How did Americans come to believe that working at home is feasible, productive, and desirable? Easy Living examines how the idea of working within the home was constructed and disseminated in popular culture and mass media during the twentieth century. Through the analysis of national magazines and newspapers, television and film, and marketing and advertising materials from the housing, telecommunications, and office technology industries, Easy Living traces changing concepts about what it meant to work in the home. These ideas reflected larger social, political-economic, and technological trends of the times. Elizabeth A. Patton reveals that the notion of the home as a space that exists solely in the private sphere is a myth, as the social meaning of the home and its market value in relation to the public sphere are intricately linked.

Historically, economists have had very little to say about art: in the latter half of this century, that has begun to change. Difficult issues, like pricing and art valuation, the influence on pricing by what is fashionable in art, and the nature of the auction, have recently been tackled by economists in spite of elusive answers. Economic Engagements with Art suggests that taste and fashion in art need not be mysterious or outside rational discourse, and that they can be studied by economists to the great benefit of the discipline.
This volume, which deals mostly with painting, is divided into three sections that consider the interplay between art and economics from different perspectives. In the first section, Art and Economic Theory, economists clarify the need to construct a framework for understanding the roles of taste and fashion in art valuation. A historical view is considered in a piece about the teacher of Velasquez and artistic adviser to the Inquisition in Seville, who took into account not only market factors, like demand, but also the "truth" and the nobility of the artist’s profession and of the painting itself. Also in this section is an essay on Rousseau’s perspective on the worth of a painting based on its envy value in social circles; other contributions focus on William Stanley Jevons, a nineteenth century British political economist, whose problems with art stemmed from the uniqueness of each work, rendering definitive market and economic terms irrelevant. The second section of the book, Art and Economic Policy, looks at broader policy issues with regard to the historical role of art. Essays consider policy with respect to art exports and imports and federal patronage of the arts during theDepression; Lionel Robbins and the political economy of art; and the interplay among economy, architecture, and politics as shown in certain postwar Hilton hotels. In the final section, The Business of Art, a variety of perspectives are considered: the economics of art in early modern times, discussed in the context of both humanist and scholastic approaches; the pricing of pictures based on a study of the Smith-Reynolds connection; and the relationships between Otto Nuerath, graphic art, and the social order.
The first collaborative and historical treatment of the connection between art and economics, Economic Engagements with Art will appeal to people across, from history and economics to art history.

Contributors. Márcia Balisciano, William J. Barber, Neil de Marchi, Bertil Fridén, Crauford D. Goodwin, Guido Guerzoni, Robert J. Leonard, Harro Maas, Ernest Mathijs, Steven G. Medema, Bert Mosselmans, Zarinés Negrón, Marcia Pointon, Helen Rees, Toon van Houdt, Annabel Wharton, Sara Zablotney

Historically, economists have had very little to say about art: in the latter half of this century, that has begun to change. Difficult issues, like pricing and art valuation, the influence on pricing by what is fashionable in art, and the nature of the auction, have recently been tackled by economists in spite of elusive answers. Economic Engagements with Art suggests that taste and fashion in art need not be mysterious or outside rational discourse, and that they can be studied by economists to the great benefit of the discipline.
This volume, which deals mostly with painting, is divided into three sections that consider the interplay between art and economics from different perspectives. In the first section, Art and Economic Theory, economists clarify the need to construct a framework for understanding the roles of taste and fashion in art valuation. A historical view is considered in a piece about the teacher of Velasquez and artistic adviser to the Inquisition in Seville, who took into account not only market factors, like demand, but also the "truth" and the nobility of the artist’s profession and of the painting itself. Also in this section is an essay on Rousseau’s perspective on the worth of a painting based on its envy value in social circles; other contributions focus on William Stanley Jevons, a nineteenth century British political economist, whose problems with art stemmed from the uniqueness of each work, rendering definitive market and economic terms irrelevant. The second section of the book, Art and Economic Policy, looks at broader policy issues with regard to the historical role of art. Essays consider policy with respect to art exports and imports and federal patronage of the arts during theDepression; Lionel Robbins and the political economy of art; and the interplay among economy, architecture, and politics as shown in certain postwar Hilton hotels. In the final section, The Business of Art, a variety of perspectives are considered: the economics of art in early modern times, discussed in the context of both humanist and scholastic approaches; the pricing of pictures based on a study of the Smith-Reynolds connection; and the relationships between Otto Nuerath, graphic art, and the social order.
The first collaborative and historical treatment of the connection between art and economics, Economic Engagements with Art will appeal to people across, from history and economics to art history.

