Mature age

The interpretation simply lies on the surface: it's so easy to paint the roles inside the love triangle and interpret the sculpture "Maturity" as Camilla Claudel's autobiographical sketch. She herself - on her knees, Rodin - without turning around, goes to the old wife. His wife carries with him. But neither Claudel nor her work has ever been so straightforward and superficial. Like all important works in the history of art, "Maturity" stands any interpretation: biographical, mythological, symbolic. Not demanding from the viewer and critic to determine the opinion.
It was a period in Camilla's life, when any find or idea "not like Rodin's" pleased her and gave hope that now she would become an independent sculptor. She ought to cross out from critical articles and oral observations any comparison with Rodin, to spite him of dressing his figures, wrapping in dresses and raincoats (only not naked, as in Rodin), to stop, balance, fix (only not to twist in a frenzied rhythm, as Rodin likes to do). And this was a period in Camilla's life, when she had to learn to live anew, lonely, matured, lost both a teacher and a lover.
"Maturity" is first and foremost a symbol of growing up, an irreversible path from youth to old age. Youth tries in vain to keep - old age slowly accepts, not doubting the victory. In the first version of the sculpture the whole group is more static - and the main character almost fainted on the shoulders of the old woman, while the young woman holds her hand tight enough to the chest. He limp limply somewhere between two states and two ages. In the second, final version of Camille Claudel seems to release all the characters and allows everyone to do their work, and the time to stop - go again. In the second variant, there appears a drapery connecting two figures, a stepped base, which at the hero's feet curves with a baroque or already modern curl. There is no fierce confrontation - only the fateful and inexorable course of things.
A year after the creation of the first version of "Maturity" Camille Claudel will leave the young heroine in complete solitude - having transformed her into an independent sculpture "The Vanished God". This girl will straighten her back and become entangled in thick rope hair, her rounded belly of criticism is more than once associated with Camilla's broken pregnancy. All saw only the pain of the artist and personal scores, while she worked for 12 hours, expecting only one - unconditional recognition. When her brother Paul Claudel writes about "The Vanished God", he will not mention Rodin, he will say: "what's right before our eyes broke out of her is her soul."
"Maturity" first appears in front of the audience at the Salon of Paris in 1899, a few years after the falling order. The French state (the main customer for the sculptor, unlike the artist) plans to order from Claudel this sculpture in Bronze, but at the last moment the order is canceled. And while Auguste Rodin, secretly from a former beloved, writes letters to editors, ministers, academicians, journalists with a request to pay attention to the brilliant sculptor Camilla Claudel, she smashes her workshop, confident that it is Rodin that hinders her transactions with the state.
It will not be different now. In the same way, already at the final stage, the order for the sculpture "Waltz" is broken - the commission considered too strong a hug of naked men and women, and their genitals too closely located - the unexplained sensuality of the sculpture did not give the opportunity to exhibit it in the gallery open for viewers.