Rachel Silveri, "The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism" (U Chicago Press, 2026)
About this episode
Rachel Silveri discusses her book on the integration of art and everyday life in avant-garde Paris.
With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026), Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life, an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw their own everyday lives—their bodies, identities, and relationships—as a type of creative material and a central component to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to integrate art with everyday life, creating an “art of living.” Considering Tristan Tzara’s performances of Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay’s simultaneous fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, Silveri offers a new narrative about how the artists of interwar Paris developed experiential life practices that resisted dominant forms of “lifestyle” and normative discourses surrounding gender, ethnicity, and office work. This book argues that ethical questions of “How should I live?” and “How should I relate to…
More episodes of New Books in Women's History
- Lucy D. Curzon, "Art and Citizenship in Conflict: British Women War Artists, 1939–45" (Manchester UP, 2025)
- Molly M. Brookfield, "Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States" (UNC Press, 2026)
- Anja Foerschner, "Female Art and Agency in Yugoslavia, 1971–2001" (Bloomsbury, 2024)
- Gayle F. Wald, "This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music, and the Long Civil Rights Movement" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
- Nora L. Rubel, "Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book" (Columbia UP, 2026)
- Diana Cucuz, "Winning Women’s Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture in the US and the USSR" (U Toronto Press, 2023)
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the New Books in Women's History podcast page.