Entertainment
Camille Claudel's hand, not her trauma, is at the center of a magnificent Getty Museum show
A notable similarity marks a subcategory of once woefully under-recognized female artists of the past. Their resolute endurance of trauma is proposed as a primary reason to reassess their work today.
At age 18, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) survived the abusive manipulations of rape by the painter Agostino Tassi, a colleague in her studio. Public humiliation followed the private ordeal when she courageously took his assault to trial.
Frida Kahlo (1907-54) endured decades of grueling pain after a bus she was riding in — also at age 18 — smashed into a trolley and forced a long metal rod to rip through her midsection. The vehicular wreck caused internal injuries that would plague her throughout her life.
Then there is Camille Claudel (1864-1943). Her trauma came later, when mental and emotional deterioration led to her confinement in a psychiatric institution, far from the Paris studio of Auguste Rodin, in which her own brilliant work as a sculptor had blossomed. The cause for the internment was said to be paranoid psychosis. She was 48 and remained hospitalized for 30 years, the remainder of her life.
“Camille Claudel,” a fascinating exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, unwinds the traumatic tale, and in the process refocuses the story in important ways. In the popular telling, Claudel is to France what Gentileschi was to Italy and Kahlo to Mexico: the overlooked artist as victim — a casualty not just once, but twice. The active personal trauma experienced in life was joined by passive negligence after death from the culture at large.
Camille Claudel, “Crouching Woman,” about 1884-85, patinated plaster
(J. Paul Getty Museum)
The welcome revival of interest in the paintings and sculptures of Gentileschi, Kahlo and Claudel since the 1970s and ’80s was led by second-wave feminists, and it represented an effort to transform victimhood into survivorship in the cultural sphere. Which sounds good, but has a catch. The narrative focus tends to linger on the artist, not the art.
Biography, framed by dramatic events, often overwhelms the paintings and sculptures, which are admired for the reductive ways in which they illuminate the artist’s tumultuous life. It can lead to travesty, such as a current Gentileschi exhibition at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, Italy, reported to feature what some critics have witheringly described as a “rape room” — a darkened chamber with a bloodied bed in the center, surrounded by projections of Gentileschi’s often gory paintings.
It’s no accident that multiple movies and plays have been produced about Gentileschi, Kahlo and Claudel, with various incidents vividly sensationalized to court pop culture success. A lead actress Oscar nomination, for example, deservedly went to Isabelle Adjani for the 1989 film “Camille Claudel,” and then to Salma Hayek for the 2002 movie “Frida.” The talented actors were given lots of cinematic scenery on which to chew.
In the case of Claudel, a subtle but opportune correction of the narrative arrives in the new museum show.
Curators Anne-Lise Desmas at the Getty and Emerson Bowyer at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the show was seen last fall, make no bones about articulating the sculptor’s very real travails. Outlined in the superb and detailed catalog are the artist’s sometimes difficult personal affair with Rodin, 24 years her senior and a commanding figure in the art life of late 19th century Paris; a rapidly industrializing society in flux, for artists as for others, that nonetheless saw exceptionally high fences erected around a woman’s potential for success as a sculptor; and internal family issues that left Claudel without much immediate personal support when she very much needed it.
“This biographical miasma,” the curators write in the catalog introduction, “has tended to obscure — or even excise — the sculptor’s art and agency.” Those subjects get put in appropriate context by an enlightening exhibition.
Camille Claudel, “The Age of Maturity,” 1890-99, bronze
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
Fifty-eight sculptures have been assembled, including works in clay, plaster, marble and bronze. They include the major 1890-99 ensemble “The Age of Maturity,” a large, three-figure allegory of aging that unfolds in multiple bronze sections, in which youth gives way to the inevitability of old age and death. There’s a stunning and compact portrait-bust of Rodin, in which the focused concentration of his life-size head seems to rise up out of a tumult below, represented by his lengthy, swirling, thickly tangled beard. And, for contrast, we get Rodin’s winsome portrait of Claudel, the lowered gaze of her intensely alert but ethereal head emerging from a hefty block of chiseled white marble.
At first, her portrait appears unfinished, but that’s a misperception. Rodin titled his sculpture “Thought.” Perhaps he recognized what emerges from encounters with Claudel’s art. Repeatedly, her figures stoop, crouch, look down or away, resulting in a concentrated bodily sense of intense interiority. Experiential subjectivity forms the essence of her human forms.
