CLAUDINE MITCHELL

University of Leeds

December 1989  [Extracted without the footnotes]

In 1905 Maria Lomer De Vits compiled a record of sculptresses working in Paris, listing 231 contemporaries whose class origins, financial and socio-economic status were as diverse as their artistic practices.   What they had in common was a commitment to producing and exhibiting regularly.   Her objective, De Vits explained, was a feminist one - she wanted to support women artists in their struggle for recognition and their campaign that ‘Art has no sex’. 

The categories ‘intellectuality’ and ‘sexuality’ seem to me the most useful conceptual tools with which to analyse Claudel’s sculpture and to probe the critical discourses they generated.  My objectives in maintaining a constant relationship between these two categories go beyond this, however, since I would argue that their mutual isolation in cultural history has been an important factor in the misapprehension of the force with which nineteenth-century women did intervene in culture. 

IMAGES OF LOVE AND DESTINY

La Valse, Clotho and L’Age mûr were conceived as imaginative compositions, works in which the artist above all displayed her capacity to invent images, whilst the capacity to analyse and capture visual appearances was instead directed towards portrait busts. 

Claudel worked on these sculptures with the Paris Salons in mind.  Like most artists of the period, she regarded these massive shows, held annually in May, as essential to her career, offering the possibility of recognition by Parisian art critics.  The Salons were also functional in the completion of a sculpture, as sculptors depended on patrons to finance the transfer from a plaster version into the durable materials of bronze or marble, itself an expensive enterprise.  Claudel’s immediate objective was to obtain a commission from the French State - not that the Beaux-Arts paid well, but a State purchase, and display in the contemporary art collection of the Musée du Luxembourg, also called the Musée des Artistes Vivants, was an undisputed mark of recognition.  It was a necessary step in the making of a career, attracting the attention of patrons, and giving confidence to a dealer on whom the sculptor would depend to organize the financing of her practice as well as to provide a regular exhibition space. 

La Valse

Clotho and La Valse were first exhibited as a pair at the Salon of 1893. An image drawn from the Three Sisters of Fate, Clotho had the figure of a woman rendered almost skeletal with age struggling with threads of hair which cling around her head and body like an octopus, symbolising destiny or fatality.  The title La Valse,  the sculpture of a couple dancing with their bodies entwined languorously, could connote modern life, though the absence of costume immediately cancelled such a reference, attesting that the sculpture represented something other than what it stood for in the present moment.  Like Clotho, it was understood as a symbol, but since it was not a personification fixed by tradition it remained open to interpretation.  Was it dance, music, love, or any combination of the three that the sculpture symbolised? The sculptures certainly demanded assessment for their intellectual content as well as their formal aspect, and Claudel obtained this from critics who, in discussing her works, did not use the concept of art as self-expression but argued for intellectuality and significance in art.  They opposed what they regarded as the mistaken and reductive notion of realism which, it was argued, had led artists to take the illusion of the body standing in space as their sole objective.  Intellectuality was advocated as the only possible means of salvation for French art:

Once again, there is only one thing we ask for and that is the appropriation of the sign to the idea, the artist’s ability to make emotion and thought visible.  There is only one alternative for French Art: invent or perish.

It was for her ‘constant search for intellectuality’ that Claudel was supported by Roger Marx throughout the 1890s.   In 1893 he singled her out from her peers as the artist most successfully working in the mode he and his colleagues had been advocating:

The originality we have been looking for, the originality which frightens the mind enslaved in routine, and incapable of personal judgment, the originality which indicates an artistic career to watch for closely has been found, at last, thanks to Mme Claudel’s The Waltz and Clotho.  Yet, however outstanding and fascinating invention is in these works, we should not fall to consider their plastic beauty.

Roger Marx celebrated Claudel’s aptitude for ‘invention’, which he had schematically defined as ‘the rule of subordinating the form to an idea’.   In his opinion, the artist’s mastery of technique had allowed her to achieve significance in art while pursuing the quest for formal beauty. 

Since ‘form’ or ‘sign’ in sculpture was the human body, the notion of invention implied that the representation of the human figure be envisaged as a signifying process.   In the case of La Valse we must examine how one of the work’s technical characteristics - the search for an equilibrium at the limits of balance - related thematically to the port royal of the relationship Claudel had carefully organized in rendering facial expressions, gestures, and physical contact or lack of it. 

Another source of dynamism in La Valse is the curvilinear and continuous flow of line which develops on the profiles of the sculpture.  The effect has been achieved at the expense of verisimilitude in the rendering of anatomy.  The bodies have been elongated, the volumes of muscles thinned down so that each section of the sculpture fuses into another.  Certain aspects of the anatomy have been accentuated to provide long sections of curves; others have been modified to offer visual links between the two figures.  This can be seen for instance in the oval figure formed by the woman’s right arm and the man’s left.  As a consequence of Claudel’s method of modelling, light catches the profiles of the sculpture, flowing continuously along the channels they provide. 

