Overview

How did workers experience cut glass during its cultural heyday? Rather than privilege the stories of factory owners or wealthy consumers, Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life During the Long Gilded Age refracts the medium's history through the labors required to make and maintain these dazzling artifacts as well as popular representations of this work, from demonstrations at world's fairs to images of domestic workers with finished pieces in their charge. Cut glass and the many manifestations of public interest in its labors offered working people, too, occasions for self-reflection and, perhaps, self-realization. Foregrounding their lives, Undercut offers a multifaceted social art history of a once-popular genre of decorative art that cuts across class, gender, and race.

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9781644534205

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Reviews

Joseph Larnerd's Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age offers an innovative and imaginative account of the subjecthood of American cut glass. Eschewing traditional celebratory accounts of the medium, Larnerd pursues a form of human, lived-experience design history in which the main protagonists are the unknown makers, maintainers, and lower-class viewers who experienced mixed feelings about the luxury good. His is an emotional history of material culture. - Edward S. Cooke, Jr., author of Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History (2022) Joseph Larnerd is the most exciting voice to emerge in decorative arts scholarship in a generation. His deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated, and above all, beautifully written study of cut glass is like the subject itself: multifaceted in its implications, crystalline in its clarity. Undercut is a crucial intervention into the field, one that sets a new standard for material culture studies in the 21st century. - Glenn Adamson, author of A Century of Tomorrows How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present (2024)

Joseph Larnerd's Undercut: Cut Glass in Working-Class Life during the Long Gilded Age offers an innovative and imaginative account of the subjecthood of American cut glass. Eschewing traditional celebratory accounts of the medium, Larnerd pursues a form of human, lived-experience design history in which the main protagonists are the unknown makers, maintainers, and lower-class viewers who experienced mixed feelings about the luxury good. His is an emotional history of material culture. --Edward S. Cooke, Jr., author of Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History (2022) (9/15/2025 12:00:00 AM)

Author Information

Joseph Larnerd is an assistant professor of design history in the Department of Art and Art History at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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