au Musée Rodin

I went to the Musée Rodin a couple weeks ago (and am just getting to writing about it now). Flavia, my host lady accompanied me. I remember my friend Judy telling me it was one of her favorite places she visited while she was in Paris and it definitely amounted to time well spent.

My favorite part (besides the statue of a hilariously confident Balzac pictured here!) was seeing the work of Rodin's mistress, Camille Claudel. Flavia told me that she was his student first and later became his mistress and it was artsy and tumultuous and ended badly of course. As Camille surpassed Rodin in ability, he became jealous to the point of driving her mad! She spend the last 30 years of her life in an asylum. (I don't know if this is the movie version she told me but it's all I got.)
 
In the actual sculpture anyway, her mastery of sculpture beyond his is evident. Claudel had a finesse Rodin did not, though she is obviously of his school in her general style. To me, the greatest difference between the two was in the gesture of the people, especially the women, each portrayed. While Rodin's male figures are active and grounded in power poses, taking up a lot of space, the women are sort of waning, bending, being small. The only piece in the Rodin Museum where a woman isn't hugging herself/bowing sort of in shame is one with no head or arms where her legs are spread open to give a view similar to L'Origine du Monde, if you know what I mean. (If you don't know and you google it, just know it's NSFW. Like, super not...)

In contrast, not only does Claudel portray women in  ordinary situations in which I suspect Rodin was never very interested like Les Causeuses (The Gossips), but she does it with such a fine, capable touch as to almost make Rodin's bronzes resemble his sketches more than a final piece. Perhaps it's the masculine/feminine opposition at work in Rodin's rough surfaces and Claudel's more polished sensibility. I actually don't know much about it. I never read the little curator notes and the Musée Rodin doesn't have a complete collection or anything. (Apparently one of the reasons her brother had her committed to an institution was because she was destroying her work.) And I love the texture of the surfaces Rodin creates, especially how he renders hair and beards. The Rodin Museum really lets you see so many of his works all together, it's impossible to deny he was a genius of his time. You can kind of tell he didn't think much of women, but I find it absurd to judge art based on some moral objection to the person who created it. So, I admit he was a genius. And it satisfies me to say, Camille was too, only more-so. In fact, according to Wikipedia, "The novelist and art critic Octave Mirbeau described her as 'A revolt against nature: a woman genius.'" That's right. He thought "woman genius" was an oxymoron.

Definitely worth going to when you're in Paris. More on that later! I'm compiling a list that the skinny on a bunch of Paris museums. Should be interesting...