I love Rodin. There was a small exhibition of his work a few years ago at the Brooklyn Museum, in the oft forgotten about gallery on the first floor, before you even get to the ticket area. They've redesigned that foyer so many times, shifting the gift shop into a gallery and then into a classroom, and back again, I dont know if the Rodin space exists anymore in that same form. Like my memory exists in a walled off room.
It was poorly attended the two times I went, with maybe two guards, bored, with drifted gazes boring through the walls opposite their posts. So no one noticed when I touched the toes of a sculpture. It's maddening being so close to a sculpture and not being able to touch it. I can remember visually, of course, but memory through feel is so strong. I can remember how my dads face looks partially through memory of feel, running my fingers over his face, even as his shook me away in irritation.
Camille Claudel is always a part of Rodin's biography. Usually a chapter, or an aside. As a model in one of his pieces, or sometimes they put her work in his show. I hadn't really looked at her as deeply.
I'm reading some of Anne Carson's Short Talks. This one caught my eye and made me look again, or for the first time? at Camille Claudel:
SHORT TALK ON SLEEP STONES
Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her life in an asylum wondering why, writing letters to her brother the poet, who had signed the papers. Come visit me, she says. Remember I am living here with madwomen, days are long. She did not smoke or stroll. She refused to sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones—marble and granite and porphyry—she broke them, then collected the pieces and buried these outside the walls at night. Night was when her hands grew huger and huger, until in the photograph they are like two parts of someone else loaded onto her knees.
30 years. Thirty years. I am thirty five, that's mostly my entire life, thirty years. Imprisoned by her younger brother who dissaporved of her lifestyle- who was a POET! He wasn't some artless fob, he was only her younger by 4 years, he only visited her 7 times in three decades, and he denied every request by everyone to release her.
I read it once and was curious. I read it again and was confused. I read it again, and then the wikipedia page, and then the wiki again, and then I put my head in my hands and cried. How do we do this to people, to people we know, people we are supposed to love? How could so many people and policies fail a sane woman, a genius, a well known figure? She lived until her 70's, she didn't tragically die young, she was merely illusioned into a young death. Disappeared away. It all happened when her father died, the wiki said "her loving and wealthy father," the last line between her and the end of her life. I'm ineloquent about this, but I will be thinking about this for a long time. I feel like I must align myself with Claudel over Rodin, like having ignored her for... 30 years... I. feel complicit. Like she's been there there whole time but in a little walled off room.