Contributors. Márcia Balisciano, William J. Barber, Neil de Marchi, Bertil Fridén, Crauford D. Goodwin, Guido Guerzoni, Robert J. Leonard, Harro Maas, Ernest Mathijs, Steven G. Medema, Bert Mosselmans, Zarinés Negrón, Marcia Pointon, Helen Rees, Toon van Houdt, Annabel Wharton, Sara Zablotney

Offering some of Cahun’s writings never before translated into English alongside a wide array of her artworks and those of her contemporaries, this book is a must-have for any fan of this iconic artist, now in paperback.

In the turmoil of the 1920s and ’30s, Claude Cahun challenged gender stereotypes with her powerful photographs, montages, and writings, works that appear to our twenty-first-century eyes as utterly contemporary, or even from the future. She wrote poetry and prose for major French literary magazines, worked in avant-garde theater, and was both comrade of and critical outsider to the Surrealists. Exist Otherwise is the first work in English to the tell the full story of Claude Cahun’s art and life, one that celebrates and makes accessible Cahun’s remarkable vision. 
           
Jennifer L. Shaw embeds Cahun within the exciting social and artistic milieu of Paris between the wars. She examines her relationship with Marcel Moore—Cahun’s stepsister, lover, and life partner—who was a central collaborator helping make some of the most compelling photographs and photomontages of Cahun’s oeuvre, dreamscapes of disassembled portraiture and scenes that simultaneously fascinate and terrify. Shaw follows Cahun into the horrors of World War II and the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey off the coast of Normandy, and she explores the powerful and dangerous ways Cahun resisted it. Reading through her letters and diaries, Shaw brings Cahun’s ideas and feelings to the foreground, offering an intimate look at how she thought about photography, surrealism, the histories of women artists, and queer culture.
           
 

A well-illustrated, holistic overview of how American domestic spaces have changed over four hundred years, Experiencing American Houses encourages readers to think creatively about houses in terms of their function as opposed to their appearance. This captivating volume helps the reader step into the lived experience of the evolving American house: understanding, for example, why a nineteenth-century dining room might include a bed or why the kitchen as we know it did not evolve until the turn of the twentieth century. By carrying her study from the colonial period to the present, Elizabeth Collins Cromley makes the domestic spaces of the past feel like vital precursors to today’s experience.

Beginning with cooking spaces, Cromley examines how multi-use areas consolidated into dedicated rooms for cooking, from fires on an earthen floor to sleek modern spaces with twenty first-century appliances. Next, the author looks at ways social class, income, and local custom framed which kinds of spaces became suitable for socializing and entertaining, and what they should be called: sitting room, drawing room, hall, living room, family room, or parlor. Distinct from cooking spaces, Cromley discusses eating spaces, which morphed from multi-use areas to separate dining rooms and back again. The author covers spaces for sleeping, health, and privacy, as well as circulation—the ways that we move through a house—analyzing the functions of such little-studied features as hallways, back doors, and staircases. Finally, Cromley takes on the evolution of storage, which began mainly because of the need to store and preserve food. Clothing closets grew from oddly shaped afterthoughts to generous walk-ins, while increases in material wealth led to the need for storage outbuildings.

This accessible volume, informed by up-to-date scholarship in vernacular architecture and disciplines far beyond it, provides students and readers necessary context to understand the development of the historic and contemporary houses they encounter.

In the years immediately following World War II, Black Mountain College, an unaccredited school in rural Appalachia, became a vital hub of cultural innovation. Practically every major artistic figure of the mid-twentieth century spent some time there: Merce Cunningham, Ray Johnson, Franz Kline, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Dorothea Rockburne, Aaron Siskind, Cy Twombly—the list goes on and on. Yet scholars have tended to view these artists’ time at the College as little more than prologue, a step on their way to greatness. With The Experimenters, Eva Díaz reveals the importance of Black Mountain College—and especially of three key teachers, Josef Albers, John Cage, and R. Buckminster Fuller—to be much greater than that.

Díaz’s focus is on experimentation. Albers, Cage, and Fuller, she shows, taught new models of art making that favored testing procedures rather than personal expression. These methodologies represented incipient directions for postwar art practice, elements of which would be sampled, and often wholly adopted, by Black Mountain students and subsequent practitioners. The resulting works, which interrelate art and life in a way that imbues these projects with crucial relevance, not only reconfigured the relationships among chance, order, and design—they helped redefine what artistic practice was, and could be, for future generations.

Offering a bold, compelling new angle on some of the most widely studied creative figures of modern times, The Experimenters does nothing less than rewrite the story of art in the mid-twentieth century.