Camille Claudel, an impressionist artist whose great nephews are resculpting her legacy

Calyxte Campe began his artistic career as a painter, learning what he called “the old techniques” in the Charles H. Cecil Studios in Florence, Italy. He had been painting at the studio for three or four years when his instructor learned of his famous ancestor.

“He said, ‘Well, if you don’t want to sculpt, then leave my studio now,” Campe said. 

Campe is now a professional sculptor like his great-great aunt, Camille Claudel. 

He started sculpting under the Studio’s roof immediately after his instructor’s ultimatum, though the school had no sculpture department.

The first time he touched wet clay, he was hooked, drawn to the freedom that the material’s malleability offered. He soon opened the Studio’s sculpture department and for several years taught the art form that his great-grandfather’s sister, Claudel, was known for. 

Though he never met Claudel, her work surrounded him. As a young boy, Campe’s hands danced across the patina of her original sculptures, pieces now guarded by museum security guards around the world. Her artistic presence influenced him in ways he still doesn’t understand. Though he inherited her natural talent, he is not chasing her legacy nor is he trying to outdo her. 

“If I had her name, that would be really a lot to carry,” Campe said. “But not having that, I think, is quite a blessing.” 

Nearly a hundred years ago, Claudel sculpted her works in a studio near to the Campe family’s reclusive chateau, nestled in the hills of an undisclosed location in France. Two of her works remained in the chateau until 2020, sheltered by direct lineage and untouched by the international art market.  

Now, the two virgin sculptures wait in the Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe for their debut at the Art Institute of Chicago in October 2023 and the Getty Museum in February 2024. The sculptures’ upcoming sale is just one chapter of the Campe family’s illustrious heritage, one molded by the hands of its artist ancestor.

Claudel destroyed most of her work trying to escape the limits of the patriarchy. But now, her great-nephews, Calyxte and his brother Sylvester, are picking up the pieces, helping to rebuild her legacy while forging their own creative journeys. 

Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin

Claudel was the pupil-turned-lover of legendary sculptor Auguste Rodin, a name almost inescapable to her legacy. 

Claudel’s story was once a quiet French legend, but through media representations and art exhibitions over the past 50 years, her story has become a roaring, global anthem for feminist art historians. 

Upon recognizing her talent, Claudel’s family moved to Paris around 1881, eager for her to learn at the private Acade'mie Colarossi, as the renowned Acade’mie des Beaux-Arts was not accepting women at the time. 

Rodin and Claudel met when she was a 19-year-old student and he a 43-year-old artist. As a sculptor, Rodin’s work was more widely known, but most do not know Claudel’s hands sculpted the finer extremities on many of Rodin’s pieces — including his tour de force “The Gates of Hell.” 

“In that time, you must remember, it's the worst time for a woman to be a sculptor, an artist, and it was all so man-orientated,” Calyxte Campe said. 

Early in the 20th century, French artists made their names and their money from public commissions. Rodin had many. Claudel had none. Claudel was a finalist for one of these lauded commissions, and Rodin was on the approval committee. He voted against it because he believed the work depicted him in an embarrassing light. 

Rodin was in a long-term relationship with another woman, Rose Beuret. Despite Beuret, Claudel and Rodin signed a contract that the two of them would marry and vacation in Italy for a year. As it became clear to Claudel that Rodin had no plans to leave Beuret, she grew very angry, drank often and shattered wine bottles on her walls. 

“This was regarded as insanity. Nowadays, I would regard it as female power,” art dealer Tonya Turner Carroll said.

Claudel lived in a world of misogynistic and religious absolutism. Her anger was seen as female hysteria and treated as such. She spent her last thirty years, rarely visited, in an asylum, where she died in 1943. Her bones now rest in the asylum’s mass grave.

The sculptor’s brother and the burning Amazon 

Calyxte’s brother, Sylvester, took another creative path: filmmaking. 

Sylvester worked with filmmaker Murat Eyuboglu and writer William deBuys on the 2016 eco-documentary “The Colorado,” a film shown in museums across the country. Because of its success, the pair teamed up again for an upcoming documentary on the Amazon River — a river whose surrounding forest endures devastating wildfires almost annually. 

After the project ran out of funding, though, Sylvester proposed a solution that crossed borders and conventional brokering. 

He offered the team some stake in Claudel’s L'Implorante and Chienne Rongeant Son Os, first known to the Campe brothers as the tabletop sculptures they cherished as children. 

