'Anxiety over his flesh painting': Art and masculinity in the early paintings of George de Forest Brush.

摘要

In 1880, after six years of study in France, George de Forest Brush returned to the United States to establish his career in New York. Over the next ten years, his paintings, representing Native Americans and figures from classical mythology, marked the development of this young artist as an established member of the American art world. This was a world in flux, transformed in the late 1870s by new institutions to foster cosmopolitan tastes and styles that young artists, like Brush, were bringing back to America from their experiences abroad. In his images of men engaged in the production of art and in the appreciation of beauty, Brush expressed his hope for an American art that, rooted in the past, would offer ameliorative benefits for a country in the midst of rapid urban and industrial development.; As a young man at the beginning of his career, Brush also used his art to explore the concerns of American men in the face of societal changes that challenged beliefs in traditional gender definitions. His early images in the decade displayed a youthful, robust energy; but as the decade proceeded and Brush moved from bachelorhood to marriage and fatherhood, his work revealed his personal conflicts and his attempts to achieve a balanced relationship between his involvement with the modern world around him and his antimodernist desire to withdraw to the haven of his art and his family.