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74. Reconstructed view of the Greek theatre of Taormina in Sicily, by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. 1839. Watercolour and lead pencil, 76.6 by 133.5 cm (Médiathèque de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Charenton-le-Pont; exh. Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris).

present one is organised in eight sections, starting with an introduction on ‘Viollet-le Duc and his time’, including busts (Fig.72), paintings, drawings, caricatures and his will. The exhibition continues with his ‘picturesque journeys’ in France (1831–36) – a new literary and painterly genre – which led him to study first-hand the major sites of medieval architecture, enhancing both his knowledge of and interest in the Romanesque and Gothic styles. The next sequence deals with his eighteen-month trip to Italy, during which he visited Genoa, Naples, Sicily, Pompeii, Paestum, Livorno, Pisa, Florence, Siena, Rome, Assisi, Padua and Venice (12th March 1836 to 1st September 1837). Among the items exhibited are his fascinating reconstruction of the Greek theatre at Taormina of 1839, which was harshly criticised when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1840 (Fig.74), and a large drawing of the façade of the Doge’s Palace in Venice. This is followed with sections on his work as a restorer of Gothic churches including the Sainte-Chapelle (Fig.73) and Notre-Dame-de-Paris, with account books, drawings and models. Central to the exhibition is the emphasis placed by the curators on his lifelong career as an educator.1 From 1834 he taught ornamental drawing at the Ecole gratuite de dessin, and in 1862 he was appointed a member of a commission responsible for rethinking the teaching of industrial design. In 1865, the rejection of proposals for the reform of teaching at the Ecole des BeauxArts and the furious polemic that followed the few lessons he had taught there in the previous year, encouraged him to start a partnership with the engineer Emile Trélat, with whom he set up the Ecole centrale d’architecture, which survives today as the Ecole spéciale d’architecture. His passion for teaching was matched by a passion for writing, which is well documented in the exhibition with books and sections of his manuscript for the Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture francaise du XIe au XVIe siècle from the holdings of

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Viollet-le-Duc materials in the Archives Départementales de l’Oise. Viollet-le-Duc developed close relationships with publishers such as Bance, Morel and Hetzel, who contributed to the dissemination of his ideas on architecture. After the publication of two major academic works, his two Dictionnaires raisonnés, he redirected his educational efforts towards a younger audience by publishing, after 1871, a series of books with the Hetzel press, such as the lovely Histoire d’une forteresse and Histoire d’une maison. Particularly interesting and innovative in the show is the section ‘Architecture, a living organism’, documenting Viollet-le-Duc’s passionate interest in mountains and geology, which drew him to imagine a restoration project of Mont Blanc. Indeed, at the heart of his theoretical reflection on style is ‘his idea that an analogy can be drawn between architectural creation and the laws of nature, in particular the process of elaboration of rock crystal and the transformation of the seed into a grown plant’. Among numerous watercolours of Etna and the Alps, visitors can admire in this sequence a fascinating 1/40000 map of Mont Blanc, drawn by Viollet-le-Duc in 1876. The last section is dedicated to Viollet-leDuc’s role in the creation of the Museum of Comparative Sculpture, a collection of casts taken from the most important French medieval monuments to promote masterpieces of French sculpture from the twelfth century to the sixteenth. It was located in the Trocadero Palace in 1879, left vacant after the Exposition Universelle of 1878, and today home of the Cité de l’architecture. Viollet-leDuc’s project also included a room entirely devoted to ornament, of which two walls, dedicated respectively to Romanesque and to Gothic ornament and consisting mostly of plaster reliefs, are recreated in the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by a finely produced scholarly catalogue, which adds considerably to the bibliography of this best

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documented of all architect–restorers.2 However, there is a regrettable lack of historical and artistic contextualisation of Viollet-le-Duc’s career in the exhibition, and a concluding section on his important legacy in France, Europe and especially in the United States, would have been welcome. By comparison with the study of nineteenth-century architecture in Britain and America, research into French architecture of this period took off only about thirty-five years ago. Some of the pioneering work was carried out by the American scholars Neil Levine, Robin Middleton, David Van Zanten and Barry Bergdoll, and by French scholars Jean-Michel Leniaud, Bruno Foucard and François Loyer. The Viollet-le-Duc exhibition is a worthy successor of the past exhibitions on the Vaudoyer family (Musée d’Orsay, 1991), Félix Duban (Château de Blois, 1996), Charles Le Coeur (Musée d’Orsay, 1996), Charles Garnier (Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 2010), Henri Labrouste (Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, 2012) and Victor Baltard (Musée d’Orsay, 2012), all contributing to the growing scholarship on the subject. 1 This emphasis was also evident at the one-day conference entitled Viollet-le-Duc enseignant: L’origine et la méthode de la pédagogie de Viollet-le-Duc, organised by the Cité de l’Architecture and the Ecole Nationale de Chaillot, which was held on 11th December 2014 in conjunction with the exhibition. 2 Catalogue: Viollet-le-Duc. Les visions d’un architecte. Edited by Laurence de Finance and Jean-Michel Leniaud. 240 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Norma/Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris, 2014), €38. ISBN 978–2–915–54266–0. The Viollet-leDuc bicentennial coincided with the publication of a new book by Françoise Bercé: Viollet-le-Duc, Paris 2013.

