Painting Gender, Constructing Theory
Subtitle: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: April 2, 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 408
ISBN-13: 9780262024884
Subjects: Gender studies; History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -; Modern Art; Special Subjects In Art; Art; Art & Art Instruction; USA; American - General; Criticism; History - Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945); Art / Fine Arts; Fine Arts; History - General; 1864-1946; Aesthetics; Gender identity in art; Modernism (Art); Stieglitz Circle (Group of art; Stieglitz Circle (Group of artists); Stieglitz, Alfred,; United States
Description: "In Painting Gender, Constructing Theory, Marcia Brennan examines how Stieglitz and the critics drew on early twentieth-century discourses on sex and the psyche, particularly the theories of Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, to characterize the artworks of the Stieglitz circle.

Critics routinely described the often highly abstracted paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth as transparent displays of the most intimate aspects of the self, taking both subject matter and painterly form to be guided by the artist's own gendered and psychic energies.".

"Focusing on the key historical criticism and art-works, Brennan shows how the identities of all five Stieglitz circle artists were presented in terms of the masculinity and femininity, and the heterosexuality and homosexuality, thought to be embedded in their work. Brennan also discusses Stieglitz's relation to competing artistic and critical movements, including Thomas Hart Benton's regionalist art and Clement Greenberg's reformulation of formalism."--BOOK JACKET.