| Description |
xi, 213 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm |
| Contents |
Introduction: A "Straight Theory" of Bourgeois Pleasure in Later Modernist Painting -- Still Lifes and Centerfolds: The Negotiation of the Feminine in Greenberg's Reading of Matisse -- Fragmented Bodies and Canonical Nudes: Painting and Reading de Kooning's Woman Series -- Pollock and Krasner: Touching and Transcending the Boundaries of Abstract Expressionism -- How Formalism Lost Its Body but Kept Its Gender: Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland in the Sixties |
| Summary |
In the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit - when social pressures on men to conform threatened cherished notions of masculine vitality, freedom, and authenticity - modernist paintings came to be seen as metaphorical embodiments of both idealized and highly conflicted conceptions of masculine selfhood. In Modernism's Masculine Subjects, Marcia Brennan traces the formalist critical discourses in which work by such artists as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock could stand as symbolic representations that at once challenged and reproduced such prevailing cultural conceptions of masculinity. Rejecting the typical view of formalism's exclusive engagement with essentialized and purified notions of abstraction and its disengagement from issues of gender and embodiment, Brennan explores the ways in which these categories were intertwined, historically and theoretically. Brennan makes new use of writings by Clement Greenberg and other powerful critics describing the works |
| Notes |
Originally published: 2004 |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pp192-205) and index |
| Audience |
Scholarly & Professional MIT Press |
| Subject |
Formalism (Art)
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Gender identity in art.
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Modernism (Art)
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New York school of art.
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| ISBN |
026202571X alkaline paper |
|
9780262524681 |
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