Modernism's Masculine Subjects ─ Matisse, The New York School, And Post-Painterly Abstraction

In the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit -- when social pressures on men toconform threatened cherished notions of masculine vitality, freedom, and authenticity -- modernistpaintings came to be seen as metaphorical embodiments of both idealized and highly conflictedconceptions of masculine selfhood. In Modernism's Masculine Subjects, Marcia Brennan traces theformalist critical discourses in which work by such artists as Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, andJackson Pollock could stand as symbolic representations that at once challenged and reproduced suchprevailing cultural conceptions of masculinity. Rejecting the typical view of formalism's exclusiveengagement with essentialized and purified notions of abstraction and its disengagement from issuesof 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 otherpowerful critics describing the works of Matisse, the postwar New York School abstractexpressionists, and their successors, the post-painterly abstractionists. The paintings of Matisse,she argues, were represented in part as intellectually engaged and culturally respectablecenterfolds. Brennan examines de Kooning's Woman series -- perhaps the most significant effort toincorporate feminine presence within abstract expressionist imagery -- as extended culturalmetaphors for bourgeois masculinity's conflicted relationship with its feminine "others." She alsoshows how the aggressive energy of Pollock's nonfigural painterly idiom became domesticated in thepress by the repeated pairing of his work with images of Pollock in the studio and at home with hiswife, the artist Lee Krasner. Finally, discussing the rise of the post-painterly abstractionists inthe sixties, Brennan shows how, both despite and because of the critical presence of HelenFrankenthaler, formalist responses to the works of Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland provided anopportunity to promote idealized conceptions of masculine creativity.