Tag: Camille Claudel

Camille Claudel: The Famous Sculptor Who Changed The History Of Art

Camille Claudel a French sculptor who broke moulds for women in art. Claudel “The Age of Maturity” legend whose achievement has left a lasting legacy and universally acknowledged as a great sculptor in her own right. 

By Sindhu Shivdas

Throughout history, there has been a famous sculptor who has withstood the test of time. Perhaps they are valued for their ability to create highly realistic figures or maybe they are prized for their willingness to push boundaries and defy expectations. Camille Claudel is one of the names that stood the test of time.

Bio:

Playing in two dimensions is easy enough, but what truly separates the women from the girls? Maybe it’s when you give up your easel for a tool belt and get to work with hammer and chisel. Such a sculptor was Camille a unique artist deeply involved in creating and constantly trying to open new doors.

Camille Claudel was born in 1864 in Fere-en-Tardenois, France. The French sculptor who defied gender based restrictions to pursue her art, She did her art studies at the Academie Colarossi in Paris, one of the handful of progressive art schools that accepted women students. Sculptor Alfred Boucher one of the most celebrated French sculptor of the late 19th century took Claudel under his wing and became her mentor for over three years, before moving to Florence.

Under Boucher’s guidance, she rented a workshop in 1882 with other young women sculptors including English sculptor Lipscomb. Claudel recognition for artistic talents came retrospectively and she is also remembered for her dramatic relationship with renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin. A major turning point in Claudel’s professional and personnel life occurred in the autumn of 1882, when Alfred Boucher left paris for Italy and asked his friend, the renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin, to take over supervising Claudel’s studio.

Being Rodin’s only female student, Claudel quickly proved her talents through contributions to some of Rodin’s most monumental works, including the hands and feet of several figures in The Gates of Hell. Working with Rodin she became romantically involved with him.

Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin Passionate Love Affair

Claudel and Rodin shared a connection beyond sculpture, and by 1882 the pair was engaged in love affair.  Rodin was a married person got infactuated with Claudel’s style and encouraged her to exhibit and sell her works. He also used Claudel as a model for both individual portraits and anatomical elements on larger works, such as La Pensee and The kiss.

Since there was gender-based discrimination which was rife in the art world, Claudel couldn’t release some of her daring sculpture ideas and she turned to Rodin to collaborate with her in order to get them made. And this instead made Rodin to receive credit for her ideas. This led to the breakdown of their long-term relationship and Claudel struggled to gain recognition of her own.

Camille Fighting For Recognition

Although continued to be productive through the first several years of the 20th century, the loss of Rodin’s public endorsement made her to struggled to find support. And moreover commisions of her work were scant due to her highly individual style which did not suit conserative tastes at the time, which paved her to mental illness and poverty. Continue reading “Camille Claudel: The Famous Sculptor Who Changed The History Of Art” →

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Fine Arts Paris and beyond

The fair underscores its links with the museum world in its third edition. Plus highlights from Paris Photo and Also Known as Africa

Fine Arts Paris began in 2017 as a boutique affair of 34 dealers, and though it has now grown to 46 exhibitors – most of them French – it still prides itself on carefully crafted displays and museum-quality works. This year (13–17 November), the fair is looking to underscore its links with the museum world with an events programme that offers behind-the-scenes tours of various institutions. Visitors will also be treated to a first look at the Château de Fontainebleau’s most recent acquisition: a late 16th-century mythological scene by a follower of Francesco Primaticcio. La Piscine – the museum of art and industry in Roubaix – provides a pop-up display of works from its collection, by artists including Marc Chagall and Camille Claudel.

At Galerie Charvet there is a selling exhibition on the theme of museum interiors; highlights include a painting of a man polishing the armour of a horse guard at the Royal Armoury in Turin, by the Piedmontese artist Giovanni Giani in 1892. [ . . . ]
Continue at APOLLO MAGAZINE: Fine Arts Paris and beyond | Apollo Magazine

Pierre Lhomme, Legendary French Cinematographer, Dies at 89

He was behind the look of films like Jean-Pierre Melville’s ‘Army of Shadows’ and Jean Eustache’s ‘The Mother and the Whore.’

Pierre Lhomme, the French cinematographer behind such films as Army of Shadows, The Mother and the Whore, Camille Claudel and Cyrano de Bergerac, has died. He was 89.