In a beautiful installation, many works are smartly shown on a pedestal positioned atop a circular base, which wordlessly leads a viewer all the way around — ideal for an art that needs to be seen in four dimensions of space and time. Revealing labels are sometimes nicely tucked away, as in one on the far side of “The Age of Maturity” informing that the baroque flourish of drapery billowing at the apex is actually a precise facsimile, the original bronze piece currently undergoing conservation back in Paris.
The number of works is relatively modest — understandably so, given the comparative brevity of her career (barely two decades, while Rodin’s was more than twice as long) and her need to devote years as a studio assistant. They range from a remarkably adept terracotta portrait bust of an elderly household member, “Old Helen,” made when Claudel was 21, to a complicated state commission for a mythological subject in bronze, “Wounded Niobid,” dated 1907, near the end of a tough career that had left her nearly destitute.
Claudel was born into a solidly middle-class family in 1864, daughter of a registrar of deeds in a small medieval town 60 miles from Paris. Her mother bore four children, one of whom — Paul — would go on to become a well-known poet and an influential diplomat posted to China, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere. With her father regularly being transferred to various provincial towns, Claudel and her siblings settled in Paris with their mother in 1881. There she began her serious study of sculpture, met Rodin during student critiques and within three years was employed in his studio.
Auguste Rodin gave the title “Thought” to his 1895-1901 marble portrait of Camille Claudel
(Christopher Knight / Los Angeles Times)
Rodin relied on his assistant’s formal skills, especially Claudel’s talents with the difficult task of successfully rendering expressive hands and feet. She’s credited with work on major commissions, including the monumental bronze sculptural group “The Gates of Hell” — the one with the “Thinker” poised on the doorway’s head jamb like an inquisitive crow, puzzling over humanity’s infernal chaos on its way to eternal doom — and, most important, “The Burghers of Calais.” (Check out the animated hands of those sacrificial citizens!) Perhaps the show’s most riveting small work is a little bronze study of a hand, just 10 inches wide, no doubt informed by Claudel’s careful scrutiny of her own. A curved index finger rises up from the rest like a speaker separating from a crowd and preparing to expound.
The exhibition was inspired by Getty and Art Institute of Chicago acquisitions in recent years. (Only 10 Claudel sculptures are in American museums, according to press materials.) Chicago’s is a plaster portrait bust of Camille’s brother Paul, made when he was a teenager and layered in thin glazes of paint to create an illusion of the patina on an ancient Roman bronze head. The Getty’s is one of the show’s knockouts.
A sculpture as fresh and contemporary as anything you’ll find in a gallery crawl today, the dark bronze “Torso of a Crouching Woman,” about three feet tall, is a headless, armless figure surely inspired by a famous Greek example of Aphrodite emerging from the bath, which the artist would have known from prowls in the Louvre Museum. Feet squarely planted, center of gravity low, Claudel’s version rests firmly on the ground while twisting in space. The movement pulls skin taut over the ribs, spine and musculature of her back, enlivening the subject’s tactile sensuality.
With one notable exception, the sliced off body parts allude to the fragmentary quality of the ancient original, which has lost its head and arms from time’s vicissitudes. The exception is the missing left knee. Gone is most of the leg.
Camille Claudel, “Torso of a Crouching Woman,” modeled circa 1884-85, bronze cast about 1913
(The J. Paul Getty Museum)
Cut off just above the ankle all the way to mid-thigh, the omission isn’t found in the classical Greek original or its many Roman copies, where the leg is a prominent protrusion. The vivid erasure also seems different from just being overkill in a nod to history by a young sculptor earnestly figuring things out. (Claudel is thought to have made the sculpture when she was about 20.) Instead, the radical cut reads as a determined compositional move. You imagine the jutting knee was there in her clay model, thought better of, then given a chop.
The result further exposes the torso in its most vulnerable feminine places, while accelerating the figure’s spatial turn. Claudel’s visceral cut invigorates the form — a seeming contradiction for a removal to accomplish, but one that is as modern as will be found in any contemporaneous bather painted in oil or drawn in pastel by Edgar Degas.
