Modernism's Masculine Subjects

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.