Camille
Claudel is, to my eyes, a far better sculptor and greater artist
than Auguste
Rodin; her work is consistently warmer, more imbued with emotion,
more genuinely passionate. That she is less celebrated is partly a
result of the breakdown and subsequent incarceration which cut short
her career in middle age, partly the perennial problem of female
artists being consistently written out of art history by a male
establishment.
A
very good and thought provoking recent lecture, in which the mutually
dependent/destructive symbiotic/antagonistic artistic relation
between the two was the focus, has had me mentally revisiting their
work and the interaction which it displays. A meandering journey
which brought me to Claudel’s L’Age
mûr
and paused there.
L’Age
mûr
is usually seen as a despairing autobiographic public cri de coeur in
the face of Rodin’s refusal to leave his lifelong partner Rose
Beuret. In this interpretation, the elderly woman at camera left is
the implacable fate Clotho (representing Beuret) leading the
unresisting central male figure (Rodin) away from life in the form of
his younger lover (Claudel) who pleads on her knees at camera right.
Looking
at the sculpture today, it suddenly merges in my mind with the lyrics
of a song: an equally passionate and
doomed cry of anguish from a lover who also finds that she cannot
use youth and flesh to overturn more compelling loyalties.
The
song is Don't
marry her,
sung by The Beautiful South. There are two slightly different
versions, the original release and a later radio edit which (this being a
family show, and since either would equally do for my present purposes) I've decided to choose here:
Think
of you with pipe and slippers
Think of her in bed
Lying there just watching telly
Think of me instead
I'll never grow so old and flabby
That could never be
Don't marry her, have me...
Think of her in bed
Lying there just watching telly
Think of me instead
I'll never grow so old and flabby
That could never be
Don't marry her, have me...
Melded
together, as they now are, sculpture and song both appear to me in a
sadder and kinder light.
Of course there's nothing unique in this context about these
two particular pieces; it just happened that way. I could equally well, perhaps,
have alighted on Tracey Emin's Everyone I have ever slept with
1963–1995 tent and Alanis Morissette's You oughta know...)
- Paul Heaton and Dave Rotheray, Don't marry her. 1996 (quoted radio edit: 2002)
2 comments:
I have to admit that I just love the original version of Don't marry her. There's something wonderfully bizarre about the juxtaposition of sunny, naive Kirsty McColl style with lyrics as bitter as, say, those of John Cooper Clarke.
I had the Beautiful South song popping into my head several times for days after reading this post. While I like the track, I didn't have a copy of it, so I went off in search of it, and found the original version.
I'd never known about the original version, and I prefer it to the radio edit, so thanks for that!
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