I commented on an another article about Camille Claudel on Medium because I really like her work, and I think I’m going to say essentially the same thing here. Of the thousands of artists in fin de siècle Paris, how many of them got to cast in bronze? How many of them were able to work in bronze and marble? A handful? Working in bronze is not like working in water colors. It involves a difficult industrial process that requires highly skilled workers with special equipment in a foundry, and it’s really expensive even now. Claudel benefitted from her relationships with certain men, as any artist at the time would had to have done to work in bronze. She got to do what most male artists couldn’t do, and we are the beneficiaries of that because she was so good at it. Her personal life was a mess, not a unique characteristic for any artist, and some of the people that helped her also hurt her, something that happens among humans both male and female.

Camille Claudia has a French national museum dedicated to her work, which is also displayed in the Louvre and Rodin Museum. She was not a victim. The only thing that makes an artist a victim is obscurity, and she is hardly obscure. Struggle goes with the artistic process, and again, thousands of other artists struggled just as much or more than she did and are long dead and forgotten.