature to create form as she was by Society to conform. She had ‘unladylike desires’.
            Aged 12, the young Claudel had busied herself with sculpting, employing her younger sister and brother to prepare the clay, and to model for her. 
            “Under her direction, and while she feverishly twists her lumps, one person beats the clay for modelling, a second mixes the plaster [or] poses as a model,” wrote the poet, playwright and art critic Mathias Morhardt.
            Recognising his daughter’s evident talent and passion for sculpture, Claudel’s father consulted their neighbour, the sculptor Alfred Boucher who took her under his wing. After a few years under Boucher’s tutelage Claudel was enrolled at the Academie Colarossi in Paris, one of only two schools to admit women, and allow them to study human anatomy.
            Boucher then introduced Claudel to the modernist sculptor Auguste Rodin who immediately took the 19-year-old on as an assistant in his Paris studio where she would remain for 10 years. She modelled for Rodin, collaborated with him, and became his lover.
            Claudel’s highly individual style developed during this period, and had a great influence on Rodin’s work, imbuing it with less stiffness, and more gesture.
            Rodin described their collaboration thus, “The happiness of being ever understood, of seeing [my] expectations ever exceeded, [constitutes] one of the great joys of [my] artistic life.”
            Despite her growing recognition as a unique talent and many successes (she was 23 when one of her works, a bust of her sister, entered a French museum, gifted by Baroness Charlotte de Rothschild), Claudel came to understand that she was still regarded by many as an appendage to Rodin.
            Claudel struck out on her own, bent on being seen as an individual talent, but without the obvious shelter of a male, and under the judgmental gaze of the patriarchy, she suffered.
            Her position as a careerist not a wife or mother made her an easy target. Her notorious affair with Rodin became an impediment. Her mother and brother disapproved of her life choices, and despite her mother’s wealth and her brother’s success as a poet and dramatist, they remained aloof.
            Her challenge to societal norms, her well-established work ethic, and her passion had already set the scene for Claudel’s solitary life. In an earlier letter to her friend and ally, English artist Florence Jeans she wrote, 
“I’m now working on my two larger-than-life figures and I have two models per day: a woman in the morning, a man in the evening. You can understand how tired I am: I regularly work 12 hours a day, from 7 in the morning until 7 in the evening, and when I get home, it’s impossible for me to remain standing and I go directly to bed.”
            Her workload became a heavy burden as she further distanced herself from Rodin in an exasperated attempt to compel her followers to stop connecting her work to that of his.
            There was no doubting her virtuosity, society’s difficulty was in regarding her as an individual. As a result of this gender-based censorship, and her figurative subject matter, funding for Claudel’s public works ceased. 
            Institute inspectors had refused funding for Claudel’s works based on their explicit nature. Men were allowed to create such works, but the works of women were denied any unladylike expression of sexual desire or heightened emotion.
            In 1901, Maurice Pottecher the French author and poet visited the 37-year-old Claudel reporting that, “She is exhausted to the point of despair. She wants to abandon her art, and she has already broken some of her moulds.”
            He was distressed to witness, “the solitude, and near financial distress to which she has been reduced after having known all the promises of great success.”
            Avoided by Society and State, abandoned by her wealthy family, tormented by her prodigious talent, Claudel wrote of her frustration and fury in a letter to Henriette Thierry in 1912, “I was in such a state of anger that I took all of my wax models and threw them in the fire ... that’s what I do when something unpleasant happens to me, I take my hammer and smash up some [sculpture].”
            Relentless hardship and injustices resulted in a mental breakdown for the 48-year-old sculptor who was ‘voluntarily’ confined to a psychiatric hospital by her absent mother in 1913.
            Despite making a full recovery, regular letters of recommendation from her doctors, as well as public sentiment, Claudel’s mother and brother would not countenance her release.  
            When World War I broke out in 1914, and food was scarce, the asylum wrote to her family asking for money for food for Claudel, their application was ignored. Claudel eventually died 30 years later aged 78 and was interred in a communal pauper’s grave.
            The poet, playwright and art critic Mathias Morhardt who had been so struck by the 12-year-old’s virtuosity stated that her brother was, “... a simpleton. When one has a sister who is a genius, one doesn’t abandon her. But he always thought he was the one who had genius.”