The Musée Camille Claudel in Nogent-sur-Seine will bring Camille Claudel and the German sculptor Bernhard Hoetger together in ‘Camille Claudel & Bernhard Hoetger: The 1905 Exhibition’, opening on 12 September 2026 and running through 10 January 2027. The exhibition revisits a presentation held in Paris 120 years earlier, when works by the two artists were shown together at the gallery of Claudel’s dealer and publisher, Eugène Blot.
Organised in partnership with the Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum in Bremen and Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie, the exhibition will assemble nearly 90 works from national and international loans. Sculptures, drawings, paintings and photographs will reconstruct the context of the 1905 presentation while placing Claudel’s work alongside Hoetger’s early sculptures.
The central section will evoke a Parisian gallery of the fin-de-siècle period. Among the works identified by the museum are Claudel’s ‘The Wave’ (1897), in onyx and bronze on a marble base, and ‘Dream by the Fireside’ (1899), alongside Hoetger’s ‘Loïe Fuller’ (around 1901) and ‘The Blind Man’ (1902). A photograph of Claudel beside ‘Perseus and the Gorgon’, dating to around 1898, also forms part of the exhibition material.
The historical encounter took place in December 1905 at Eugène Blot’s gallery. A guided-tour page for the exhibition describes Claudel as being at the height of her artistic career at the time, while Hoetger was a younger sculptor around a decade her junior. Their paths had crossed several times in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, within the city’s international artistic networks.
After the 1905 presentation, the exhibition will trace the artists’ divergent trajectories. Claudel continued trying to establish her work, but her creativity declined and she stopped sculpting from 1906, according to the museum. Hoetger returned to Germany from 1907 and pursued a prolific career not only as a sculptor but also as a painter, architect and designer. The presentation will introduce French audiences to Hoetger’s life and work while addressing his ambiguous relations with Nazism.
The exhibition also focuses on a lesser-known phase of Claudel’s career: her final years of artistic activity before her internment. It will be held at the Musée Camille Claudel, 10 rue Gustave Flaubert, in Nogent-sur-Seine. The museum opened in March 2017 in a building incorporating the Claudel family home and holds the richest public collection devoted to the sculptor, with 45 works spanning her career. Its wider display includes around 200 sculptures representing French sculpture from 1880 to 1914.
From 12 September to 31 October 2026, the museum will open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm. From 2 November 2026 through 10 January 2027, it will open Wednesday to Sunday from 10am to 5pm. Admission is €10, with a reduced price of €6.
