Modernism's masculine subjects : Matisse, the New York school and post-painterly abstraction /
Marcia Brennan.
- xi, 213 pages : illustrations (some colour) ; 24 cm
Includes bibliographical references (pages 192-205) and index.
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. Ch. 1. Ch. 2. Ch. 3. Ch. 4.
"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."--BOOK JACKET.
026202571X 9780262025713
2004044957
Modernism (Art) Formalism (Art) New York school of art Gender identity in art Painting, Modern--20th century