Lhomme died July 4 in Arles, France, the French Society of Cinematographers told The Hollywood Reporter.

Lhomme received a César award in 1989 for his work on Camille Claudel, which was directed by former cameraman Bruno Nuytten. He received a second César in 1991 for Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Cyrano de Bergerac, which also won a technical prize at Cannes.

Among his 60-odd credits are films by Chris Marker (Le Joli Mai, which Lhomme co-directed, and A bientôt, j’espère), Robert Bresson (Four Nights of a Dreamer), Marguerite Duras (Les Mains Négatives, Le Navire Night), Claude Miller (This Sweet Sickness, Deadly Circuit) and Alain Cavalier (Le combat dans l’île, Pillaged).

Lhomme also shot several Merchant-Ivory features, including the James Ivory-directed Quartet, Maurice, Jefferson in Paris and Le Divorce, and Ismail Merchant’s Cotton Mary. His last feature credit was on Le Divorce, which he lensed in 2003.

Born in Boulogne-Billancourt on April 5, 1930, Lhomme studied briefly in the U.S. before trying to make it as a jazz musician in Paris in the late 1940s and early ’50s. He was then accepted into the prestigious École nationale supérieure Louis-Lumière, a highly technical film school whose alumni includes fellow cinematographers Henri Decaë (The 400 Blows), William Lubtchansky (Shoah) and Philippe Rousselot (A River Runs Through It, Big Fish) and directors like Gaspar Noé and Jean-Jacques Annaud.

Lhomme graduated from Louis-Lumière in 1953 and began working as an assistant cameraman and camera operator on films like Philippe de Broca’s The Love Game and Jean Becker’s Man Called Rocca. He also befriended several directors of the budding French New Wave, working as an operator on Eric Rohmer’s first feature, The Sign of the Lion, and co-directing Marker’s 1962 Paris-set documentary, Le Joli Mai.

His first feature credit as a cinematographer was on Robert Darène’s 1958 pirate adventure The Amorous Corporal, for which he was co-credited with Marcel Weiss.

Lhomme went on to shoot dozens of features from the 1960s up to the late 1990s. One of his most memorable early collaborations was on Jean Eustache’s sprawling 220-minute drama The Mother and the Whore, which he shot in high-contrast 16mm black-and-white.

Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Lebrun, the film was made on a tiny budget and became a minor sensation in France during the post-May ’68 years. Lhomme worked again with Eustache on the hybrid fiction-documentary A Dirty Story, starring Michael Lonsdale and Jean-Noël Picq and released theatrically in 1977.

Lhomme’s most renowned work was on Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 French Resistance epic Army of Shadows, starring Lino Ventura and Simone Signoret. Shot in monochrome color tones that channeled the somber, stifling atmosphere of Vichy France during the World War II, the film was a hit at home but wasn’t released in the U.S. until 2006, where it grossed more than $700,000 in theaters and was widely hailed as a masterpiece.

“It was only after Army of Shadows that I felt like a real cinematographer,” Lhomme told the French-Canadian newspaper Le Devoir in 2007. “Melville asked me to do things I’d never tried before. I remember when I messed up a shot that came out so dark, you couldn’t see anything. Melville said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll put some nice music there.’”

Along with his César awards, Lhomme received a Prix Premio Gianni di Venanzo, named after the Italian cinematographer of 8½, in 2005, and a lifetime achievement prize at the Camerimage festival in Poland in 2008. He was also crowned an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters and a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in France.

During a 12-hour interview that Lhomme gave with students at the French film school La Fémis in 2014, he summed up his approach to cinematography this way: “I never had a fixed or preconceived idea about cinema … One of the main skills of a good cameraman is to be able to pass from one director to another and adapt to their different worlds. What I loved above all else was working with talented people.”

Source: Pierre Lhomme, Legendary French Cinematographer, Dies at 89

Gabriel Yared’s soundtrack to “Camille Claudel” remastered

Original Motion Picture Soundtrack of Camille Claudel composed by Gabriel Yared

Newly remastered and expanded edition.
12-page CD booklet with French and English liner notes by Gabriel Yared.
Limited Edition of 350 units.

In collaboration with Yad Music, Music Box Records presents the newly remastered and expanded edition of Gabriel Yared’s score to the 1988 drama film Camille Claudel, starring Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu, and directed by French cinematographer turned director Bruno Nuytten.

