In 1892, the French sculptor Camille Claudel applied to France’s Ministry of Fine Arts for a block of marble. As was customary, the ministry sent an inspector to decide whether her planned work was worth the state’s support. Her plaster model, showing two nude figures waltzing, was a “virtuoso performance,” the official wrote. Not even Auguste Rodin, Claudel’s mentor, could “have studied with more artistic finesse and consciousness the quivering life of muscles and skin.” But although the ministry commissioned equally sensual works from Rodin in that era, it refused to support one by a female artist. In Claudel’s composition, the “closeness of the sexual organs” went too far.

Claudel spent months on a version that veiled the female figure. The resulting bronze, The Waltz, was a triumph—an ethereal work of romance, air, and sweeping movement. The composer Claude Debussy, a friend of Claudel’s, acquired a plaster version and kept it near him. The Waltz became her most celebrated work, produced in many different iterations, several of which are gathered in a new exhibit of Claudel’s work, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in October and will move on to the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, in April. But Claudel never did get the marble she had applied for.

Claudel bent every effort to make a name for herself, undeterred by the restrictive mores of her time. Though she won acclaim at the height of her brief career, her reputation faded in the decades after her death. Despite renewed interest in Claudel’s work in the 1980s, her tumultuous life story and Rodin’s role in it tended to deflect attention from her art, particularly in the United States. “Her best pieces,” H. W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson wrote in their canonical History of Art, “might pass for his.” But Claudel’s oeuvre, especially its sensitive and moving evocation of women’s interior lives, is not so easily dismissed. The new show presses the argument that Claudel ranks among the greatest French sculptors of the 19th century.

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