Camille Claudel's sculptures now sell for close to a million dollars, and a national museum in France is devoted entirely to her work. She spent the last 30 years of her life locked in a psychiatric asylum and was buried in an unmarked communal grave. Born in rural northern France in the 1860s, she was studying anatomy and sculpting the human form by 12. Her mother, from a traditional Catholic farming background, found the whole business of hauling wet clay unladylike and despised her daughter's ambition. Her father did the opposite: he took her teenage work to a professional sculptor for assessment, and when the verdict came back exceptional, he moved his wife and children to Paris in 1881 and stayed behind in the countryside alone to pay for it. The state art school barred women. Modesty laws kept women out of rooms with nude models, which made ...