It’s also hard to imagine Rodin doing something like that. Claudel surely benefited from her artistic relationship with the revered sculptor. But he benefited from it as well, modeling some of his work on her inventive forms, plus using all those eloquent hands and feet. A good bit of the scholarship around Claudel in the last few decades has been directed at correcting attributions to him for sculptures she made but did not sign.
A modern cliché has it that an artist must suffer to achieve true success in their art, and Claudel, like Gentileschi and Kahlo, surely did. But for female artists throughout history, the marvelous Getty exhibition handily demonstrates that there’s much more to it than only surviving trauma. Everyone needs to labor to get through the day. A powerful artist needs to do more, and Claudel does.
‘Camille Claudel’
Where: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood
When: Through July 21; closed Mondays
Info: (310) 440-7300, www.getty.edu
Book Review
Dear Monica Lewinsky
By Julia Langbein
Doubleday: 320 pages, $30
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
First loves can be beautiful or traumatic, sometimes both. They are almost always intense, with emotions on speed dial and hormones running amok. Nothing like the durable consolations of late-life romance, but headier, more exciting and, in the worst cases, far more damaging.
Even decades later, Jean Dornan, the protagonist of Julia Langbein’s smart, poignant and involving novel “Dear Monica Lewinsky,” can’t recollect her own first love in tranquility. Its after-effects have derailed her life, and an unexpected email invitation to attend a retirement party in France honoring her former lover sends her into a tailspin.
An agitated Jean finds herself praying to none other than Monica Lewinsky, the patron saint of bad romantic choices, or as Langbein puts it, “of those who suffer venal public shaming and patriarchal cruelty.” In Langbein’s comic, but also deadly serious, imagination, this is no mere metaphor. The martyred Monica has literally been transfigured into a saint. And why not? Surely, she has suffered enough to qualify.
Jean and Monica have in common a disastrous liaison with an attractive, powerful, married older man. Monica was humiliated, reviled, then merely defined by her missteps. Meanwhile, her arguably more culpable sexual partner survived impeachment, retained both his political popularity and his marriage and enjoyed a lucrative post-presidency.
Jean’s brief fling during the summer of 1998 coincided with the public airing of Monica’s doomed romance. Jean’s passion took a more private toll, but she still lives with what Monica calls “this deepening suspicion that your existence is a remnant of an event long since concluded.”
Though framed by a fantastical conceit, “Dear Monica Lewinsky” is at its core a realist novel, influenced by the feminism of #MeToo and precise in its delineation of character and place. Langbein’s Monica — having finally transcended her past and ascended to spiritual omniscience — becomes Jean’s interlocutor. Together, they relive the fateful weeks that Jean spent studying the Romanesque churches of medieval France and charming David Harwell, the Rutgers University medieval art professor co-leading the summer program.
Every now and again, Monica, as much savvy therapist as all-knowing seer, interrupts Jean’s first-person account to offer guidance. Threaded through the narrative, as contrast and commentary, is a martyrology of female saints. These colloquially rendered portraits, reflecting a punitive, patriarchal morality, describe girls and women who would rather endure torture or even death than sully their sexual purity — stories so extreme that they seem satirical.
The portraits play off the novel’s milieu: a series of churches, as well as the medieval French castle that is home to an eccentric and mostly absent prince. The utility of religious doctrine and practice is another of the book’s themes. One graduate student, Patrick, is a devoted Roman Catholic, unquestioning in his faith. Others are merely devout enthusiasts of medieval architecture. Judith, a doctoral candidate at Harvard, has an addiction of her own: an eating disorder that threatens to disable her.
A rising junior at Rutgers, Jean is one of just two undergraduates in the program. Her initial dull, daunting task involves measuring and otherwise assessing the churches’ “apertures” — windows and doors. Later, she is assigned to collaborate on a guidebook and write a term paper.
A language major unversed in art, architecture or medieval history, Jean feels overwhelmed at times. But she does have useful talents: fluent French and the ability to conjure delicious Sunday dinners for her bedazzled colleagues. (The author of the 2023 novel “American Mermaid,” Langbein has both a doctorate in art history and a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for food writing, and her expertise in both fields is evident.)
