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Camille Claudel (French, 1864-1943)
Truth coming out of the …
See original version (French)
243
-
Camille Claudel (French, 1864-1943)
Truth coming out of the …
See original version (French)
Estimate €30,000 - €40,000
Voluntary lot
Description
Camille Claudel (French, 1864-1943)
Truth coming out of the well, c. 1900-1905
Bronze.
Posthumous lost-wax casting.
Signed "C. Claudel".
Foundry stamp Chapon, numbered 7/8.
Height 43 Width 31 Depth 20 cm.
Provenance:
- the plaster cast given as a wedding present by Eugène Blot to his cousin Léon Cahen, 1907;
- by descent, de Boissieu family, Paris;
- the bronze, private collection, Hong Kong.
Camille Claudel. An 1900 bronze sculpture entitled La vérité sortant du puits (The Truth Emerges from the Well). Signed and numbered.
Certificate of authenticity by Reine-Marie Paris.
Bibliography:
- Reine-Marie Paris, Philippe Cressent, Camille Claudel, catalogue raisonné, fifth revised and enlarged edition, Paris, Economica Culture, 2019, n°68, pp 484-488.
- Anne Rivière and Bruno Gaudichon, Camille Claudel, l'expression farouche de l'intime, Paris, éditions Hazan, 2025, p. 143.
DREYFUS IS INNOCENT!
This Truth from the Well is a veritable Dreyfus manifesto by Camille Claudel, whereas Auguste Rodin had comfortably preferred silence, "accommodating himself to the prevailing anti-Semitism in order to preserve his interests with potential sponsors", as the Rodin museum points out. Camille Claudel brilliantly reinterprets the painting by Edouard Debat-Ponsan (Amboise, Musée de l'Hôtel de Ville) presented at the Salon of 1898. It had been offered to Emile Zola by public subscription at the 1900 Universal Exhibition, to celebrate the commitment of the author of "J'accuse", who led the fight for the liberation and rehabilitation of the Jewish captain Alfred Dreyfus. Truth, triumphant, emerges naked from the well where it was imprisoned, while two men, allegories of the Army and the Church, try to plunge it back in to hide it. This image has its origins in pre-Socratic philosophy and in a fable by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian, which enabled many artists to personify their struggles.
The theory that this Truth is a simple 'layering', the re-use of a pre-existing work to create a new one, must be refuted. Some would argue that this practice, taken to its most brilliant extreme by Rodin, is justified by the great similarities between La Vérité (1900-1905) and La Valse (1889-1893) and La Fortune (1900), whose female figures are similar. Camille Claudel frequently produced different variants of the same work, with differences in detail between them. The best example might be La Valse, which alone has twelve versions. However, the absence of any trace of assembly supports the theory that this was a variation on a common motif, rather than a simple reworking, just as the construction of the well's curbstone is unprecedented in the artist's work. The veil of this Vérité is a real exercise in style, much fuller and more marked than that of La Fortune. Her face, close to that of La Valse, is sublimated by her broken arms, like those of the Venus de Milo, giving this sculpture the power of an ancient allegory.
This little-documented work puts an end to the interpretations of his late statements, marked by bouts of delirious paranoia that led to his internment in 1913. The plaster cast was discovered by Reine-Marie Paris among the descendants of Léon Cahen, who had received it from his cousin Eugène Blot as a wedding present in 1907. Produced before the official exoneration of Dreyfus, it is a token of the sculptor's support for Eugène Blot, her most loyal founder, dealer and patron. Only one other bronze, also posthumous, is currently in the collections of the Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent-sur-Seine.
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