When at the end of September art appraiser Matthieu Semont, from the French auction house Philocale, was commissioned to carry out the inventory of an apartment near the Eiffel Tower as part of an inheritance, he found himself entering a place of darkness that had remained uninhabited for fifteen years. Without electricity and full of dust, with the help of the light of his mobile phone he was revealing behind sheets and plastic bags, furniture and objects. He could never imagine that in a dark hallway, on a Louis XVI chest of drawers, he would find an exceptional sculpture that disappeared more than a century ago: ‘The Middle Ages’ by Camille Claudel (1864-1943). This sculptural group, also known as ‘ The Path of Life’, was created by the student and lover of August Rodin (1840-1917) in 1898. Year of breakup in their relationship due to Rodin’s inability to abandon his wife. who was with him all his life, Rouse Beuret, whom he would finally marry two years before he died. This bronze is number one, of the six that the art dealer Eugène Blot cast in 1907. And it will be auctioned by the auction house’s headquarters in Orleans on February 16. Only three versions are preserved, one in the Camille Claudel Museum, another in the Musée d’Orsay and the last in the Rodin Museum, the rest are missing. The estimates are very high. Specialists estimate that it could be around two million euros, given that only three are preserved in French museums and it has not been exhibited on the art market. We have also been able to observe in recent times how international museums are interested in acquiring works by women artists due to the scarcity of their funds. Related News report If Rothko’s Chapel Reopens Elena CuéThe purity, balance and serene beauty of lines in the sculpture of Neoclassicism as a reaction to the baroque and rococo style will be accused of being inexpressive and anti-modern by the current of Romanticism. In this historical period of great changes and overflowing energy, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) bursts forth in a revolutionary way, becoming the symbol of a new plastic era. The expressive force, movement and intensity of his sculpture will be followed by Camille Claudel. Existential transience and the passage of time will be concerns that will manifest themselves in his work, as is the case with ‘The Mature Age’. Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, one of the great couples of ABC art. The work in question is one of Claudel’s emblematic pieces. It represents three figures: a young woman kneeling, ‘the imploring one’, who extends her arms with a desperate gesture towards a man of masculine complexion swept away like a wave by an elderly woman with the power to keep him away from her. This composition, like any work of art, lends itself to multiple interpretations, just as plural are the views of the observer. But in this case it is difficult to strip the work of the biographical events that occurred at the time of its creation and the pure thought of Camille that permeates this entire work: the separation between Claudel and Rodin caused by August’s determination not to abandon Rose Beuret. It is inevitable not to see in this representation the universal manifestation of the heartbreaking pain of a passion that escapes. Camille Claudel is a symbol of tragic destiny. A woman endowed with great beauty and genius, with an independent character, powerful courage and talent, she lived in a society in which women were relegated to a situation of inferiority and defenselessness. A romantic life, marked by her passionate relationship with a titan of sculpture such as Rodin, who succumbed to her beauty and talent, dazzled by her ideas and plastic skill, which ended up powerfully penetrating the work of her teacher. She had a tragic fate when she was forcibly confined by her mother and brother in a psychiatric hospital where she remained confined and abandoned for the last thirty years of her life. “Of the dream that has been my life, this is the nightmare,” he wrote to his faithful friend Eugène Blot from the Montdevergues mental institution on May 24, 1935.
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