Camille Claudel Roubaix by MELANIE VANDENBROUCK ‘WHAT MAKES MY sister’s œuvre unique is that, in its entirety, it is the story of her life’, wrote Paul Claudel in 1951.1 Works of art often have an autobiographical resonance, but this could not be truer for Camille Claudel (1864–1943). Renowned in her lifetime, Claudel’s work sank into oblivion after she was sectioned in a psychiatric ward in 1913, only to be rediscovered in the 1980s, when she was recast as an icon of feminism, a misunderstood, betrayed and forgotten romantic heroine. While the chronology of her life is the Ariadne’s thread through Camille Claudel: Au Miroir d’un Art Nouveau at La Piscine, Roubaix (closed 8th February), this exhibition complicated the hackneyed narrative of the cursed artist. Rather than concentrate on the usual, two-dimensional Rodin/Claudel encounter, its curators staged a three-dimensional character, a woman of her time, seen in the context of her peers, friends and patrons.

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This major retrospective was served by spectacular loans, notably from the Musée Rodin, Paris (currently partially closed for renovation), and the future Musée Camille Claudel, opening in Nogent-sur-Seine in late 2015. The visitor was introduced to the artist by early works such as Old Helen (1882; cat. no.8), whose symbolic naturalism introduces concerns that preoccupied Claudel throughout her career: an acute observation of the human figure (a remarkable series of drawings, published in L’Art, stressed this point) and her signature disequilibrium, the bust projected into space. Displayed alongside elderly women by her contemporaries Alfred Boucher, Jean Dampt and François Pompon, it demonstrated Claudel’s distinct artistic sensibility while being in line with the trends of her time. The eighteen-year-old Claudel moved to Paris to study sculpture in 1882, and joined Auguste Rodin’s workshop in 1884. Their relationship soon became fusional, resulting in what the curators call ‘œuvres à quatre mains’. Rodin found a muse and alter-ego, while she benefited from his protection and relished the emulation. While Rodin worked on The kiss (1882–89), she modelled Sakountala (1886; no.34). This seminal work evokes early strains in their relationship: after a curse took the Indian Sakountala away, he returned to his forgiving lover, kneeling in adoration, revelling in her tenderness. By way of contrast, Rodin’s Eternal Spring (1884; no.132) shows the intoxication of rapturous desire. Their reciprocal inspiration went beyond Claudel lending her features to many of his works, or her sculpting what was to become Rodin’s quasi-official portrait (no.27). Indeed, it proves difficult to distinguish one hand from

