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Who knows what prompted Camille Claudel, at 20, to take a blade to the clay model of her sculpture of a headless crouching nude, tilting to one side and balanced precariously on rough feet?

Claudel had spent considerable time in Paris’ Louvre Museum, where she was well acquainted with its collection of classical Greek and Roman sculptures, many of them broken and missing limbs.

In a startlingly modern conception, the negative space of Claudel’s abrupt amputation exposes — and italicizes — the human body’s dense, inescapable physicality.

A celebrated ancient marble of a crouching Venus, excavated in a Roman settlement near Lyon, France, entered the museum’s collection with noisy fanfare just a few years before Claudel executed her piece.

Sculptor Camille Claudel was more than a tragic figure.