Perhaps the most worrying aspect of Marcia Brennan’s new book—and it is typical of revisionist accounts of modernist art and criticism on the 1950s and 1960s from the past two decades—is the assumed transparency of her own interpretations vis-à-vis the ideologically mediated nature of critical accounts from the period. Historical distance from an object of study does not permit an unadulterated account of that object, and neither does an enlightened methodology, especially when the theoretical perspective given voice is a very late and idiosyncratic response to the headway made in the discipline of art history by gender and cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Modernism’s Masculine Subjects is rendered all the more problematic—as well as symptomatic of larger trends in the humanities—because it examples the process of retreat and retrenchment that followed upon initial insights and that ultimately allowed the marriage of extrinsic criticism and identity politics to make a comfortable home for itself within the discipline. In Brennan’s book, this amounts to an uncertainty as to whether art can still be taken to task for the indiscretions social art history once accused it of, or if it is safer to simply hedge one’s bets and heap the bulk of the blame on art criticism and the various modes of reception, meaning, and misinterpretation art finds in the culture at large.

Though individual chapters—on Henri Matisse; Willem de Kooning; Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner; and Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland—each narrate different and variously convincing versions of this story, generally speaking Brennan characterizes art criticism as “fiend,” and painting as benign surface (or, more succinctly, “body”) for monistic discursive projections and masculine fantasies. That one of the main threads running through Brennan’s book is the assumedly formalist criticism of Clement Greenberg—a figure whose contributions to an intrinsic and immanent criticism remain wholly undervalued in the current context—makes this book stand out as largely insensitive and at worst ethically blinded to its various objects of study. In fact, Greenberg’s criticism is not formalist as Brennan claims: he is interested in expression or feeling, and so are the painters he most admires. Ironically enough, the high moral tone of Brennan’s identitarian account cannot begin to fathom the care for language, nor the dialectical complexities, that Greenberg’s version of close reading is able to tease out of modernist painting.

This is harsh criticism of a text whose subject is potentially compelling, whose publication marks the first time that a book with “post-painterly abstraction” in the subtitle has even come along, and whose overtly feminist perspective finds a sympathetic listener in this reviewer. If my criticism and worries were only a case of “my feminism is better than her feminism,” I would be on considerably shakier ground. What I point to is something far more serious, something of a limit that appears again and again with regard to the modernist moment in American art and criticism. Her use of an ideologically motivated approach betrays the utter incapacity of extrinsic criticism to broach questions fundamental to Abstract Expressionism and post-painterly abstraction. Continually lost in Brennan’s metatheoretical account are the highly variable and singular modes of complexity and seriousness around which modernist painting turns and, for that matter, the multiple ways in which responding to such formal problems can be generative of either male or female subject positions. That the critical writings of both Greenberg and Michael Fried variously hinge on a practice of close reading is not something to be dismissed out of hand; rather it should be used as a point of departure. Being open to the otherness of painting as language—perhaps the most compelling aspect of contemporary art history and the legacy of “deconstruction,” and which is near the heart of both Greenberg’s and Fried’s accounts—is here suppressed. As with so much art history today, Brennan privileges a hermeneutic that completely blinds her to the rhetorical dimension of language.

This said, Brennan’s project is partly salvaged by her straightforward gendered interpretation of the moment, which in spite of limitations does have a purchase on interpretive problems faced by art historians of the period under discussion, even if these often gossipy, interpersonal, and psychological understandings are temptations necessarily—and somewhat easily—overcome. Furthermore, the book’s narrative structure gives it the semblance of a speculative project—all of which is neatly summed up in a final chapter that promises high returns with the title, “How Formalism Lost Its Body but Kept Its Gender.” Brennan’s ultimate aim in this chapter is to address from a gendered perspective the central paradox of “opticality” in the paintings of Louis and Noland. This is a valid objective, and makes the book potentially interesting, for it offers the possibility of a gender-sensitive interpretation of post-painterly abstraction.

But the problems begin accumulating at the outset of the book in a theoretical introduction titled “A ‘Straight Theory’ of Bourgeois Pleasure in Later Modernist Painting.” Putting pressure on aesthetic pleasure is undoubtedly the correct tack in a study such as this, but the self-evident findings, which range from the gendered nature of a House and Gardens photo spread to second-rate art criticism better left in the archive, come off as curious oddities to pursue in a text that claims to be “necessarily selective” (157). Furthermore, to claim that “Greenberg’s formalist reading of Matisse is consistent with the aestheticized approach adopted in House and Gardens” (4) is not an equation that I or any other responsible reader of Greenberg can in good conscience allow. That a few pages later Brennan turns to the accounts of contemporary cultural historians in order to flag the problem of conformity and the aspirant tastes of a new middle class in the United States during the 1950s in order to substantiate her claim goes a long way in suggesting that she has managed to overlook a paramount concern in Greenberg’s criticism from the publication of “The Plight of Culture” in 1953 on. Namely, that Greenberg himself was acutely aware of the pressures to conform, and was especially attentive to the conflicted nature of his own aesthetic judgment. For Greenberg the choice of high culture or a taste in things aesthetic was always at risk of being simply entertainment or little more than an appurtenance for decorating one’s home. All of Greenberg’s insights on art depart from this basic premise concerning the cooption of experience, and, what is more, are figured as immanent to the problem of aesthetic judgment. This is where his version of the dialectic gets put into action, and is the reason why one sees him championing the work of Louis and Noland as opposed to hundreds of other Abstract Expressionist painters exhibiting in New York in the late 1950s. Moreover, if one adds aesthetic pleasure to the mix—and some readers will know that an immanent criticism not only adds but puts pressure on precisely this question—it points to one of the crucial reasons why Greenberg held Matisse’s nudes in such high regard. In turn, the question of aesthetic pleasure throws into relief one of the main points Brennan makes in the second chapter, titled “Still Lifes and Centerfolds: The Negotiation of the Feminine in Greenberg’s Reading of Matisse.”