In La Valse Claudel was concerned with technique, the challenge of conveying in sculpture a sensation of movement.  Yet the illusion she wanted to create of characters escaping the law of gravity also had a symbolic dimension: release from the material world.  Such symbolism was, I think, the solution Claudel devised to resolve the problems raised by the representation of sexuality.  Unlike Rodin, who in Le Baiser positioned his figures seated next to one another or placed them back to back as in Fugit Amor, Claudel presented the human couple embracing face to face, a position in which the sexual reference was inescapable.  Through the narrative she signified in La Valse Claudel worked to soften or displace the sexual dimension of the embrace.  There is no indication of the pressure the man’s body might exercise on the woman’s flesh.  As we look at the sculpture closely, we notice that Claudel has reduced the surface of skin contact between her two fingers to an absolute minimum: the woman’s drapery grows into a skirt to separate the sexual organs, and, contrary to the indications suggested by a photograph, the man’s left arm does not rest on the woman’s waist.  The only point of contact between them is at the crossing of the elbows, and in the touch of the woman’s right hand on the man’s left.  The mannerism of this gesture and the relaxed openness of the man’s hand indicate a control of the mind over the body; there is no facial expression that might suggest desire or sexual pleasure.  The man’s lips are close to the woman’s neck but the mouth remains closed and without tension in a suspended gesture.  All these specific narrative spaces contrived by Claudel indicate that she wanted to portray love as the union of two minds as much as that of two bodies. 

In Salon reviews of the work we find narrative descriptions which accredited the symbolic dimension of movement and balance in La Valse.  Octave Mirbeau constructed a narrative of lovers’ escape into another time and another space as a response to the apparent release from the law of gravity:

Mademoiselle Camille Claudel has courageously confronted one of the greatest difficulties of sculpture: a dance movement.  An infinite art is required, if it is not to become vulgar or remain frozen in stone.  Mademoiselle Claudel has conquered that art. 

Embracing one another, the woman adorably placing her head on the man’s shoulder, the couple is moving away, turning round and round in slow motion, voluptuous and chaste.  They are nearly lifted off the ground, quasi-aerial, supported by a mysterious force which holds their leaning bodies in balance.  They fly away, as if carried by wings.  But where are they going, lost in the exaltation of their soul and flesh, so closely united? Is it towards love or towards death? The flesh is young, they palpitate with life, but the drapery which envelops and follows them, and turns round with them, clings like a shroud.

Octave Mirbeau’s reading depends on his assessment that Claudel’s sculpture was capable of signifying both voluptuousness and chastity.  He saw no problem in the combination.  The absence of sexual passion in the faces and gestures of the characters, the transference of the turmoil of the flesh into the movement of the drapery, were understood as cancelling sexual passion.  The disentanglement from the law of gravity was viewed as a metaphor for the control over sexual desire.  The reading Mirbeau made of the position of the woman’s head is decisive in his interpretation.  He saw it as signifying the trust she places in her partner, a token of love as an experience of the mind. 

In a similar manner, Léon Daudet gave a symbolic status to Claudel’s sculpture in response to the representation of movement, reading the non-representational aspect of the drapery as a disassociation from the material world:

The couple carried away in a whirlwind conveys admirably the impression of turmoil and vertigo ...  Around them and emerging from them is their atmosphere, dress or cloud, folds of ecstasy or shivering air which are signified by indefinite and aerial curves.

Mirbeau and others approached Claudel’s sculptures as they would a poetical text.  They constructed a poetical narrative in a series of images held together by the recurrence of certain themes within a network of connoted meanings.  The implicit dimension of Claudel’s symbolism was welcomed as inviting the viewer to improvise a chain of associated ideas. 

The theme of love as the union of two minds, released from the material world, the imagery of vertigo and uprootedness, the theme of the omnipresence of death and man’s incapacity to control destiny which these critics attributed to Claudel’s sculptures were drawn from other sources.   In particular their remarks relate to the poetry of the period, which Claudel valued and her critics admired or even wrote.  There are, for instance, interesting correspondences between the imagery and mood of the sculptures under discussion and the much read Les Névroses of Maurice Rollinat.  The themes of music as love or of love as a flight into space are interwoven in the section entitled L’Ame, with its four poems on Music:

O Music the flow of dream,

Roll me away in the infinite. 

Dream can tenderly float in your souls,

Voluptuousness unfolds itself quivering

In your sighs of love and vague sadness

The endless vertigo of the fantastic waltz.

The symbolism of Clotho, which means both spider and fate in Greek, can be compared to the image of the spider in Rollinat’s La Folie, a poem which represents human doom as madness. 

Set to music, Rollinat’s poems entertained the intellectual bourgeoisie, as is testified by Frédérique Vallet’s painting Entre Artistes, which shows two women interpreting Rollinat’s Nuit tombante with Claudel’s La Valse standing on the piano. 

The Paris Salons, the reviews of Roger Marx and Mirbeau, Rollinat’s poetry or the painting of Frédérique Vallet begin to build up a picture of the intellectual community within which and for which Claudel worked.  It is in this context that L’Age mûr acquired meaning and should be discussed. 

L’Age mûr

La Valse and Clotho demonstrated a preoccupation with the theme of destiny, a project which continued to engage Claudel after the Salon of 1893.  She stated as much in a letter to her brother: ‘I am still working hard at my group of three.  I shall put a leaning tree to express destiny.  ‘Claudel’s terminology gives us some insight into her approach to sculpture.  The phrase ‘my group of three’ suggests that she conceived the project first of all as a technical challenge, that of tackling a three-figure composition.  The formula ‘to express destiny’ indicates that Claudel envisaged sculpture as the representation of mental conceptions, a view of art that echoes a specific linguistic register in the 1890s, that of literary-critical discourse.  Claudel’s vocabulary can be compared to that of Henri de Régnier when he explained the poetical procedures which engaged him and his fellow poets at the time:

A symbol is the crowning of a series of intellectual operations which, starting from a word, works through images and metaphors, and goes on to include emblems and allegory.  It is the most complete configuration of an Idea.  The expressive configuration of the Idea is what today’s poets have attempted and sometimes achieved.