75. Clotho, by Camille Claudel. 1893. Plaster, 89.9 by 49.3 by 43 cm. (Musée Rodin, Paris; exh. La Piscine, Roubaix).

the other, and the show shed light on previously contested authorships. Claudel’s Young girl with a sheaf (1887; no.40) predates Rodin’s Galatea (1889; no.137) by two years, and one was struck by the similarities in the figure, composition and formal approach. The interlocking limbs and pensive posture of Claudel’s Leaning man (1886; no.26) owe as much to Michelangelo as they do to Rodin’s 1882 Thinker. Similarly, she learned from Rodin’s investigation of the fragmented, accidental and seemingly unfinished. This was no servile imitation from the student or plagiarism from the master, but showed their collaborative practice and mutual influence. But a storm was brewing. Claudel’s jealousy and mounting paranoia opened a chasm between them that was never sealed. Passion is the catalyst for The waltz (1889; no.47). The couple defy gravity but also propriety, with their unacceptable, erotic nudity, the billowing draperies symbolising their fervour. The exhibition’s glorious arrangement of multiple editions of this group showed its popularity, but also Claudel’s collaboration with other artists and her interest in the decorative arts, with a stoneware version executed by Louis Müller (no.52; Fig.77) for Samuel Bing’s Salon de l’Art Nouveau. As evoked by the work of her contemporaries Louis Forain and René-Xavier Prinet shown nearby, dance was the symbol of an epoch. In the section devoted to busts of children, one sensed her close bond with her younger brother Paul, her confident supporter, and later her biographer. But in their youth, it was Camille who dominated her docile sitter. For her portraits of him, she drew inspiration from Roman antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. The many versions of the Little chatelaine – including La Piscine’s own masterpiece (1892; no.67) – show the tender features of six-yearold Marguerite Boyer, who sat for Claudel while the artist was convalescing from an abortion at the Château de l’Islette. The little girl became the figure of Dawn (1900–08; no.89), showing both Claudel’s interest in Symbolism and her constant reworking of earlier subjects. By 1893, Claudel was no longer in Rodin’s shadow but claimed her autonomy by establishing her own milieu and distinctive style. Thanks to the influence of Paul, by then a diplomat, and Siegfried Bing, the disseminator of Japonisme, Claudel found her art revitalised by Far Eastern models. Onyx and bronze coalesce in such groups as Women chatting (1893; no.71) or The wave (1897; no.57), where Claudel displayed her technical virtuosity. Her small studies from life and domestic pieces of figures in interior settings show both Claudel’s awareness of a middle-market and her continuous engagement with observation. While this blurring of boundaries between fine and decorative arts is very much her own, the influence of Rodin remained present in the creation of composite works from the assemblage of pre-existing figures. A change of tone awaited the visitor in the section devoted to The age of maturity, Claudel’s

undisputed masterpiece, created at a time when her mental state was deteriorating. This group evokes, with uncompromising truth, her final separation from Rodin, her unbearable heartbreak. The group was long in the making (so was the separation, which endured from 1894 to 1898). Research into Claudel’s correspondence allowed the curators to re-date some of her works, and it is now clear that she started working on this piece while occupied with The waltz. One cannot help but be astonished that she was simultaneously creating two works at the opposite ends of the spectrum of amorous love. A man is torn between deathlike Age and the desperately supplicating figure of Youth. In an early plaster version (1893), Youth’s hands still touch his; in the final piece (1899) she has lost her grasp as he is dragged away from her. Paul recognised the autobiographical vein of this work. ‘This naked young woman, it’s my sister! My sister Camille. [. . .] Imploring, humiliated, on her knees, and naked! It is all over! That is why she has allowed us to look at her. And do you know something? What is being wrenched away from her, in this very moment, before your eyes, is her soul!’2 Rodin chose his lifelong companion, Rose Beuret, and his ties with Claudel were irremediably severed. The separation was publicly known, and inspired Henrik Ibsen’s play When We Dead Awaken. Exhibited at the Salon in 1899, critics admired the ‘quivering bitterness’ and the tragic theatricality of the group. Claudel sublimated her fury in the solitary figure of her Clotho (no.74; Fig.75). Draped in matted strands of hair, her repulsive figure is all sagging breasts, emaciated limbs and wrinkled features. The piece emulates Rodin’s Winter (Musée Rodin) and Jules Desbois’s Misery (no.136), but Claudel

76. Vertumnus and Pomona, by Camille Claudel. 1905. Marble, 91 by 80.6 by 41.8 cm. (Musée Rodin, Paris; exh. La Piscine, Roubaix).

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77. The waltz, by Camille Claudel and Louis Müller. 1896. Stoneware, 46 by 38 by 20.5 cm. (Musée Camille Claudel, Nogent-sur-Seine; exh. La Piscine, Roubaix).

injected anguish and madness in her Clotho, making her exacerbated decrepitude even more powerful. After bearing witness to this heart-rending spectacle, it came as a relief, but also as an anticlimax, to step into the room devoted to her late portraits. These are surprisingly conventional, yet they retain the artist’s sensitive understanding of her sitters’ personality. No longer benefiting from Rodin’s connections, Claudel sought new patrons drawn from her brother’s network. Among them was the Marquise de Maigret, who commissioned her portrait as well as Perseus and the Gorgon (1897; no.79). But, in her exhausted mental state, Claudel’s inspiration was drying up. The group draws on earlier works – the body of Medusa is taken from Crouching woman (1884–85; no.12), Perseus from The waltz’s dancer: the lover becomes executioner. Most movingly, she gives her own features to the face of the Gorgon, howling with rage. The dry workmanship (the marble was executed by Pompon) and uncharacteristically academic treatment of the figures do not hide Claudel’s unique merging of influences (here Donatello and Cellini as well as antique sculpture) and the unbalance of the composition is certainly hers. Despite her growing obscurity, Claudel still had loyal supporters, among them the dealer, foundry owner and collector Eugène Blot, with whom she remained close even after she was committed to the asylum. Blot issued limited editions of her work, displayed in group shows. Seeing Claudel’s small marbles and bronzes shown among the vividly coloured paintings of the Fauves Albert Marquet and Charles Manguin was remarkable. Blot also ensured she earned some longawaited commissions from the French state. The challenges of combining a chronological and thematic approach to Claudel’s œuvre were met by sensitive sightlines that created visual links between different periods and

