“My body moves forward, but my spirit disagrees and falls backward, like a silk banner born into the wind… Oh love, of which only the ashes remain, how could you burn so for beings such as I?”
Filled with a gripping tension emanating from the connection between the two principal figures, L’Abandon endures as one of the most celebrated sculptures of Camille Claudel’s oeuvre. Claudel began developing the larger version of this work in 1886 based on a Sanskrit play by the ancient Indian poet Kālidāsa called Śakountalā. The protagonist is a young woman, Śakountalā, who grew up as an orphan in a hermitage. One day, Śakountalā happens up a king, Dushyanta, who had been hunting near the hermitage. The two quickly fall in love and marry, but Śakountalā becomes cursed, and the king tragically forgets her. Eventually, Śakountalā breaks this curse by presenting Dushyanta with a signet ring he once gave her, prompting him to remember his wife.
The present work is the dramatic moment of reunion between two lovers torn apart by fate. The composition is a masterful study of the expressive potential of the nude body, as Claudel deftly conveys an impression of the wave of conflicting emotions that threaten to overwhelm the characters after years of separation.
Claudel conceived this highly ambitious work in her twenties as a public statement of her technical and artistic prowess at a time when women were not necessarily welcome to pursue sculpting. Despite the barriers to entry, Claudel had begun studying sculpture first under the direction of Alfred Boucher in 1882 and then, notoriously, under Auguste Rodin beginning in 1883. Artistic collaboration quickly evolved into a long, often tempestuous relationship between the two. Claudel likely drew inspiration for Śakountalā (known in later forms as L'Abandon) from Rodin’s 1884 Le baiser. In Rodin’s Le baiser, the seated man hangs over the woman, firmly gripping her with both hands. There is a sense of possession in Le baiser that is wholly absent in Claudel’s Śakountalā (L'Abandon). In her sculpture, the man kneels, all desire, his face lifted, yearning before he even dares to touch the woman standing above him. Their embrace is tender as the woman gives in to this weight that is love. It is simultaneously passionate and chaste. Rodin’s 1890 L’Eternelle idole is compositionally indebted to Claudel’s composition arrangement in Śakountalā (L'Abandon), as the man in L’Eternelle idole similarly kneels before the woman in adoration.
Right: Fig. 4 Auguste Rodin, L’Eternelle idole, conceived circa 1890, marble, Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Śakountalā underwent two transformations to become L’Abandon. In 1905, at the request of her patroness, Countess Maigret, Claudel re-worked Śakountalā in marble and became known as Vertumne et Pomone, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Finally, Claudel developed a bronze version in two sizes, which assume the title L’Abandon and were cast by Eugène Blot. The present work is a rich example of the smaller size, and it has remained in the same private collection for nearly 65 years. L’Abandon is a profound expression of love, a monomyth in bronze that casts Śakountalā as the protagonist of this hero’s journey.