Claudel seemed to have had similar ambitions for her new sculpture: she would invent ‘an expressive configuration of the Idea of Destiny’.  A clay model for the composition was finished by July 1895, as is confirmed by the report which the Inspector of the Beaux-Arts Armand Silvestre wrote when he visited her studio:

Mademoiselle Claudel has shown me the sketch of a group for a truly interesting composition, the studies of which are at an advanced stage.  It represents Maturity symbolized by a man drawn forward by Old Age while youth sends a last farewell.

As Roger Marx had done in his allusion to Claudel’s ‘invention’, so Silvestre’s use of the term ‘composition’ in opposition to ‘group’ refers to the intellectual content of the work.   In his understanding, the sculpture was an allegory of Maturity represented through a narrative of the three ages of Man. 

Claudel worked on the plaster model until October 1898.   The outcome of five years work, L’Age mûr was an unprecedented composition exemplifying a conception of sculpture very different from that which the Beaux-Arts promulgated.  The idea of sculpture as a volume occupying space in relation to a vertical axis was jettisoned and the traditional dichotomy between figure and pedestal was done away with.  The base had become an integral part of the sculpted object.  The idea a of sculpture as mass absorbing or reflecting light was replaced by that of a composition which integrated hollowed space within a tormented outline.  Every square inch of matter from the base to the top had been worked out to articulate meaning.  The relationship of parts to whole did not simply follow the principle of coordination and subordination.  The sculpture was conceived to create its own visual and emotional impact in its entirety, rather than as the sum total of the parts which constituted it. 

Claudel’s symbolism interwove three distinct modes of representation.  She drew symbols from the repertory of personifications fixed by tradition, thanks to whose conventions a mental conception could be represented through the human figure and recognized by specific attributes of physical appearance, age, gender or occupation.  On one level, Claudel’s three figures were, as Silvestre defined them, personifications of youth, maturity and old age.  Secondly, there was, and prominently so, a narrative order in Claudel’s sculpture.  Thanks to its positioning, gestures and facial expressions the human body was made to signify states of mind and the ways in which the characters affected one another and were affected by the surrounding space.  The viewer had to assess what took place between the characters by making a reading of the causal relationships which the sculptor had articulated.  Thirdly, there were metaphorical images and connoted meanings.  Take the base, for instance, which has been worked to suggest the unfolding of a wave.  On the left it thins out as if breaking on the seashore.  On the right, the base with its middle platform, the arch standing above it (whose extremity resembles the bows of a ship) and the floating drapery evoke the image of a ghostly ship.  The waves, the sea, the boat drifting away were all traditional images of destiny.  Instead of using a definite object to symbolize destiny, such as the leaning tree she first thought of, Claudel chose to give the main architectural lines of the sculpture a symbolic function.  The horizontal, expanding from left to right, would represent the passage of time.  The three different levels of the base would symbolize the cycle of life.  The main oblique axis of the sculpture, that which follows the direction of the gaze which the young woman addresses to the man and ends in the extremity of the old woman’s drapery, would symbolize destiny.  The oblique axis of the left group, dominated by the figure of death, would symbolize destiny or fatality. 

Within this general symbolic framework, the personifications are modified by the nuances of meanings which the narrative order and the connotations convey.  What makes Claudel’s allegorical mode difficult to read is that there is no agreed cultural convention as to how the narrative order, the personifications or the connotations should be related to one another.  The concepts associated with the idea of time, death, fatality, destiny or the ages of man are represented by any of the three levels we have described.  Claudel also elected to modify the conventional symbols of personification by narrating states of mind which were not part of their fixed attributes.   In this respect, viewing her sculpture is primarily an act of language.  One has to transpose into language the multiple and nuanced inflexions of meaning which the artist has signified.  It is a time-consuming activity and not a particularly easy one to convey in writing, for the critic has to take the risk of subjective interpretation. 

Before investigating the critical reception of L’Age mûr at the Salon of 1899, I shall claim the right to such interpretation, bearing in mind the remarks of Henri de Régnier:

In practice symbolism always entails a certain degree of obscurantisms which is inevitable ...  A symbol is, indeed, a comparison which seeks an identity between abstraction and concreteness, one of its term remaining unexpressed.  The relation is only suggested and one has to re-establish the link that there was.

Narration takes precedence in this figure of Psyche, as Claudel made the emotional tension which the character invests in the departing group its very structural principle.  The only point of contact between the young woman and the group to the left is her gaze.  The figure has been constructed in relation to the oblique line which the gaze describes in space.  As the body projects forward, the elongation of limbs and thumbs gives tangibility to the oblique line. 

The modelling of the face was designed to define the tension of the gaze.  The wide aperture of the eyes or the hollow between the eyebrows explain the woman’s concentration on the act of seeing.  The inclination of the head, the stretching of the neck muscles and the mouth opening slightly in consequence, signify the woman’s endeavour to make vision reach as far as possible. 

