Saturday Studio at the Art Institute: Claudel and Movement
Divya Chandrasekaran - March 19, 2024
On Saturday, January 13th, the Art Institute of Chicago honored the life and works of sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943) in a workshop of visual analysis and guided movement led by dancer, writer, and choreographer Ellie Houlihan. For the first time in over 20 years in the United States, the Institute has gathered an extensive collection of around 60 of Claudel’s works. I and the other attendees of the class first engaged directly with a selection of these works using pencil and paper to document the details of bronze bodies, torsos, hands, and other extremities. Our instructor challenged us to use as descriptive language as possible, as we would later call upon our notes to try to replicate the statues’ bodily contortions in dance.
Camille Claudel, The Waltz, c. 1900, bronze, Musée Rodin, France.
We then progressed to a set of Claudel’s works called The Waltz (pictured above), a collection of romantically intertwined bodies, where we noted prominent body parts and generated adjectives we felt the works evoked. Finally, we gathered around Claudel’s The Mature Age (pictured below), commonly believed to depict Claudel kneeling with arms extended towards her lover Auguste Rodin, who is leaving her for another mistress. From this piece, we crafted three-word interpretative stories given one criterion: to capture the Past, Present, and Future we saw within and beyond the piece. Some composed stories that formed a cohesive phrase (ie. “Death Doesn’t Last”); others strung together a series of words that each represented the three phases of time (ie. “Consumed; Deprived; Devoid”).
Camille Claudel, The Mature Age, c. 1902, bronze, Musée d’Orsay, France.
Our instructor then paused our writing activities to share more of Claudel’s biography. We learned that Claudel hand-carved marble on her own, whereas her teacher, Rodin, sometimes received assistance. Although Claudel is often referenced in relation to Rodin as his student or lover, her technical capabilities rivaled and sometimes even surpassed those of the sculptor. Rather than his pupil, Claudel is more accurately described as Rodin’s contemporary.
Next, the class departed the exhibition and migrated to an empty studio with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Millennium Park. Beginning with light stretching and muscle activation, passersby peered in to discover about twenty people rolling across the ground, running, walking, laying down, and standing back up as we sought to embody the fluidity and motion evident in Claudel’s work. On some observers’ faces, I saw smiles; on others, bewilderment, as though we were Claudel’s sculptures and those on the sidewalk outside were museum-goers, trying to make sense of our organic, sometimes awkward, often nonsensical movements.
The remainder of the activity was largely collaborative: We chose partners and instructed one another to move according to body parts we had noted an hour earlier in the exhibition. Finally, we worked in pairs to choreograph dances that blended the narratives of our respective three-word stories from the exhibit, piecing together acrobatics and emphatic facial expressions to tell a story that represented Claudel’s work. We later broke into groups of three in which one person at all times must remain standing, another seated, and another laying, using only slight head nods or discerning eye contact to signal we were ready to rotate positions. A practice in intimacy, we were challenged to discern the subtle visual cues of our partners and adjust our movements accordingly, much in the way I imagine Claudel closely studied her subjects to recreate their vivacity and likeness through sculpture.