As the summer wanes, Jean’s fixation on David grows. Langbein excels at depicting the obsessive nature of illicit, unfulfilled desire — how it swamps judgment and just about everything else. A quarter-century Jean’s senior, David is trying to finish a stalled book project, laboring in the shadow of his more prolific and successful wife, Ann. An expert on the erotically charged religious life of nuns and the art it produced, she shows up briefly in the story and then conveniently disappears.
David is smooth, seductive and, to 19-year-old Jean, far more appealing than the fumbling schoolboys she has known. But he turns out to be no more grown-up or emotionally mature. After the flirtation and its consummation, David beats a hasty (and unsurprising) retreat. Then he does something worse: He allows his guilt to shred his integrity.
In the aftermath of that summer, a wounded Jean stumbles through her last two years of college, “berserk, unfocused, humiliating.” She abandons her academic and career ambitions, takes a job as a court interpreter, and marries Michael, an affable nurse who has little idea of her emotional burdens.
Then that invitation, inspiring “a racy heat,” arrives, and Jean must decide whether to confront her past or keep running from it. Is there really much of a choice? Fortunately, she has the saintly Monica as her guide. More clear-eyed now, Jean must reject her martyrdom and reclaim her own truth and agency. If she does, David, at least in the realm of the imagination, may finally get his comeuppance.
Klein, a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.
The sixth outing in the director’s chair for filmmaker Kirk Jones, I Swear dramatizes the real-life story of touretter John Davidson (played by Robert Aramayo). Tourette’s Syndrome, for those unfamiliar with the condition, is a nervous system disorder that causes various tics, the most prolific being erratic and explicit language. However, as I Swear expertly showcases, the syndrome is far more than ill-timed outbursts of curse words. Davidson’s story is one of societal frustration, finding your people (both with and without the condition), and using your voice to help others rise. The subject and subject matter are handled with absolute care and understanding under Kirk’s measured vision and Robert Aramayo’s BAFTA-winning performance.
The film kicks off with the greatest exclamation to democracy ever uttered (*%#! the Queen!), as a nervous John Davidson prepares himself before entering an awards ceremony hosted by Britain’s royal family. Right away, the film tells us what it is: a triumph over adversity that blends humor and human drama with education. It’s an important setup, as the film flashes back to Davidson’s 1980s youth, where we see his time as a star soccer recruit flatline as his condition takes hold. Davidson’s life spirals from there. Some aspects, like school bullying and accidental run-ins with authority figures, are expected but important to empathizing with young Davidson’s (young version, played with heart by Scott Ellis Watson) new everyday life. The more tragic, a complete meltdown of his family system, is unsettling if quick. His father (Steven Cree) is never given enough screen time to explore his alcohol coping tendencies. However, his mother Heather’s descent into easy fixes and blaming is crushing and convincing. Harry Potter series actress Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle) gives a layered performance as Heather. Someone who loves her son, but also feels cursed by him as the entire family exits the picture. It’s bitter, she’s tired, and fills each conversation with ‘only medication and your mother can save you’ energy.
From there, the viewer and Davidson find refuge in a host of characters. Maxine Peake plays Dottie, the mother of a childhood friend and a retired mental health nurse. Screen vet Peter Mullan plays maintenance man Tommy Trotter. Together, they help Davidson build a life and an understanding of himself that carries the film forward into its second half. After that, the film is primarily a 3-actor show as director Kirk fills the screen with these tour-de-force performances. Peake and Mullan are great vessels to get the film’s main message across: patience, love, and a shared responsibility between the diagnosed and those who understand their struggle can help change the path for people quickly left behind by a normative world. Together, they are the soul of the movie, with the filmmakers clearly hoping the audience will follow their lead after they exit the theater (in my case, the beautiful Oriental Theater for the Milwaukee Film Festival). Both performances are perfectly warm and reflective and shouldn’t be left out in discussions of I Swear.
I say this because the movie is anchored by The Rings of Power actor Robert Aramayo, who leaves Elrond’s elf ears behind to bring an acute naturalism to his performance of main character John Davidson. Aramayo’s physicality and timing of the fitful Tourettes Syndrome never feel out of place or overplayed. In fact, the movie as a whole does an amazing job of never veering into sentimentality. While many moviegoers left with tissues dabbing their eyes, the filmmaking never felt like it was forcing that reaction out of audiences. It straddles the line between feel-good and reality with every story beat and lands squarely on the side of letting the real inform our feelings. Anyone with an ounce of empathy will grasp the film’s message and hopefully take it with them into life.
