THE equally powerful Niobide blessée (Wounded Niobid), cast in bronze in 1907, is the last work by Camille Claudel to survive. This biographical note comes from Ayral-Clause, who gives a blow-by-blow ...account of Camille's terrible final years, her existence slowly destroyed by paranoid delusions in which "Auguste Rodin and his 'gang'" loomed large. By 1913, the year her father died, Camille was 48 - not much older than Rodin when she met him - isolated behind closed shutters in her filthy atelier, scavenging for food in garbage cans, attacking with a hammer the sculptures she had made. Her mother, who never forgave the scandalous affair with Rodin, had cut Camille out of the family's life. Two days after Monsieur Claudel's funeral (Camille was not invited), Madame Claudel arranged for her daughter's forcible removal to an asylum, insisting she be fully sequestered from the outside world. When Camille's persecution mania subsided, the doctor suggested letting her out on a trial basis: "Madame Claudel immediately replied with a complete refusal," writes Ayral-Clause. A collection of Camille Claudel's sculptures is on display in a room at the Musée Rodin in Paris. I've not been there myself, but .when I emailed a friend and happened to mention the ballet, she replied: "I love Camille's work. I brought the kids to the Rodin Museum last summer and we visited the Camille section (it's like an annex; one can have a feminist reading of the Rodin Museum!). The work was absolutely superb, in every part as great as Rodin's. ... Wow, I would really like to see Les Grands Ballets' interpretation."
