The past few years have witnessed the publication of several major studies that reframed the history of early American modernism and the Alfred Stieglitz circle, most notably Celeste Connor’s Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924–1934 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Wanda M. Corn’s The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), and Sarah Greenough’s Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company/Bulfinch Press, 2000). These books share similar themes and concerns: they all investigate the Stieglitz artists after Gallery 291 had closed and during the interwar decades, as well as the years of the Intimate Gallery and An American Place, when the “second circle” had taken form under the banner of what Corn has called a soil-and-spirit nationalism. In varying ways, Connor, Corn, and Greenough locate this second circle in its artistic and cultural contexts and highlight the crucial function of critics such as Paul Rosenfeld in establishing and promoting the ideology and artists of the Stieglitz group. The picture of early-twentieth-century modernism as an isolated, disconnected episode in American art history is revised by these authors. Together, they reconstruct the Stieglitz circle’s role in defining modernism not only in the early years of the century, but also throughout by mapping continuities—from cultural nationalism to pluralism—between the first-generation avant-garde and that of the post–World War II era.

Marcia Brennan’s Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics is a noteworthy addition to this literature. It is concerned with the issues listed above as it analyzes the post-291 artists and critics and establishes a kinship between the early modernists and their well-known followers, the Abstract Expressionists. Brennan, however, lends a fresh perspective to the history of American modernism. While not ignoring the cultural nationalism that influenced the circle’s art, she identifies an equally compelling critical and cultural discourse, which she labels “embodied formalism.” This discourse, in which abstract forms are characterized as “aestheticized analogues of the artists’ own gendered presences” (3), is exemplified by Rosenfeld’s comments: “[Georgia O’Keeffe] seems to bring before one the outlines of a whole universe…expressed through the terms of a woman’s body. For there is no stroke laid by her brush, whatever it is she may paint, that is not curiously, arrestingly female in quality. Essence of very womanhood permeates her paintings” (3). It is, of course, not a discovery that critics used such gendered and sexualized language to explain O’Keeffe’s art—or Arthur Dove’s, Marsden Hartley’s, or Charles Demuth’s, for that matter. What is new is that Brennan recognizes this rhetorical tendency as pervasive in and fundamental to formalist criticism from the mid-1910s to 1946, from the Stieglitz group to Clement Greenberg.

Brennan’s persuasive argument unfolds over the carefully organized structure of the book, the first part of which sets out the multiple contexts from which embodied formalism originated in the years during and after World War I. For Brennan, the concept of the artist’s body merging with art and nature must be understood as part of anti-Puritanism—that is, the pairing of sexual liberation with artistic expression as the source of a vital American art and culture common in early-twentieth-century literary and critical texts, from Benjamin de Casseres’s 1914 essay, “The Great American Sexquake,” to The Seven Arts’ celebration of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Equally influential, according to Brennan, were debates between members of the Stieglitz circle and New York Dada about aesthetics and the body, as the organic sexuality imagined in Stieglitz’s photographs, from his “Equivalents” series to those of O’Keeffe’s body, is defined in opposition to the mechanized, nongenerative sexuality of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, for example. Her discussions of anti-Puritanism and Dada are followed by a chapter introducing the principal Stieglitz-circle critics, with the focus on Rosenfeld, the “chief proponent” of the new embodied aesthetic criticism (26), and on the intimate collaboration between the critic and Stieglitz in advancing the circle artists. In Brennan’s study, Rosenfeld’s book, Port of New York (1924), emerges as the key text for the postwar Stieglitz group, not solely for its nationalist discourse (as Connor and Corn have asserted) but also for its embodied formalist rhetoric as a way to unify the circle artists.

