@mastersthesis {8104,
	title = {Abstract Passion: Images of Embodiment and Abstraction in the Art and Criticism of the Alfred Stieglitz Circle},
	year = {1997},
	school = {Brown},
	abstract = {The photographer and entrepreneur Alfred Stieglitz faced the decline of his first and pioneering art gallery, "291", in 1917 only to become a reemergent figure in the New York art world during the early 1920{\textquoteright}s. In part, Stieglitz achieved his comeback through the efforts of a group of highly influential art and cultural critics, most notably Paul Rosenfeld and Waldo Frank. If 291 was a more or less experimental forum for a diverse range of projects, the agenda that Stieglitz pursued after its closing was more rigorously strategized. As a result of a tighter promotional focus, Stieglitz and his in-house critics were able to produce and maintain a consolidated identity for their "American" artists, a group which included Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O{\textquoteright}Keeffe, and later, Charles Demuth.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of Stieglitz circle discourses is that the artists{\textquoteright} non-figural works, including landscapes, still lifes, and outright abstractions, were continually described in terms of the sexed and gendered human body. In this study I examine how and why such a conceptual anchor informed Stieglitz circle painting, criticism, and photography from c. 1915 to 1950. In the process, I trace the shifting but surprisingly constant presence of the gendered human subject in American modernist aesthetics over a period of three-and-a-half decades. Once the Stieglitz circle{\textquoteright}s critical rhetoric was fully established, it attracted a great deal of commentary from rival artistic movements. From the early twenties through the forties, the Stieglitz circle engaged in a series of generative if frictional encounters with other leading modernist movements, including New York Dadaism, Regionalism, and Abstract Expressionism. In the final sections of this study I examine the ways in which the Stieglitz circle{\textquoteright}s critical rhetoric was integral to the various counter-constructions which each of these groups undertook of themselves.},
	keywords = {Art of the United States and Canada},
	author = {Brennan, Marcia}
}