To sell them, the team needed an art dealer. deBuys knew one: Tonya Turner Carroll, a friend with a mutual alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill. 

Turner Carroll is one half of the husband-wife duo that opened the Turner Carroll Gallery in 1991. The Gallery primarily highlights artists of previously marginalized communities. Tonya Turner Carroll, as a historian, specializes in female artists and considers herself a scholar on Claudel. 

Now, the couple, with the trust of Claudel’s lineage, await their largest sale yet with the  L’Implorante.

The virgin sculptures

The L’Implorante, a 1905 bronze cast, is one that many consider to be Claudel’s magnum opus. The Gallery expects the sculpture to go for at least $4 million if purchased before its October debut and at least $6.5 million if later.

It’s a cast commissioned by Claudel’s prominent art dealer, Eugène Blot, who cast five of the sculpture. The other four now rest in museums and private collections across the world. 

One was bought by Claudel’s brother, Paul, and remained in the family’s homestead until 2020, when it was moved to the Turner Carroll Gallery. 

At the Campe family’s invitation, Tonya Turner Carroll and her husband, Michael, flew to France to see the sculptures for the first time. She knew it was a milestone, personally and professionally. 

“I felt like I was in the presence of the most pivotal work of art history,” she said. “It was the masterwork of the greatest woman sculptor up to that time.”  

The Carrolls completely embedded themselves into Claudel’s story, visiting the asylum she died in, closely befriending her descendants and ensuring their actions were beneficial to her legacy. 

It took the couple a year to get the sculptures out of the country legally. Now, it’s the only L'Implorante cast of its size in the United States; a smaller one is held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

Turner Carroll’s L'Implorante is accompanied by a bronze titled Chienne Rongeant Son Os. It was cast from an original Claudel mold in 2002 by Calyxte Campe himself. He is Claudel’s sole remaining family member with sculpting experience.

When the Carrolls walked through the Campe house for the first time, Tonya almost could not tell the difference between Claudel and her great-great nephew’s work. 

“It was almost like he had absorbed her artistic touch by growing up with her work and touching it, even though he never met her in person,” she said.

The Chienne mold that Calyxte grew up around and worked with is one of few remaining Claudel molds that Claudel herself did not destroy. 

A woman’s asylum

Today, less than a hundred of Claudel’s works remain. As Claudel broke away from Rodin to escape his shadow and his snare, she destroyed most of her own works out of spite. 

“Camille was suffocated by societal expectations for women, but her craft was where she was free — and then that was stolen from her,” Emily Smither said. Smither has been interning for the Gallery for several months, working closely on the distribution and advertising of Claudel’s pieces. 

For aspiring art historians like Smither, Claudel’s story is an inspiring archetype, one reflective of blooming conversations in the art world about retrospective social value. 

“How do we reconcile with a great artist like Rodin but admit the wrongdoings? What about the thousands of other women who don’t have as much evidence of abuse?” she said.

For experienced art historians, Claudel’s story is a crucial piece to understanding the art world as a whole. 

“It's pivotal, in terms of understanding how the art world works, how the role of women in the arts works, how the economics of the art world works,” Michael Carroll said. 

Whispering about a masterpiece

A curator from the Art Institute of Chicago called the Turner Carroll Gallery first. After verifying the pieces’ authenticity, a fruitless negotiation ensued. The Institute and the Getty then decided to co curate a major retrospective exhibition about Claudel. 

Curators from each institution traveled together to Santa Fe to see the L'Implorante and decided it would be the centerpiece of an upcoming dual exhibition: “Camille Claudel: Revolt against Nature,” the exhibition’s title being a double entendré on the piece’s hopeful assistance to the Amazon and Claudel’s contemporary rebellion against the constraints of womanhood. 

Calyxte Campe said he hopes the pieces will soon have a permanent home in a public museum, where Claudel’s work can be admired for its exquisite emotion and her story can be lauded among other artists of her time.

The filmmaking team knows that their documentary is unlikely to save the Amazon, deBuys said. But the film and the sculptures represent a new type of exchange in the art world — a social-justice-oriented business model, one that Smither is hopeful will be more common in years to come. 

“Sometimes art can make people think, especially to see about issues in ways they never would have otherwise. And, sometimes art can only bear witness to things that are happening out in the world. But either way, its role is vital,” deBuys said. 

For Tonya Turner Carroll, working with Claudel’s pieces is not just another day on the job — it’s a part of an ongoing Claudel renaissance, a celebration of an artist who defied the expectations of her gender and her time.