Inside Flap copy
--Michael Leja, University of Delaware
"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
"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
