The trailblazing French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864–1943) defied the social expectations of her time to pursue original and powerful explorations of the human form.

During that period, few women achieved celebrity in the field of sculpture, which, unlike painting or drawing, continued to be a largely male enterprise. Densely material, largely reliant on nude models, physically demanding, and bound up in male-dominated and politicized systems of state patronage, sculpture was not considered a polite art, and Claudel’s ambitions in that arena were transgressive. Her work prompted the critic Octave Mirbeau to famously exclaim, “We are in the presence of something unique, a revolt of nature: a woman genius.”

Image: The Implorer (large model), modeled about 1898–99, cast about 1905. Camille Claudel. Turner Carroll Gallery, Sante Fe