Revising Men

Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction; Marcia Brennan; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. xi + 213 pp.

Tell the American people . . . that I am a devoted husband and father . . . that I go to the theater, ride horseback, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love . . . just like any man.

—Henri Matisse

A summary, standard view of American painting after 1945 might describe its development in close relation to a modernist discourse that emphasized pure visuality, so that the most highly valued work tended to be abstract. The central artist would be Jackson Pollock, while the chief exception would be Willem de Kooning's paintings of women. The central critic would be Clement Greenberg, who saw the refinement of the aesthetic experience generated by explorations of what was specific only to painting as a necessary defense against the depredations of mass culture. Such a description is now outdated but retains considerable force as a generator of counterarguments. Thus, the postwar emergence of American modernist painting has been revised in terms of its entwinement with Cold War ideologies and its instrumentalization in the construction of U.S. cultural prestige (Serge Guilbaut), its development in tandem with emergent forms of modern subjectivity (Michael Leja), or its near-tragic instantiation of the petit bourgeois colonization of everyday life (T. J. Clark).

Marcia Brennan's Modernism's Masculine Subjects contributes to this process of revision. Essentially, Brennan argues that postwar American painting, from abstract expressionism to the postpainterly abstraction of the 1960s, was bound to an inherent instability in normative postwar masculinity—"The very features that endowed the normative male subject with power were precisely the qualities that placed him at risk, since conforming to a prescribed social prototype seemingly engendered uniformity, insularity, disempowerment, and a lack of freedom and autonomy" (8)—with the effect that in the painting of the period, "heterosexual masculinity produced itself dialogically through the feminine, just as conceptions of the aesthetic transcendence of embodiment and materiality were produced through their accompanying material forms, through the symbolic bodies of paintings" (13). This argument, focusing on a "polemically complex heterosexual operation" (6) that powerfully influenced modernist aesthetics, is interesting enough, though the suggestion that modernist aesthetics are masculinist, in however nuanced terms, seems rather familiar; there is also the caveat that while Brennan's argument certainly rests on aspects of feminist and queer theory, the kind of argument that discerns the instabilities or inconsistencies within normative structures is also by now familiar, so it is not clear why the use of the term straight theory to describe her methodological orientation is necessary (6).

Given Henri Matisse's carefully nurtured status as iconic modernist, Brennan uses his reassuringly bourgeois masculine self-presentation to postwar America, together with the troublesome persistence of gendered corporeal desire in his work (all those odalisques and nudes), to launch her argument. Matisse's stuffiness and the "sensuousness" of his works provide, as Brennan suggests, "productive counterpoints for alternative conceptions of empowered masculinity in the art of the New York School" (11). If Matisse's bourgeois masculinity seems to sit comfortably enough with what John O'Brian has called his "apparently untroubled conception of the female form as an idealized repository for color and form" (Brennan's work on Matisse is most productively read in tandem with O'Brian's),¹ the role of figuration, but more especially corporeality and desire, was a problem for artists and critics in terms of Greenbergian modernism (or, at least, dominant readings of same), typically seen to banish the body (artist's, subject's, or viewer's), in favor of the trope of the "floating eyeball" (5). Hence Brennan takes up the task of reconciling Greenberg's enthusiasm for Matisse with his support for abstraction (a task that best serves to generate her powerful reading of de Kooning's women), so that her revision of the history—normative masculinity...