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aspects of her art. Her later works could be compared and contrasted to earlier pieces, showing how Claudel continuously reinterpreted her own compositions, but also how, as she felt her strength to be declining, she took stock of her career. While this recycling shows that her creative energy was faltering, in the exhibition’s last room some of Claudel’s stronger works were to be found. Sakountala becomes Vertumnus and Pomona (no.37; Fig.76), which affirmed her unshakable mastery in carving marble. The female figure was turned into Abandon (1905; no.36), and Claudel’s swan song, the Wounded Niobid (1907; no.96). Poignantly, the latter was rescued from neglect, as it decayed in a fountain at the Admiralty in Toulon, suffocated by a coating of limescale, her supple features further bruised by inexpert ‘conservation’. Damaged, alone with her pain, the Niobid seems to symbolise Claudel’s own forced exile, spending the last thirty years of her life, as she wrote to her brother, ‘in prison, with crazy women that scream all day long’. Beyond the tale of an exploited sculptor, betrayed woman and abandoned sister, by looking closely at her works, this exhibition revealed what Claudel expressed of her period and what she brought to modern sculpture. And as the myth recedes, the portrait of the person, woman and artist, becomes remarkably clear. 1 P. Claudel: ‘Ma sœur Camille’, p.257, in the Catalogue: Camille Claudel: au miroir d’un art nouveau. Edited by Bruno Gaudichon and Anne Rivière. 250 pp. incl. 250 col. ills. (Gallimard, Paris, 2014), €39. ISBN 978–2–07–014738–0. 2 Ibid.

Velázquez Vienna

including a daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren, as well as matrimonial contenders, sent by the Habsburgs of Madrid to the court of Ferdinand III, and for the reception of the young Infanta Margarita (earlier pictured in Las Meninas) as Empress of Austria through her marriage to Leopold I. An essay on Velázquez and Margarita in Vienna would not have been amiss in the accompanying catalogue.2 The dimly lit canvases were spread out through nine rooms, hung on the dark purple to dark grey walls of the Kunsthistorisches Museum between its door frames adorned with marble busts; it was as if the exhibition designer, Gerhard Viegel, had wished to conjure up the slightly ominous air of Velázquez’s late portraits, such as the magnificent one of Prince Felipe Próspero (cat. no.42; Fig.80), with its ‘rhetoric of protection’, as suggested by Javier Portús, in the central gallery of the exhibition, devoted to dynastic portraits. Regrettably, we know nothing about their original display in the palatial halls of Vienna that might have indicated whether they were of an intimate or a courtly nature, intended for private or public display. In the exhibition the portraits were hung too high in relation to the viewer, which made it difficult to establish the proper visual or psychological relationship that may have been intended. The preceding rooms examined Velázquez’s period in Seville, when the young painter, who was of Jewish converso origins (a point not made in any of the catalogue essays) committed himself to the renewal of Spanish painting through his radical engagement with painting from life, where empirical observation, portraiture and portrayal – the foundations of his painting – merge with his thoroughly modern wish to understand human nature. This first part of the exhibition also included two sections devoted to his portraits of the 1620s and 1630s.

by FERNANDO MARÍAS

Velázquez at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (closed 15th February), was a wonder for Mitteleuropa; unlike the United Kingdom and the United States, it has never before had the privilege of seeing such a rich display of works by the Spanish master. Riding on its collaboration with the Prado Museum and on that institution’s latest exhibition on Velázquez,1 the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s show included forty-six paintings by the artist and his immediate circle (of which eight were lent by the Prado). The paintings by Velázquez, many of which came from institutions and collectors other than the Prado, were woven into the fabric of works mainly from the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s own collection: Spanish paintings to provide the context for Velázquez, but paintings by Jan Thomas, Gérard Duchâteau and Guido Cagnacci from the collection of the Habsburg rulers of Vienna to provide the context for the reception of the numerous portraits of family members,

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78. Portrait of Diego Velázquez(?), attributed in the exhibition to Pietro Martire Neri. c.1650? Canvas, 78 by 57 cm. (Courtesy Galerie Canesso, Paris; exh. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).