While Beaux-Arts students were taught to treat facial expressions as elements added to a mould, Claudel made emotions and states of mind the very structure of her forms.  What she represented in Psyche is an emotional state in itself and for itself.  Each aspect of the anatomy has been given a narrative function.  The gestures of the arms and the hands bring nuances to the tension of the woman’s gaze.  The hands do not attempt to cling to a lost object, they start closing upon themselves and the arms begin to lose their tension and bend.  The gesture signifies the woman’s awareness of her powerlessness to alter the situation.  It is therefore a process of change that Claudel wanted to signify, a passage from bereavement to an attempt to bring about reunification and a final stage of resignation. 

Psyche symbolizes the awareness of experiences that one hoped to encounter or had encountered once and that were no longer attainable.  On its own - as it was presented in 1894 and cast in 1905, Le Dieu envolé is open to meaningful interpretation.  It is no longer so when placed in the group, where the figure of the man appears to be the concrete form of Psyche’s state of mind and the representation of an emotional state begs to be explained in a set of causal relationships between the characters of a narrative. 

Unlike some of her colleagues who, when exhibiting a work with a complex subject, would provide an explanation in the Salon livret, Claudel added only two words to the title: ‘fantastic group’.  The term ‘fantastic’ did not explain the symbolism but claimed a particular status for the sculpture.  It indicated that what was represented in L’Age mûr was neither a scene taking place in actual time and real space, nor a symbol of a real event.  It was a ‘vision’, a set of images, figments of the artist’s mind.  The term ‘fantastic’ claimed for L’Age mûr, the same relationship with reality as that governing symbolist poetry, where language constructs scenes and images to embody a state of consciousness rather than represent a given reality.  The subject of Claudel’s sculpture is not existence but one’s relationship with existence, the emotions which arise from the painful encounter with reality. 

L’Age mûr was Claudel’s chef d’oeuvre in the old sense of the term, a work in which the craftsman invested the sum total of his knowledge and talent in a bid for recognition of his professional status.  By now aged thirty-five and having exhibited for just over a decade, Claudel had no less an ambition than this when she presented the sculpture at the Salon of 1899. 

Turning to the Salon reviews, one might expect to find long narrative descriptions similar to that which Mirbeau had written on La Valse, for such was the mode critics adopted when reviewing works they valued.  Descriptions of the work turn out to be short and scarce, however.  Praise, for praise there was, dwelt in generalities on the status of L’Age mûr as a masterpiece, or concerned Claudel’s intellectuality and her exception al status as a woman artist.  Critics who did offer some account of L’Age mûr  symbolism oversimplified it, contenting themselves with naming the personifications.  They were in agreement that the figure to the left was ‘Death’ or ‘Age’, the figure to the right was ‘Youth’ or ‘Love’, and the central figure was ‘Man’:

Youth, personified in a kneeling position, desperately stretches her arm towards Man who departs from her, attracted and guided by Age into which he declines, filled with regrets.

Assuming that the figure at the centre of the composition was the focus of meaning, the critics read L’Age mûr as showing a process of change taking place in the figure of the man.  The sculpture was consequently thought to represent man’s ageing process, something which unsympathetic critics used for humorous effects, writing of ‘An old man bent in two, walking with difficulty’, claiming that ‘the figures represent the worst side of reality’, exclaiming ‘oh how hard it is to grow old’ or dismissively remarking: L’Age mûr is the work of some octogenarian Romantic. 

The representation of ageing in Gabriélle Dumontet’s Le Soir du haleur did not offend, for it was thought to symbolize the suffering of mankind, as the verse which introduced it explained: ‘Each man is a haleur who drags along the burden of life. 

In L’Age mûr the figure of the man was positioned between the sexually marked figure of a young woman and the asexual figure of an elderly woman who took charge of him. 

The critics saw the process of ageing in such an image as a loss of sexual power, something Maurice Hamel transposed directly into language:

A woman, projected forward with all the force of desire, stretches her arms towards Man whom Death has already marked with her seal and removed from the joys of life.

‘The joys of life’ was a common euphemism for the pleasures of the flesh, a connotation which seems particularly overt in Hamel’s sentence with its reference to ‘desire’ as incarnated in the figure of a young woman. 

The critics’ reluctance to engage with Claudel’s sculpture stemmed from a conflict between what it was thought to represent - a man’s loss of virility and the masculine ideology of power.  It was a very partial interpretation, focusing on one aspect of the sculpture’s sexual dimension and thus emptying the work itself of its significance.  Could Claudel’s practice ever be given proper recognition in nineteenth-century culture when critical language had the power so to impoverish it, on the ground of sexual politics?

Claudel, and the critics or artists who valued her, shared the conviction that art should have an intellectual content, a term which could be extended from the simple demand that the human body be a signifier to the ambitious project of tackling the philosophical problems of life and death, or even of encompassing experiences that discursive language could not.   In opposition to the aesthetics of the Beaux-Arts, which they viewed as an empty regurgitation of the past and a mistaken conception of realism, the critics developed a theory of art as expression.   In search of cultural identity, these members of the Parisian intelligentsia believed that there was a ‘mentality’, a ‘psychology’ specific to the 1890s, characterized by a painful awareness of the tensions of desire and the insatiable nature of human aspirations, to which the arts should give form.  The strongest factor giving coherence to this concept of art was what it excluded: an awareness of historical conflicts, of the harsh realities of class, race and sexual oppression.  More innovative was this group’s departure from the notion of an intellectual hierarchy of the arts in which poetry had supremacy over the visual arts and painting over sculpture.  Without failing to recognize the specificity of each practice, they thought sculpture capable of the same intellectual procedures as those which constructed poetical tests. 

