Emerson Bowyer and Anne-Lise Desmas Win 2025 Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for "Camille Claudel"

The Barr Award is given annually “to the author or authors of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published in the English language under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection.”

Camille Claudel traces the exceptional career of a trailblazing sculptor who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, defied the social expectations of her time to pursue a powerful and expressive exploration of the human form. She was memorably praised by critic Octave Mirbeau in 1895 as “a revolt of nature: a woman of genius,” a comment brimming with both praise and condescension, but encapsulating the sculptor’s fraught position within the art world at that time. Radically diverging from the social conventions of women, she was a new and unsettling figure. Genius had always been positioned as the exclusive preserve of men, and yet here was a woman whose art exhibited all the traditional qualities of greatness.

Since her rediscovery in the revisionist rush of the 1980s, Camille Claudel’s undeniably tragic life has firmly entered the realm of popular culture. Her passionate relationship with Auguste Rodin, mental decline, and internment in a psychiatric institution for the final 30 years of her life have provided rich fodder for adaptation.

Featuring more than 200 photographs along with contributions from leading experts, Camille Claudel accompanied an exhibition on view at The Art Institute of Chicago from October 7, 2023 to February 19, 2024 and at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from April 2 to July 21, 2024. With essays exploring the many facets of her life, work, and reception; a biography; commentary by American sculptor Kiki Smith; and a fascinating appendix of documents written by Claudel and her contemporaries, this volume reevaluates the artist’s work on its own merits and repositions her legacy within a more complex genealogy of modernism.

Co-author Emerson Bowyer, Searle Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, at the Art Institute of Chicago, says of the award, “I’m so honored to receive this recognition for our work on Camille Claudel. Her revelatory sculpture is eminently deserving of scholarly and general interest and I hope this catalogue will serve future researchers and readers.” Co-author Anne-Lise Desmas, senior curator and head of the Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the J. Paul Getty Museum, adds, “I am deeply touched that our work on Camille Claudel is granted this prestigious award; I want to acknowledge the dedication of the many who are as passionate as we are about this extraordinary sculptor, contributed to the undertaking of this scholarly catalogue, and in particular our French and American co-authors, as well as Getty senior editor, Ruth Evans Lane, and lead publication designer, Jeffrey Cohen.”

Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum notes, "I know I speak for all of Anne-Lise's friends and colleagues at the Getty in saying that we are delighted and incredibly proud that she has been honored with the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award as co-author of the exhibition catalogue Camille Claudel. Her exhibition had a great impact on the many visitors it brought to the Getty, and I am sure that the book will likewise enthrall the many readers who, through it, are able to follow Claudel's brilliant, if traumatic, life and career."