Thirty Years in the Madhouse

Consider this photo:
 

They had worked in the same studio in Paris, when they were young, before life had carried them where they didn’t want to go. Or perhaps they did, who knows?

I sit in this café and peer at the photo. Notice, for example, that the lady on the right, has her hand on the lady on the left. But she? Her arms are akimbo.

“They’re trying to poison me,” sang Joyce DiDonato in the epilogue to Jake Heggie’s song cycle Camille Claudel: Into the Fire. Well, she may have said it, but the lady on the right—Jessie Lipscomb—came away saying it wasn’t true the Claudel was insane, and a friend of Rodin’s echoed the statement. More tellingly, the doctors were never entirely convinced that Claudel needed to be in the madhouse—they once wrote to suggest that she be cared for at home.

Reading the account of her life in Wikipedia, her family seem to be the villains. The brother—who signed the form that committed her, managed to visit seven times in 30 years. To be fair, part of that time he was in China, part of the time war was ravaging Europe. In fact, she died in the middle of World War Two; was that why she was buried in a mass grave? And by the way, the brother managed to specify to the centimeter—practically—where he wanted to be planted.

Still, the brother managed to cross occupied France to see her before her death. But what about the sister—who dropped in just once?

Then we come to Mother—who had never fully accepted her daughter’s embrace of the arts. And Wikipedia seems to imply that Mother, acting through Brother Paul, was the driving force behind the commitment. Because Mother didn’t visit once—thus laying to rest the claims about those ferocious maternal instincts.

Then we come to her relationship with Rodin: Joshua Kosman had this to say in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Her relationship with Rodin, which was both artistic and erotic, caused her as much grief as any such romance between mentor and protégée, and came to an end after she aborted their child. 

Hmm—don’t know about that. Wikipedia states, “in the early years of the 20th Century, Claudel had patrons, dealers, and some commercial success,” and she had stopped seeing Rodin regularly in 1898. She exhibited in 1903, and produced this work in the same period:

Claudel destroyed most of her work; still, about 90 pieces remain. She’s been the subject of a few biographies, a few films, and a few exhibitions. Some people feel that she is a spin-off of the infinitely more famous Rodin—to me, their work looks nothing alike, but what do I know?

The question is whether she was mad, and if so, what if anything caused it. I look into the faces of the photo, and what do I see? Jessie—an English sculptor—peers at us, as if to say, “yes, world, remember us. Remember that we too were young, that we lived and loved, and went our separate ways. Yes, this is the last visit—we won’t see each other again.”

And Claudel?

She’s withdrawn. Nor had she wanted to see her old friend, but rancor? It’s a young person’s taste. The picture makes it clear: they are tied to each other by their history, by their fights, perhaps by their envy or jealousy. And they parted for many years. Jessie married, Claudel spent the final 30 years of her life in a madhouse: I see understanding in Jessie face. And in Claudel’s?

Resignation….