Modernism's Masculine Subjects

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Modernism's Masculine Subjects is written by Marcia Brennan and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0262524686 (ISBN 10) and 9780262524681 (ISBN 13).

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.