LIFE AS MYTH
JOURNAL
JOURNAL 2008
Impressions at sunrise
Finding the inner muse
SPRING 2008
Artists and models
LIFEWORKS
ATLAS
SPRING 2008
SUZANNE AND LEON
(above) The lecture also known as The reading (Madame Manet and Leon). Edouard Manet. 1868. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. (below) M. et Mme Manet (the parents of Edouard Manet) 1860. Musee D'Orsay, Paris. M. et Mme Manet (the artist and his wife). Edgar Degas. 1869. Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Japan.
For me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats.
Pablo Picasso (1881 - 1973), painter, sculptorFor a woman, for any woman living in patriarchy, it is extraordinarily freeing to go back or forward into a time when love is not split from anger, when the universe of emotion returns as a world in which she can move freely, where she is not bedeviled by a split between good and bad women, one loving, the other angry - images of women that are surreal, that come from the unconscious of men.
Carol Gilligan (1936 - ), feminist, ethicist, psychologist
Manet was married to Suzanne Leenhoff, a Dutch musician two years his senior. He met her when August Manet, his father, hired her to give his sons piano lessons. It is likely that she was the senior Manet's mistress.
Leon Leenhoff was born in 1853 and whether August or Édouard was his father is unknown. From 1853-63, Édouard Manet had a romantic relationship with Leenhoff but it was only after his father's death that he married her. Both Suzanne and her son, Leon, were featured models in Manet's paintings.