INTELLECTUALITY, SEXUALITY AND THE CENSORS

Intellectuality was not easily accepted in a woman and Claudel was made an exception only because of her intellectual creativity.  The representation of sexuality in the works of women artists was subjected to a tiresome system of control.   In its most brutal form, censorship was exercised, with women being excluded from the main exhibition spaces and denied commissions.  Censorship could also take the form of misrepresentation in critical language and, above all, silence.  These phenomena should not be kept separate, for it is in the combination of restrictions placed on women’s intellect and the control of women’s sexuality that sexual oppression is and was effectively exercised.  Whether the debate focused on Claudel’s capacity to invent or on the legitimacy of women artists representing the naked figure, the fundamental issue at stake was the same: women’s claim to have access to knowledge and to the public discussion of sexuality. 

The generalising categories by which Claudel’s works were valued ‘originality’, ‘imagination’, ‘intellectuality’, ‘power’, ‘courage’ - were those reserved for outstanding artists.  These terms were not specific to the language of art criticism; attributes of the human persona, they could not but bring to art criticism nineteenth-century ideologies concerning human psychology.  The growing conviction that women were different from men, the belief that there was a biological connection between gender and personality, the ideology of the relative value of the sexes all manifested themselves when the outstanding artist under discussion was a woman.  Octave Mirbeau considered it a problem that he should be led to recognise the attributes of outstanding creativity in a woman:

Mademoiselle Claudel gives us works which for their invention and power of execution go beyond anything that can be expected from a woman.  Last year she exhibited a bust of Rodin: a marvel of powerful interpretation ...  This year she exhibits two compositions so strange, exciting and new in their invention, so moving in their decorative organisation, of such poetical depth and masculine thought, that one stops in amazement that such a work could come from a woman.  I am victim of repetition so astonished I am. 

Judging from Mirbeau’s inability to dissociate the term ‘masculine’ from the term ‘thought’, intellectuality was regarded as a masculine prerogative. 

Mirbeau’s derogatory attitude towards women’s intellectual creativity may seem the mark of an eccentric misogynist.  We can nevertheless relate his remarks to the dominant ideology which structured the institution especially created to take charge of women’s intellect: the secondary school system.  From its creation in 1880 up to the First World War, women’s intellectual education was not considered on a status of parity with that of men.  The curriculum was different, women’s allowed readings were strictly controlled and emphasis was laid on the teaching of morality.  The acquisition of knowledge and the stimulation of intellectual inquiry were not considered valuable in themselves.  Education was not conceived as preparing women for a career and consequently the diploma which rewarded it did not grant access to higher education.  The predominant attitude to the value of women’s intellectual education was that it would make them better able to assume their role within the family.  Women were granted access to knowledge only inasmuch as it did not endanger the institutions which perpetuated sexual oppression.  The history of women’s entry to higher education in the late nineteenth century is punctuated by a series of battles, often conducted by feminist groups. 

Women’s claim to access to knowledge provoked a fundamental crisis of consciousness, and we should not expect the art establishment to have remained undisturbed.  Mirbeau’s remarks are an example of the strategy some critics adopted when designating Claudel an exception to avoid questioning the validity of their notion of ‘women’s art’.  Whilst to safeguard their ideologies other critics denied the specificity of her work and subsumed them into their own notions of what women’s art could or should be.  Since intellectuality was thought of as a masculine prerogative, such writers would empty the works of sculptresses of their symbolic content to root them in the ostensibly feminine characteristics of feeling, or instinct. 

Mademoiselle Claudel has more fever - and her art is filled with fire and passion - nonetheless it cannot be said that she has renounced the feminine instinct.  “La Valse”, with the young man and the young woman closely embracing as they turn round and round to the sound of some inebriating music, in one thrust of their bodies, and with their souls in unison, represents youth in all its exaltation, when vertigo takes over.  And again who could speak with more subtlety than a woman of the sudden fit of madness of a first passion?

La Valse was interpreted as an image of a woman’s longing for sexual love or perhaps her memory of it.   The so-called ‘female instinct’ in which Sertat wanted to root Claudel’s work was conveyed recurrently in nineteenth-century novels, which implied that the quest for love and the encounter of love through a man was the central experience of women’s lives.  The balance between intellectuality and sexuality which Claudel had achieved in La Valse was broken, to allow Sertat to produce his own narrative of sexual passion. 

The theory of art as expression expounded by critics who regarded themselves as the promoters of Claudel’s career and the theory of woman’s art as the expression of woman’s nature expounded by others had the same result.  Both focused attention on a perceived sexual content in her sculptures. 

Mirbeau, Roger Marx, Geffroy, Camille Mauclair, Maurice Hamel or Charles Morice, the exponents of intellectuality in art, never questioned the legitimacy of Claudel’s representation of sexuality, for they could anchor it in a cultural movement with which they were closely associated.  The imprisonment of sexuality within the instincts, the inability to control passion, and the quest for sexual love were viewed by them as the forms that the anxiety of living could take, as significant and as moral as a sense of the omnipresence of death or one’s powerlessness to control destiny.  L’Age mûr and La Valse operated both kinds of symbolism.  Claudel’s preoccupation with the theme of death and destiny gave an intellectual and moral justification to her representation of sexuality. 

