A timely and expansive survey of a groundbreaking American art movement that overturned aesthetic hierarchies in a riot of color and ornamentation The Pattern and Decoration movement emerged in the 1970s as an embrace of long-dismissed art forms associated with the decorative. Pioneering artists such as Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), Joyce Kozloff (b. 1942), Robert Kushner (b. 1949), and others appropriated patterns, frequently from non-Western decorative arts, to produce intricate, often dizzying or gaudy designs in media ranging from painting, sculpture, and collage to ceramics, installation art, and performance. This dazzling book showcases an astonishing array of works by more than 40 artists from across the United States, examining the movement's defiant adoption of art forms traditionally viewed as feminine, craft-based, or otherwise inferior to fine art. In addition to offering an overview of the Pattern and Decoration movement as it is commonly recognized, this volume considers artists of the period who are not typically associated with the movement. Rethinking the significance of patterns and the decorative in postwar American art, this panoramic view provides new insights into abstraction, feminism, and installation art. Essays explore the movement's feminist methods and values, including Miriam Schapiro's "femmage" practice; its impact on contemporary abstract painting; and its relationship to postmodern architecture and design. Artist biographies, an exhibition history, and reprints of historically significant writings further establish With Pleasure as the most expansive publication on the subject.

By the time of the great Paris Exhibition of 1925, the idea that an interior and its furnishings should form a complete design--a "total look"--dominated the thinking of both designers and their sophisticated clients. In the later 1920s and 1930s, whole studios were established, notably in France and the United States, to serve the needs of a design- and style-conscious middle class intent on showing off its newly refined taste for things modern and exotic: the richly lacquered screen, the tubular steel chair, the vivid geometric carpet. Art Deco Interiors documents this flourishing of design ingenuity in Europe and America. Using contemporary photographs and illustrations of interiors, juxtaposed with modern photographs of individual pieces, it traces the stylistic evolution and dominant motifs of Deco. Patricia Bayer illustrates the triumph of the 1925 exhibition and the establishment of the pure high style of the leading Paris ensembliers, and assesses the tremendous growth of jazzy, Streamline Moderne offshoots in the United States. Major chapters are devoted to large-scale designs for ocean liners, cinemas, theaters, offices, and hotels, and to the revival in the 1970s and 1980s of Deco as a decorative style.