After the closing of his first art gallery in 1917, photographer Alfred
Stieglitz reemerged in the New York art world in the 1920s. He achieved his
comeback in large part through the innovative means he used to promote himself
and the artists of his inner circle. Stieglitz and a number of well-established
critics drew on period conceptions of sexuality, gender, and cultural identity
to characterize the artists he championed as the fulfillment of a shared vision
of a vital, nonrepressed American art.In Painting Gender, Constructing Theory,
Marcia Brennan examines how Stieglitz and the critics drew on
early-twentieth-century discourses on sex and the psyche, particularly the
theories of Sigmund