CAMILLE CLAUDEL

In a fictionalized treatment, the French sculptor looks back on her sometimes ecstatic, but mostly tortured life.

Bond, a retired Freudian psychoanalyst and author of a number of varied works, here focuses her psychoanalytic acumen on the complex character of a prominent late-19th- to early-20th-century artist whose achievements came at great personal cost. Claudel (1864–1943), now widely acknowledged as a brilliant sculptor, suffered much of her artistic life because of her romantic liaison with–and inevitable artistic comparison to–the philandering Auguste Rodin, hailed at the time as the greatest sculptor of his day. At first, Claudel benefited both professionally and personally from her relationship with Rodin, but when she realized he wasn’t going to leave his wife, the critics’ comments that she had copied the “master” began to gnaw at her fragile sanity; soon she loathed him with the fervor of her former affection, thinking he was out to claim her accomplishments as his own. Bond suggests this paranoia spurred a detachment from reality that prompted Claudel’s mother in 1913 to commit her to an insane asylum from which she would never emerge. Bond’s portrayal also illuminates other troubling aspects of Claudel’s story, including her charged relationship with her younger brother, Paul, another male uncontested “genius” in her life, as well as with her mother, who left her daughter in the asylum even when psychiatrists recommended in 1920 that Claudel be released and reintegrated with her family. While the author’s sympathetic and detailed account convincingly paints the struggles of the female artist, her reading of Claudel’s work as having sprung in a neat one-to-one relationship from her joy or trauma du jour is both reductive and reflective of a level of self-awareness that’s difficult to believe coming from a character writing from the madhouse.

Overall, though, a provocative rendering of female genius wrestling for recognition in the male-dominated art world.