Outside this cultural community Claudel’s representation was regarded as a problem.  This did not take the form of confusion between the artist and the image of the passionate woman constructed around her works - that came later, in our own period.  Those who supported Claudel gave her a reputation for integrity, resilience and total commitment to her profession which was never questioned by her detractors.  Nor did the issue take the form of an overt moral sanction.  It is in the state of unbalance between the excessive and emotional language of the critics who supported Claudel and the silence of others that it manifested itself, around doubts about what could be publicly articulated about a woman’s representation of sexuality.  The issue at stake, I believe, was the legitimacy of woman’s claim of access to the public discussion of sexuality. 

The scientific discourse on sexuality, that of psychiatric medicine which scrutinized and policed woman’s sexuality, was an entirely masculine one, in the sense that women could not exercise the professions which controlled it.  Women could study general medicine and Paris numbered the grand total of eleven women general practitioners in 1888, though they could not work in psychiatric medicine.  The standards of morality which structured women’s lives ordained that they should be given a limited knowledge of sexual matters on the day prior to their wedding, by their mothers, and in private.  Girls and teenagers were given no sexual education and changes which occurred within their bodies were not explained to them.  Instead, they were kept separate from boys, subjected to moral injunctions, and put under surveillance so that their virginity should be protected. 

In the 1880s feminists looked into the legal system which regimented women’s lives within matrimony.  Though they addressed the problems of the status and fate of unmarried pregnant women and campaigned for the right to paternity suit, their publications never discussed issues directly related to the sexual function.   It is in the period 1895-1913 that feminist thinkers claimed the right for women to intervene in the public discussion of sexuality.  The feminist paper La Fronde launched an impressive campaign with Madeleine Pelletier to open the profession of psychiatric medicine to women.  Pelletier entered the profession, but instead of reinforcing the dominant discourse on sexuality or becoming a follower of Freud, she produced an alternative one, laying the basis for a cultural theory of sexual difference and sexual oppression. 

The movement for birth control, which grew in the 1890s, provided French feminists with another platform to intervene in culture.  The Neo-Malthusians established an organization in 1896, ran their own press, set up an extensive network of public lectures and efficiently used the Universal Exhibition of 1900 to propagate their views.  The idea that procreation should be the result of a deliberate choice, and that contraceptive methods made it possible to separate the sexual act from the procreative function, was used by feminist thinkers such as Madeleine Pelletier or Nelly Roussel to articulate the concept of women’s sexual freedom.   In the 1890s, Nelly Roussel came to argue that it was necessary for feminists to ally themselves with the Neo-Malthusians, and went on to articulate the concept of sexual emancipation:

Of all the liberties which women claim and aspire to, there is none that will have a more decisive influence than that of sexual freedom. 

The doctrines of the Neo-Malthusians became the object of a struggle in the press which was punctuated by court trials.   In 1907 Nelly Roussel lost a court case on the grounds that her writings offended the law of decent public behaviour (‘contraire aux lois et aux bonnes moeurs’).  The terms of the judgement that was passed against her revealed what the establishment thought could or could not be said about sexuality:

Mme Nelly Roussel recommends voluntary sterilisation to women as a right and duty, invoking not reasons of health, which would be legitimate, but the fear of suffering and the desire for well being and...  she does not recommend chastity at the same time ... 

It is an immoral and antisocial doctrine...  Nelly Roussel offends the patriotic duty on which the lives of a civilised nation and much of our laws rest. 

In the first paragraph, women’s right to a sexual life outside procreation is condemned by the legal system which, in this instance, appropriates the moral law of the Catholic Church.  Women’s rights over their own body were denied, and the notion of women’s right to sexual pleasure could not even be publicly articulated.   In the second paragraph, the notion of women’s sexual emancipation is not treated as a question of morality but as a political issue - and it was as a political issue that the question would be fought over after the First World War, within the terms of the Law of 1920 set up to make abortion and contraception extremely difficult and heavily penalised. 

In art institutions, the conflict provoked by women’s claim for access to the public argument on sexuality took the form of a debate around the legitimacy of women artists representing the naked body.  There was much bewilderment as to whether the tacit codes of representation of sexuality which transformed the naked body into a formal abstraction - the nude - could operate in the case of women practitioners or how they should operate.  The decisions that State administrators and critics took regarding Claudel and her fellow sculptress Hélène Bertaux are as exemplary in their own way as those of the legislators in respect of Roussel’s writings. 

La Valse was the object of straightforward censorship.   In February 1892 Claudel had solicited a State commission for La Valse, which at this stage did not include any drapery.  An Inspector from the Ministry of the Beaux-Arts was sent to her studio to examine it and recommended that it should not be bought on the grounds of its erotic content:

The work cannot be accepted as it has been presented to me.  First of all the violent accent of reality which comes from it prohibits its display in a public gallery.  The proximity of the sexes is conveyed with a surprising sensuality of expression which considerably exaggerates the absolute nudity of all the human details.