Adapted from the biography written by Paul Claudel’s granddaughter Reine-Marie Paris, the film was a project initiated by Isabelle Adjani. The film tells the story of the troubled life of French sculptor Camille Claudel and her long relationship with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Camille Claudel received wide public and critical acclaim, won five César awards including the one for Best Feature Film and contributed to the rediscovery of the sculptress’ works.

To illustrate the artistic and amorous passion of the characters onscreen, Gabriel Yared composed beautiful strings pieces inspired by German postromantic music. This album allows listeners to fully appreciate the many shades of this score by adding several previously unreleased tracks to the original edition. The 12-page booklet by Gabriel Yared gives insight into the scoring process. This is a limited edition of 350 units.

Two by Two

A London exhibition of work by famous artistic couples reveals the tensions of partnership

The pioneering modernists of the first half of the 20th century are most often hailed for their individual genius. A new exhibition shifts this perception by focusing instead on artistic couples. “Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant Garde,” which opens at the Barbican Art Gallery in London on Oct. 10, examines the output of 40 such couples whose lives became indelibly linked through love and art. The exhibition features some of the leading artists of the 20th century, including sculptors Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and photographers Man Ray and Lee Miller.

The exhibition “is really making an argument that developments in modern art often resulted from a creative dialogue which was very often within the couple,” says Jane Alison, one of the show’s four curators. These developments included modernist movements such as Tactilism, a genre of mixed-media installations, which was developed by the Italian couple Benedetta Cappa and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; and Rayism, a style of abstract art, created by the Russian couple Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.

“We wanted to show that desire has a centrality within the avant-garde and modernity,” Ms. Alison says. “There is an undercurrent of sexuality infusing many of the art works which expresses this intimate access to the other.” The theme of sexual desire is starkly apparent in the work of artists like Claudel, who mined Indian literature for her terra-cotta studies of “Sakountala,” (1886) depicting a couple in a sinuous embrace. In his long-gestating installation “Étant donnés” (1946-1966), Marcel Duchamp made a cast of the body of his lover, the Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, and the nude photographs Man Ray took of Miller pointed toward a new form of corporeal abstraction.

Robert Delaunay’s ‘Circular Forms: Sun No. 2’ (1912-13)
Robert Delaunay’s ‘Circular Forms: Sun No. 2’ (1912-13) PHOTO: CENTRE POMPIDOU, MNAM-CCI, DIST. RMN-GRAND PALAIS/JACQUES FAUJOUR

Altogether there are over 300 works of art on display in “Modern Couples,” by artists from Europe, Russia, the U.S. and South America. The exhibition also features numerous photographs and letters that attest to the artistic complicity many of these couples enjoyed. Alexander Lavrentiev, a lecturer in design and photography in Moscow who contributed a biographical essay in the exhibition catalog, recalls reading a letter that his grandfather, the influential Russian painter and graphic designer Alexander Rodchenko, wrote to his artist wife Varvara Stepanova during World War II. “My grandfather had returned to Moscow from the Urals, where my grandmother had to stay on,” says Mr. Lavrentiev. “He wrote that he couldn’t work because he found it difficult to live without her and that she was his engine.”

Mr. Lavrentiev likened his grandparents’ relationship to that of the French abstract painter couple Sonia and Robert Delaunay, whose experiments in “color rhythms” were in constant dialogue with one another. “There was a trend of equality which had begun,” he says. “My grandmother became a textile designer in the 1920s but only after fighting for her position in a print shop, which had always been a male-dominated field.”

Ms. Alison says that one of the aims of the exhibition is to “give due recognition to the women artists in the duos whose work has been unjustly marginalized.” She points to the example of the Hungarian photographer László Moholy-Nagy’s wife Lucia Moholy, who is largely unknown today. “She was the one who had trained to be a photographer, and it was in her darkroom that the couple experimented with the photograms which have shaped the way we view the Bauhaus today,” Ms. Alison says. These pictures produced with photosensitive materials, but without a camera, expanded the Bauhaus’s vision of photography as a way of imagining new worlds.

There are very few cases in the exhibition, however, where the female partner eventually outshines her male counterpart, as with Kahlo and Rivera. The Mexican couple, who painted each other for 25 years, were on an equal artistic footing for much of their lives, but Kahlo’s posthumous reputation has grown to be far greater. More typical are artistic couples where the woman saw her career almost entirely eclipsed by her partner. This was certainly the case with Claudel, whose sanity floundered when she tried to break away from the influence of her lover and mentor Rodin.