I Swear continues at the Milwaukee Film Festival on Tuesday, April 21st, and releases nationwide April 24th, 2026, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Several private equity firms and Hollywood power players, including United Talent Agency and longtime agent Patrick Whitesell, have expressed interest in buying parts of Casey Wasserman’s music and sports management firm after it abruptly went up for sale.
Wasserman became ensnared in controversy earlier this year after his salacious decades-old emails to Ghislaine Maxwell, an accomplice of child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were released as part of the U.S. Justice Department’s trove of Epstein files.
The agency auction is in the early stages, according to three people close to the process but not authorized to comment.
Earlier this week, several interested parties submitted proposals to meet a preliminary deadline in the auction, two of the sources said.
The company, which changed its name to the Team last month, is expected to be valued at around $3 billion.
Providence Equity Partners holds the majority stake. The private equity firm has discussed selling the entire company or carving off Wasserman’s minority interest. Providence also has considered selling the bulk of the firm and staying on as a minority investor, one of the sources said. Another scenario could involve separating, then selling the individual business units that make up the Team.
Wasserman and Providence’s company boasts an enviable roster of music artists, including Kendrick Lamar, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran. Its sports marketing practice is viewed as particularly lucrative and has potential to grow in value as big dollars flow into sports that draw large crowds.
Wasserman, who declined to comment, has a veto right over any sale of the company that he has spent a quarter of a century building.
UTA, which also declined to comment, is among the most aggressive suitors, the sources said. The Team’s sports marketing and music representation divisions would dramatically boost the Beverly Hills agency’s profile and client roster.
Whitesell, former executive chairman of Endeavor, separately has been motivated to make investments in sports, media and entertainment since last year when he left the talent agency that he and Ari Emanuel built. Whitesell launched a new firm with seed money from private equity firm Silver Lake, and last spring he started WIN Sports Group to represent professional football players.
Whitesell wasn’t immediately available for comment.
European investment firm Permira also has expressed interest, according to a knowledgeable source. Permira declined to comment.
The New York Times first reported that Permira, UTA and Whitesell had expressed interest.
The sales process is expected to stretch into summer, the knowledgeable people said. The auction could become complicated particularly if Providence decides to unwind the business.
For example, UTA could not buy the entire company because of the Brillstein television unit. The agency is bound by an agreement with the Writers Guild of America that prevents it from owning television production.
Investment bank Moelis & Company is managing the sale. A representative of the firm declined comment.
Wasserman also is the chairman of LA28, the nonprofit group that will be staging the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles in two years.
Following revelations of Wasserman’s 2003 emails with Maxwell, several musicians and athletes — led by pop artist Chappell Roan and soccer star Abby Wambach — said that, to stay true to their values, they would leave the agency then known as Wasserman.
Wasserman apologized to his staff for “past personal mistakes” and said he would sell the agency.
He had limited dealings with Epstein, flying on the financier’s jet along with former President Clinton for a September 2002 humanitarian trip through Africa.
Wasserman, a prolific Clinton fundraiser whose legendary grandfather, Hollywood titan Lew Wasserman, helped the Democrat win the 1992 presidential election, was joined on Epstein’s jet by his then-wife, Laura, actor Kevin Spacey, Epstein, Maxwell — who was convicted of sexual abuse in 2021 — and others, including security agents.
The LA28 board’s executive committee unanimously voted to keep Wasserman as chairman, citing his “strong leadership” of the Games.
-
Science5 minutes agoPace of N.I.H. Funding Slows Further in Trump’s Second Year
-
Health11 minutes agoAging in Place: How Technology Might Help You Grow Old at Home
-
Culture23 minutes agoBook Review: ‘Israel: What Went Wrong?,’ by Omer Bartov
-
Lifestyle29 minutes agoStreet Style Look of the Week: Airy Beachy Clothes
-
Education35 minutes agoÉcole des Sables, Africa’s Premier Dance School, Faces a Precarious Future
-
Technology41 minutes agoIt’s amazing how good Alienware’s $350 OLED monitor is
-
World47 minutes agoIran reportedly fires on three ships in Strait of Hormuz
-
Politics53 minutes agoWATCH: Sen Warren unloads on Trump’s Fed nominee Kevin Warsh in explosive hearing showdown