In his coded language Armand Dayot stated that the sculpture made an explicit reference to coitus.  It was thus censored on the grounds that it offended the law of public decency which prohibited the sexual act from being performed in public places.  Armand Dayot himself respected the terms of this law when he referred to the sexual act without using the word in his report.  He also expected visual artists to do so, and to know about the devices of displacement or erasure of erotic content in their representation of the naked figure.  Since the Beaux-Arts had commissioned Rodin’s Le Baiser, a sculpture which was to represent French art at the Universal Exhibition of 1889, which showed the human couple naked and embracing, and since Rodin could include in his show at the Universal Exhibition of 1900 a direct representation of coitus simply by calling it ‘Sin’, the sanction that the Inspector of Art put on Claudel’s La Valse does not make sense, unless the issue was that the tacit codes governing the representation of sexuality used by male practitioners were regarded as inoperative or inadequate in the case of women practitioners. 

Dayot made decisions as to which codes Claudel should have used.  First the representation of the human couple embracing had to refer to a social context in which the law of public decency allowed it to take place.  There was such a context, that of an evening bail:

I have therefore asked Mme Claudel to dress her characters, choosing for preference an evening dress (First Empire) which will prevent the form of her dancers from being sacrificed and still allow us to admire the female dancer’s throat and shoulders, even her legs.

Since the contact of female and male sexual organs could not be displayed in a public place, some form of drapery was called for.  Dayot’s specification of which parts of the female body could be shown upheld the law of public decency which allowed women to display the throat and shoulders in an evening situation.  In their representation of the human figure, he was thus asking women artists to respect the same laws which governed the presentation of the female body in society. 

Male artists, on the contrary, could operate codes in the arts that differed from those applying in society.  Dayot did not take this decision lightly and had sought Rodin’s opinion before submitting his report.  Rodin’s answer was somewhat ambiguous in the sense that it suggested that it was a lack of technical competence that made Claudel avoid using drapery in her sculpture:

Mademoiselle Claudel only wants to do the nude, so we should let her, for it is right and as she does not want drapery she would only do it badly. 

Rodin’s answer also stated his disagreement with the moral sanction the Inspector of the Beaux-Arts had placed on La Valse.  In the event, Dayot did not follow Rodin’s advice and sent his own report all the same. 

To get her commission Claudel added drapery and succeeded in satisfying Dayot, who felt that its concealment of the sexual organs was sufficient to displace the erotic content of the sculpture:

Ah! the draperies are rather flimsy ...  but they are sufficient to hide certain too obviously realistic details and indicate at the same time the character of the composition.  The light sash which clings to the woman’s hips leaves the torso entirely naked, a torso which bends backwards as if to escape a kiss, and ends in a shivering tail; it is like a cocoon that bursts open to let a winged creature escape.

More decisive in Dayot’s assessment was the gesture of the female character, which, when it is read as a turn of the head to escape a kiss, signified the woman’s resistance to sexual impulse, her insistence on chastity.  Dayot was setting the code that chastity be expressly signified in women artists’ representation of the naked human figure.  On the grounds of his assessment that this had been clearly signified, Dayot accredited a symbolic dimension to the representation of sexuality, commenting on it in the manner of a poetical narrative as Mirbeau did in his description of the sculpture as ‘voluptuous and chaste’. 

In 1889, Hélène Bertaux’s Psyché sous l’empire du mystere had set a precedent demonstrating that when women practitioners tackled the nude sexuality could only be signified by its absence.  The figure in Bertaux’s sculpture was identified with a specific phase of a woman’s life, that of the nubile woman before sexual encounter:

She is the youthful beauty unaware of herself, the virgin who is no longer a child and not yet a woman, who aspires to love without explaining to herself what is incomplete in her . . . 

Armand Silvestre consecrated the chastity of Bertaux’s figure as an intrinsic artistic value.  As he described the sculpture, Silvestre scanned the figure, pointing out which absence signified virginity:

She is standing in her statuesque whiteness ...  a kind of epiderm which makes one think of skin but which the delicate transparency of blood does not redden.  She is standing in a pose which is that of recollection ...  her breasts curve softly, firm and chaste, two breasts that do not know the burning kisses of a lover or the warm lips of the new babe, two virginal breasts like gentle hills flowered with lily ...  The line of the stomach is of a simplicity which breathes the same absence of painful or violent impressions...  The two legs which no contractions disfigure, so to speak, carry nearly equally the weight of the body... 

In Bertaux’s Psyche all the volumes are balanced in relation to the vertical axis.  They are also in rigorous parallel with the horizontal plane, on the four sides of the sculpture.  The figure is therefore enclosed within a rectangle.  The width of the hips is contained within that of the shoulders, and the left arm falls in a vertical line closing the profile of the sculpture.  The volumes of the breasts and buttocks are small and counterbalanced by those of the muscles of legs and arms, which are more pronounced.  The stomach is flat, the curves of the hips fused within the profile of bust and legs.  The head and eyes are lowered.  The surface of the material has been patiently smoothed to erase any small protuberance or marks.  Such are the technical aspects of the sculpture which were given a symbolic interpretation in relation to sexuality.  The neoclassical style of Hélène Bertaux, the geometrical archetype on which she modelled all the forms of the human figure, the poise, self-containment and motionlessness of the pose of her figure, all of these features were interpreted as a quest for purity, a disentanglement from the excesses and the turbulences of the human world subjected to passion and instinct.  The lowering of the head and eyes were registered as a token of modesty, as they were in the codes of social behaviour.  Whiteness was a Christian symbol for purity and the lily the emblem of the Virgin Mary.   In relation to this general symbolism, the absences which Silvestre pointed out became the signifiers of virginity. 

