Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction

How postwar abstract modernist paintings came to be seen as metaphorical embodiments of masculine selfhood; an examination of the critical discourse surrounding the work of Matisse, de Kooning, Pollock, and the post-painterly Abstractionists.

Marcia Brennan is Professor of Art History and Religious Studies at Rice University. She previously taught art history at Brown University and the College of the Holy Cross. She is the author of Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics; Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction; and Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum, all three published by the MIT Press.

"In this book Marcia Brennan extends her acute analysis of American art criticism and theory into the 1950s and 60s. She grapples tenaciously with the language, imagery, and rhetorical strategies of Clement Greenberg and others as they forged peculiar amalgams of transcendent abstraction, embodied artwork, and gendered artist. With imagination, intelligence, and intensity, Brennan situates postwar modernism within a compelling cultural history."--Michael Leja, Professor and Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History, University of Delaware