The argument in question concerns paintings from Matisse’s Nice period, the peculiar binding of Greenberg’s monograph on Matisse published in 1953, and the coincidental release of Playboy magazine’s first issue that same year. According to Brennan, the fact that “Matisse’s figures were strategically concealed beneath a book flap that was decorated with enlarged details of still lifes” (14) finds an echo—indeed, finds certifiable meaning—in Playboy’s “highly effective use of the centerfold” (35). Here, Brennan dubiously rehearses social art history’s own worst misinterpretations of Greenberg’s enterprise. This time his intentions are read against a gender-sensitive, deterministic cultural model of guilt by association. Even if the text is somewhat slippery in declaring the precise mode of connection, the fact remains that, minimally speaking, meaning is made in this chapter through the syntactical proximity of discussing the paratextual apparatus of Greenberg’s book—which may or may not have had anything to do with the critic’s intentions and which is taken as a transparent revelation of Greenberg’s reading of Matisse—in the neighborhood of a discussion of the well-known publishing format of Playboy.

This is one of the most palpable limit cases I have yet seen as to the impoverishment of art history at the hands of cultural studies. The fact is that Hugh Hefner’s “ideal masculine subject” (37) is not Greenberg’s; nor do they share an idea of modernism. Neither does Greenberg’s account of Matisse posit a gendered identity. On the contrary, his reading hinges on the negative moments of a dialectic. That Brennan identifies the rudimentary instances of Greenberg’s reading of Matisse’s Meditation (1920) as strung between “the floral still life as the predominate compositional element” and the “push[ed] back . . . seated figure” (19)—or, as she later puts it, “sensual pleasure and intellectual detachment” (38)—suggests that her damning equation is simply one more example of a well-intentioned and right-minded politics obscuring a more careful reading of art. In other words, Greenberg recognizes that in Matisse’s painting the nude operates as a temptation to be overcome; inasmuch, his construction privileges neither “the hierarchically structured relations between judgment and pleasure” (27) nor, for that matter, “reason” over “desire.” These are negative moments, and one need only look carefully at the painting Greenberg championed in 1960 to see just how unstable these moments actually are. This is especially the case with regard to the uniqueness of Noland’s version of “opticality,” which might well have served as a test case for a discussion of such tropological problems in spite of the artist’s interest in Reichian therapy and his commitment to “sexual revolution,” ideas that at least “crystallize” in Greenberg’s account of Noland’s painting—something that cannot be said of Brennan’s account.

Much of the oddness of Brennan’s project largely hinges on a misreading of metaphor and hence narration in an early quotation from Greenberg in which the critic appears to be working out some of his initial ideas about “opticality.” Brennan writes:

The critic observed that modernist abstract painting instantiates “an object of literally the same spatial order as our bodies, and [is] no longer the vehicle of an imagined equivalent of that order. It has lost its ‘inside’ and become almost all ‘outside,’ all plane surface.” According to Greenberg, abstract paintings’ qualities of unity, complexity, physicality, and wholeness are instrumental in engendering a metaphorical sense of identification between the artworks and their viewers, just as the “corporeality” and the “physical emphasis of the more or less flat, more or less opaque plane surface that is declared as such” endows these objects with a compelling sense of “human interest.” (5)

There are two things to say about the misreading of metaphor here: first, the metatheoretical imperatives of current interdisciplinary practice militate against close reading—interpretation becomes jumpy; it leaps for conclusions not sustained by the text. Second, in retreating or pulling back from the art object to pursue a form of discourse analysis applied to art criticism alone, Brennan’s approach mimes a dialogue internal to one version of feminist and queer theory concerning the place of the body within linguistic structures. Dialogues internal to feminism, or to other theoretical discourses, cannot be simply imported into other fields of analysis as motors for interpretation; this is one of the most serious weaknesses of the interdisciplinary method now accepted as part of art historical practice. In doing so, Brennan elides the fact that (for Greenberg) flatness in abstract painting is not a body, but is one of the conventions of the medium upon which “opticality” vicariously depends. Greenberg’s materialism—what he calls earlier in the same essay “how intensely and largely we feel”—rushes quietly in here. To frame this in other terms, one could say that much of the novelty of Brennan’s account hinges on merely reversing or flipping the terms of modernist criticism or painting and privileging interpersonal relations, which modernist painting explicitly does not privilege but rather posits as a temptation to be overcome.

Thus, many of Brennan’s insights are conflicted by the fact that she is voicing Minimalism’s reductive critique or misreading of modernist painting’s dialectic. “Embeddedness,” a key term for Brennan, is almost always literalized and rarely performed—and by performed I mean used up in close reading. It might have been useful for Brennan to have consulted the dialectical resources of the system summoned up in Fried’s essay “Art and Objecthood.” It predicts the kind of hypostatizing of the body upon which her insights hinge and repudiates much of her argument avant la lettre.