Review:
--Eric Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Modern and American Art, Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University
--John Davis, Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art, Smith College
" 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, University of Delaware
" This is a fascinating and rigorous account of American abstract painting's critical fortunes between what might be called its Greenbergian and Friedian moments. Acknowledging the pioneering contributions by scholars such as Anne Wagner, Lisa Saltzman, and John O'Brian along the way, Marcia Brennan excavates with sophistication a politics of gendered significations for avant-garde painting embedded in the very formalist languages of a classic modernist formation. In the end, she presents an essential argument for the shift in emphasis between the 1950s and the early 1960s that recovers much of the complexity and contradiction inherent in the maintenance of painting's primacy on the eve of pop and conceptual art." --Eric Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Modern and American Art, Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University
" Marcia Brennan's fascinating book is a sustained exploration of a central paradox in the art of the 1950s and 60s: how formalist discourse celebrated abstraction and pure opticality while simultaneously delighting in a highly gendered, sensuous experience of the body. Beginning with an ingenious interpretation of the American reception of Matisse, she offers a series of close readings of both the paintings and the constructed media personae of de Kooning, Pollock, Krasner, Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland. Throughout, Brennan blends theory and social history so that the authoritative criticism of Clement Greenberg is revealingly cast against a period backdrop of masculinist anxiety, bourgeois domesticity, and popular visual culture ranging from "House and Garden" to "Playboy,"" --John Davis, Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art, Smith College
& quot; 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.& quot; --Michael Leja, University of Delaware
& quot; This is a fascinating and rigorous account of American abstract painting's critical fortunes between what might be called its Greenbergian and Friedian moments. Acknowledging the pioneering contributions by scholars such as Anne Wagner, Lisa Saltzman, and John O'Brian along the way, Marcia Brennan excavates with sophistication a politics of gendered significations for avant-garde painting embedded in the very formalist languages of a classic modernist formation. In the end, she presents an essential argument for the shift in emphasis between the 1950s and the early 1960s that recovers much of the complexity and contradiction inherent in the maintenance of painting's primacy on the eve of pop and conceptual art.& quot; --Eric Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Modern and American Art, Department of Art and Art History, Tufts University
& quot; Marcia Brennan's fascinating book is a sustained exploration of a central paradox in the art of the 1950s and 60s: how formalist discourse celebrated abstraction and pure opticality while simultaneously delighting in a highly gendered, sensuous experience of the body. Beginning with an ingenious interpretation of the American reception of Matisse, she offers a series of close readings of both the paintings and the constructed media personae of de Kooning, Pollock, Krasner, Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland. Throughout, Brennan blends theory and social history so that the authoritative criticism of Clement Greenberg is revealingly cast against a period backdrop of masculinist anxiety, bourgeois domesticity, and popular visual culture ranging from House and Garden to Playboy .& quot; --John Davis, Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art, Smith College
"Marcia Brennan's fascinating book is a sustained exploration of a central paradox in the art of the 1950s and 60s: how formalist discourse celebrated abstraction and pure opticality while simultaneously delighting in a highly gendered, sensuous experience of the body. Beginning with an ingenious interpretation of the American reception of Matisse, she offers a series of close readings of both the paintings and the constructed media personae of de Kooning, Pollock, Krasner, Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland. Throughout, Brennan blends theory and social history so that the authoritative criticism of Clement Greenberg is revealingly cast against a period backdrop of masculinist anxiety, bourgeois domesticity, and popular visual culture ranging from "House and Garden" to "Playboy"."--John Davis, Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art, Smith College
"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, University of Delaware
About the Author:
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.
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