The same thing happened to Dora Maar, whose confidence Ms. Alison says was shaken when her lover Pablo Picasso persuaded her to abandon photography, where her real talent lay, and take up painting, with inauspicious results. One of Maar’s photographs in the exhibition, “Picasso en Minotaure,” captures her ambivalent feelings toward the Spanish artist’s machismo by shooting him in a pair of tight swimming trunks holding aloft a bull’s skull. “Modern Couples” makes clear that, for many women artists, being part of a creative pair involved obstacles men never had to face.

Dora Maar’s ‘Picasso en Minotaure, Mougins’ (1937)
Dora Maar’s ‘Picasso en Minotaure, Mougins’ (1937) PHOTO: CENTRE POMPIDOU, MNAM-CCI, DIST. RMN-GRAND PALAIS/PHILIPPE MIGEAT

Source WALL STREET JOURNAL: Two by Two – WSJ

10 Famous Women Artists Who Conquered the World 

Have you ever noticed that most people are not familiar with women artist, even if they can name a lot of male artists? If you are asked to name at least several well-known artists, then you will remember men only: Raphael, Gogh, Dali, and so on. And what about women? Didn’t women succeed in the field of fine arts or perhaps their works have been lost on the pages of centuries-old world history? What was women’s role in art history?

In fact, the women’s share in art really does constitute a smaller number compared to men’s one and therefore only a relatively small number of women managed to become renewed.

Sofonisba Anguissola

She is a famous Italian artist of the second half of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century, who, first of all, gained her reputation as a portrait master. It is noteworthy that Sofonisbawas born in a noble family, where art classes were held thanks to her father, who dreamed of realizing all the creative abilities of his family consisting of four girls.Sofonisbais known for living portraits of her relatives who she tried to portray in their habitual activities. Among the teachers of the famous artist are Bernardo Campi and Michelangelo himself, although there is no complete certainty about that.

Marie Bashkirtseff

The main merit of this talented artist is that she became among the first Russian female artists whose works were purchased by the Louvre. Marie lived in the middle of the XIX century leading a short but bright and life full of creativity.Marie received all the necessary knowledge concerning painting at the Academy of Painting, however, the girl was constantly engaged in self-education and ask uncle: “Please, type my essay free!”. Soon, she was praised by famous critics in the press becoming more and more popular. To date, original Bashkirtseff’s paintings are a real rarity in the art world, as most of her works were burned down during the Second World War.

Angelica Kauffman

Angelica is considered one of the most educated and talented women during the Enlightenment age. It is known that her father was a middle-handed artist and her family moved not only from city to city, but also to other countries quite a lot.Angelica could paint beautiful things at the age of nine and even then, she was dreaming of becoming a great artist, which, she managed to do. As a result, Angelica was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, and a few years later, she also joined the ranks of the French Royal Academy. Angelica was the most productive during her stay in London, which lasted 15 years.

Zinaida Serebryakova

Zinaida was born at the end of the nineteenth century in a creative family, in which it was difficult not to become an artist. From the early childhood, the girl was told about the important role of art in the life of every person. At age 25, the artist introduced her own self-portrait to the world, which was highly appreciated by critics at that time.

For a while, Zinaida had to stop painting because she was left alone with four young children. Everyone who knows Serebryakova’s art confirms that it is her paintings that represent the real Russian talent and deserve an art gallery dedicated to her paintings alone.

Marie Tussaud

When it comes to women in art, we are positive that many of you are familiar with the Tussaud name. Surprisingly, but little Marie did not know that her father was a sculptor for a long time, who, in consequence, handed over to her the whole life of his life – the Museum of Wax Figures. Marie continued her father’s business, followed by her children and other descendants.

Camille Claudel

Camille was a persevering and very talented artist who conquered Paris at the age of eighteen. Camilleis known for her resemblance to the popular artist of that time named Rodin with whom, she even had an affair. Nevertheless, such sculptures as “The Wave” and “The Waltz” received mass approval among true connoisseurs of art, and after Camille’s death, they were placed in a separate hall of the Rodin Museum [ . . . ]

Continue reading at: 10 Famous Women Artists Who Conquered the World | Times Square Chronicles


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