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In Visible Touch

Modernism and Masculinity

In this collection, outstanding historians and theorists explore the representation of heterosexual masculinity embodied in modernist art.

Examining such major European modernists as Cézanne, Caillebotte, Matisse, Wyndham Lewis, and Boccioni, these writings offer a history of how artists sought to shape their sexuality in their work. In turn, the essays also show how the artists were shaped by the historical shifts in the gender order and by the exchanges between sexualities occurring in their social worlds. For example, the piece on Wyndham Lewis shows how he subscribed to an exaggerated masculinism, while the essays on Boccioni and Matisse bring out the efforts by these men to understand feminine sexuality.

In the theoretical essays, Bernard Smith questions modernism itself as a style category. And Richard Shiff and W.J.T. Mitchell trace the consequences for art theory of recognizing the physical presence of modernist artworks and the agency of imagery in our encounter with contemporary art.

258 pages | 83 halftones | 8 x 9-1/2 | © 1997

Art: Art--General Studies

Gender and Sexuality

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Intensity: Modernism’s Phallic Aesthetics by Terry Smith
Ch. 1: Freud’s Cezanne
T. J. Clark
Ch. 2: Masculinity, Muscularity and Modernity in Caillebotte’s Male Figures
Tamar Garb
Ch. 3: Expression, Disfiguration: Matisse, the Female Nude and the Academic Eye
Roger Benjamin
Ch. 4: Mother and Son: Boccioni’s Paintings and Sculpture 1906-1915
Virginia Spate
Ch. 5: The Popular Culture of Kermesse: Lewis, Painting and Performance 1912-13
Lisa Tickner
Ch. 6: Modernity and the Formalesque
Bernard Smith
Ch. 7: Breath of Modernism (Metonymic Drift)
Richard Shiff
Ch. 8: What do Pictures Want? An Idea of Visual Culture
W. J. T. Mitchell
Ch. 9: Gloria Patri: A Conversation about Power, Sexuality and War
Mary Kelly, Terry Smith.
List of Images
Notes on Contributors

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