The second section of Painting Gender, Constructing Theory explores how critics, grounded in a new discourse of sexuality drawn from psychoanalytical theory, applied embodied formalism to each of the five Stieglitz-circle painters. Brennan discusses Dove and O’Keeffe in tandem as critics (following Stieglitz’s lead) read their organic abstractions as complementary: Dove’s paintings show his penetration into nature, his procreative, phallic, heterosexual urges, while O’Keeffe’s work reveals a female sexuality, an interiority, an embrace of the other into the self. In similar fashion, critics wrote of John Marin’s work as a “spontaneous ejaculation” (155) responding to the natural world, a “sublimated orgasmic experience,” fluid, powerful, and masculine (142). Embodied formalism, Brennan contends, worked best for these three painters as this notion depended upon a heterosexual identity, a merging of a gendered body with an other, while its limits were apparent in criticism on Hartley and Demuth. Critics read effeminacy and self-absorption (homosexual traits according to psychoanalytical theory) into the work of Demuth and Hartley, and this self-absorption purportedly restricted these artists’ ability to disseminate the self into the other or incorporate the other into the self. Throughout this chapter, Brennan provides careful, insightful readings of the critical texts, although her efforts to identify the formal structures of the paintings that prompted critics’ gendered readings are uneven—strong, for instance, with Dove and O’Keeffe, but less so with Marin’s 1920s paintings. Problems with the leap from words to images are also evident in her claim that the oppositional forms in O’Keeffe’s paintings embody her identity as the only female artist in the Stieglitz circle (132). Such comments, while provocative, detract from the historically grounded analysis, which is the strength of the book and which dominates the final two chapters on the Stieglitz circle as it was challenged by Regionalism and Abstract Expressionism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Recreating the exchanges between Thomas Hart Benton and Stieglitz (and their critics), Brennan demonstrates that these debates hinged on the issue of the artistic “potency” of abstraction versus literal representation, of “competing constructions of American masculine subjectivity” (221). In so doing, she recasts the famed showdown between Benton and Stieglitz as a battle about embodied formalism. For Brennan, this rhetoric also plays a significant role in the contests between the Stieglitz group and Abstract Expressionists, between Stieglitz and Greenberg—the subject of the final chapter. While Greenberg rejected the Stieglitz group (save Marin) and parodied its critical rhetoric, he envisioned a modernism counter to that of the circle, yet dependent upon it. Brennan shows how Stieglitz’s idea of a formal and corporeal merger between the gendered body, nature, and abstract form was revised and replaced by Greenberg’s notion of self-referentiality and an aggressively masculine modernism in which a merger is no longer possible as the artist transcends the world and interacts with (or is embodied in) the paint materials. Greenberg saw Marin a model of a self-sufficient heterosexual masculinity and an American modernist ancestor for Jackson Pollock, and Brennan’s discussion of the Marin–Pollock association is a major contribution to the project of breaking down the boundaries between modernism in the United States before and after World War II. In demonstrating the Stieglitz circle’s influence into the 1940s, Brennan joins Connor and Corn in revising the dominant (but now-crumbling) narrative of twentieth-century American modernism.

Here, and throughout her book, Brennan provides complex, nuanced readings of the culture of modernist art and criticism. She fashions a picture of a New York art scene in which artists and critics are in a contest over aesthetic and cultural power. The art history that she writes does not contain a linear narrative of progressive movements, but instead shows multiple groups and artists in a process of definition and counterdefinition. Brennan illustrates this process, for instance, in her analysis of the rivalry between Duchamp and Stieglitz, and the skirmishes between Greenberg and Stieglitz-circle criticism in the 1940s. She also dissects the dialectic among critic, patron, artist, and viewer, as each is shaped by the others through a network of exchanges. She unravels these exchanges, for example, between gendered critical readings of O’Keeffe’s painting, Stieglitz’s encouragement of these interpretations, and O’Keeffe’s acceptance of such critical readings to advance her reputation (127–33). Like other recent studies, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory discloses that this criticism was socially and culturally constructed, and embedded in its historical moment. Moreover, this book has the effect of reminding readers how embodied formalism continues to define these artists and art-historical interpretations as scholars search for the bodies and sexual identity of these artists in their art.

In building her argument, the author offers original readings of modernist paintings through the lens of embodied formalism—Demuth’s Turkish Bath (1918), Hartley’s Sustained Comedy (1939), and Pollock’s Number 1, 1948, for instance—though the presence of Demuth’s and Hartley’s bodies in these two works poses questions outside the range of Brennan’s study. Several Stieglitz-circle artists painted the male and female nude, some showing the figure merging with nature, as in Marin’s landscapes and seascapes from the 1930s and later. What was the place of such represented bodies in the Stieglitz circle and the embodied formalist discourse? How does the dialectic between embodied formalism and Stieglitz-circle art change in the 1930s? How do these figures and even those in Abstract Expressionism respond to this critical discourse? These questions are meant less as a criticism of Brennan’s book than as a recognition of the significant issues it engages. Placing the body, gender, and sexuality at the center of the Stieglitz circle, Painting Gender, Constructing Theory sounds an original voice in the latest scholarship on early American modernism, one that will undoubtedly open new directions of scholarly inquiry. In writing about “constructing theory,” Brennan has made an important contribution to reconstructing the history of the Stieglitz circle and its place in American modernism.