Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics

391 Pages·2001·4.26 MB·English

by  Marcia Brennan

Painting Gender,Constructing Theory
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
Marcia Brennan
Painting Gender, Constructing Theory
The Alfred Stieglitz
Circle and American
Formalist Aesthetics
© 2001 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information
storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
Publication of this book has been assisted by a grant from the Millard Meiss
Publication Fund of the College Art Association.
This book was set in Bodoni and Futura by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens,
Georgia, and was printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brennan, Marcia.
Painting gender, constructing theory : the Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American
formalist aesthetics / Marcia Brennan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-02488-8 (hc. : alk. paper)
1. Stieglitz Circle (Group of artists). 2. Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864–1946—
Aesthetics. 3. Modernism (Art)—United States. 4. Gender identity in art. I. Title.
N6512.5.S75 B74 2001
709'.73'09042—dc21
00-046060
For Scott Brennan
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction 2
Part I Embodied Formalism: The Formation of a Discourse
Chapter 1 20
Puritan Repression and the Whitmanic Ideal:
The Stieglitz Circle and Debates in American
High Culture, 1916-1929
Chapter 2 44
Faith, Love, and the Broken Camera:
Alfred Stieglitz and New York Dada
Chapter 3 72
Alfred Stieglitz and His Critics:
An Aesthetics of Intimacy
Notes 272
Selected Bibliography 348
Index 370
Part II The Stieglitz Circle’s Symbolic Body
Chapter 4 96
Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe:
Corporeal Transparency and Strategies of Inclusion
Chapter 5 136
John Marin:
Framed Landscapes and Embodied Visions
Chapter 6 156
Marsden Hartley and Charles Demuth:
The Edges of the Circle
Part III Contests and Counterdiscourses, circa 1930-1950
Chapter 7 202
Modernism’s Masculine Subjects:
Alfred Stieglitz versus Thomas Hart Benton
Chapter 8 232
The Contest for “the Greatest American
Painter of the Twentieth Century”:
Alfred Stieglitz and Clement Greenberg
Acknowledgments
This study was guided and inspired by the teaching and scholarship
of Kermit S. Champa. He taught me that intense critical analysis
and methodological questioning could converge productively with
a rigorous dedication to works of art. Professor Champa has been
a constant source of patience and generosity as my work has de-
veloped. He has influenced this study in more ways than I can
enumerate, not the least of which are through the kindness and flex-
ibility which have sustained me through every phase of the project.
Acknowledgments viii ix
This study has also benefited immeasurably from the contribu-
tions of three other scholars. Dian Kriz and Carolyn Dean offered in-
valuable advice and assistance from the formative stages of the
project. Dian Kriz taught me the value of maintaining the social and
historical embeddedness of works of art. Carolyn Dean provided
new ways to envision the intersection of subjectivity and aesthet-
icswithin a theoretical account of American modernism. Both re-
peatedly offered incisive and sympathetic responses to my work.
Michael Leja provided detailed comments on the entire dissertation
with which this study began, and on the revised version of the book’s
final chapter. He has been an extraordinarily generous and sensi-
tive reader, and I have learned much from his extensive knowledge
of modern art and from his trenchant theoretical insights.
Other scholars and friends have contributed substantively to the
development of this study. For their many important suggestions and
encouragement, I would like to thank Jay Clarke, Sarah Greenough,
Estelle and Stuart Lingo, and Kathleen Pyne. In different but com-
plementary ways, Maureen Meister and David Feigenbaum brought
light to moments of darkness and helped me to see my way forward.
The bibliography of the Stieglitz circle is both rich and exten-
sive, and I would like to acknowledge the works of other scholars
who have contributed to the development of my thinking. Anne M.
Wagner’s remarkable study Three Artists (Three Women): Mod-
ernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffewas published
just before I completed my dissertation. The rigor and creativity of
her arguments extended my ability to see and imagine unexpected
expressions of identity and unconventional corporeal structures in
the artworks of Georgia O’Keeffe and Lee Krasner. Barbara Buhler
Lynes’s meticulous research and the vast documentary base she
has assembled have been indispensable to my study of O’Keeffe.
Anna C. Chave’s scholarship has repeatedly underscored for me
the significance of the relationship between gender and power that
threads through the history of art and informs O’Keeffe’s artistic
production. Jonathan Weinberg’s pioneering study Speaking for
Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hart-
ley, and the First American Avant-Gardeopened up new ways for
me to approach issues of subjectivity and sexual difference in De-