Within this elaborate signifying system, Camille Claudel’s Psyche could not be described as ‘chaste’.  Beside the movement of thrust towards the naked figure of a man, the body bore the marks of sexuality.  The figure twisted in space, the breasts were modified by the pull of gravity and their weight registered, the material was punctured with holes made by the thumbs, the muscles accentuated the irregularity of the surface.  The intensity of emotion of Claudel’s figure was registered as sexual passion.  Maurice Hamel conveyed this is in language - ‘A woman thrust forward with all her desire’ - Geffroy left it at the level of metaphor - ‘a woman ...  beautiful for all her movement’.  Most remained silent. 

The recognition of chastity in Bertaux’s Psyche was a step towards expounding its intellectual dimension:

This is Psyche, the soul in which life awakens, she is thought which takes possession of itself, Woman in whom beauty is ennobled under a yet obscure impression of an Ideal and a Beyond.

Bertaux herself tried to impose this interpretation on the art establishment and wrote to the Minister and the Directeur des beaux-arts telling them what the significance of Psyche was.  The sculpture, she explained, was a symbol of women’s struggle to obtain educational and professional rights on a par with men, and an emblem for a decade of activity in the Union of Women Painters and Sculptors. 

In her campaign for the recognition of women’s art Bertaux argued that it should be different, that its value would be in its capacity to embody women’s natural virtues and the patriotic values of women’s traditional roles.  She believed a feminine style conceived as ‘a return to a simple art form’ should be created to embody these values.   In relation to the nude, ‘simplicity’ meant the absence of sexual life and ‘chastity’ was the term Bertaux used to praise her work when writing of it: ‘I dare bring to your attention this work so chaste.’ The State promoted Bertaux’s Psyche, which was awarded a first-class medal at the 1900 Universal Exhibition

Outside the Institution the chastity of Bertaux’s nude was not regarded as an overriding or intrinsic value.  Her return to a simple form of art was identified as an instance of the obsolete and conservative aesthetics of the Beaux-Arts and dismissed accordingly.  For instance, in a decade of prolific and committed writing on art, Gustave Geffroy dedicated only half a sentence to Bertaux: ‘an imitation of Egyptian Art’.  Nor should Silvestre’s celebration of chastity be taken at face value.  Other critics made it perfectly clear that what they valued in chastity was its capacity to adumbrate the sexual life to come:

The virgin who is no longer a child and not yet a woman, who aspires to love without explaining to herself what is incomplete in her ... Everything is suggestive to us of the struggle of her heart, of the intense emotions of this naive virgin who soon will be a desperate lover, prey to all the violence of burning love.

The representation of chastity, which the critics described as an absence or an incompleteness, offered a semantic void which they could fill with their own sexual fantasies.  Mirbeau’s or Daudet’s attitude towards Claudel’s La Valse was similar to that of Le Page and Silvestre towards Bertaux’s Psyche.  In La Valse it was the erasure of real time and actual space, the relatively abstracted quality of the human face, the absence of facial expressions, the smoothness and shine of the material, the non-representational expanse of matter in the drapery, which provided an empty semantic space.  By contrast, with its excessive representation of an emotional state and its overcharged semantic content Claudel’s Psyche did not allow that. 

To provide a semantic void that could be identified with chastity, this was what seemed to be asked of women practitioners when they represented the nude.   It was certainly the condition the critics set to accredit the representation with a symbolic dimension, and to proceed to account for the intellectual content of women’s work.  Yet the rule remained unspoken, and the tacit codes of representation of sexuality could not begin to be articulated. 

CONCLUSION

Disconnecting sexuality and intellectuality was a strategy for emptying women’s works of their significance in the advent of women’s claim to access to the public debate on sexuality.  The strategy lingers on, in new forms, most noticeably in the tendency to give primarily biographical accounts of women’s work.  This approach rests on the assumption that because the artist is a woman her creative activity must be rooted in private experiences, in the emotional, in a passion for and state of dependence on a great man.  The sculptures of Claudel acquired significance, in the context of an artistic movement which recognized intellectuality in the artist’s ability to stage-manage moments of private experience purporting to represent those of a collective ‘ours’.  The emotional, sexual, narrative qualities of her work exemplified the conviction that art should embody the anxious questioning of the individual’s relationship with existence, the mode of consciousness of the 1890s. 

The ambiguous notion of ‘a language of the private’ on which the theory of art as ‘expression’ rested, raised further issues in the case of women art practitioners.  That Claudel also gave form in her compositions to emotions that had arisen from her painful encounter with reality, to reflections on the patterns which shaped or failed to shape her sexual and marital life, is not denied: there is usually such an input in all kinds of creative activity.  But any investigation of Claudel’s artistic procedures should consider this dimension as a process of intellectualization, not of ‘expression’.  Her work always reveals an attempt to generalize by transposing the personal into mythology or poetical images; formal language had to be modified to let the personal filter into the public discourse on culture. 

The immediate problems facing sculptresses was that it was impossible for them to know how they were to represent the naked human figure without offending the moral laws which the various agencies controlling art institutions - art administrators, critics or famous artists - gave themselves the right to make or modify.  Crucial as this was for individual women artists, whose careers could be jeopardized because of it, this problem was only an instance of a more general phenomenon.  The bodies empowered to control culture could always shift their register of reference according to criteria of social behaviour, the good of the State or moral laws so that ethical judgements masked political positions and, in effect, worked to eradicate women’s contribution to culture.