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Martha Rosler made House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home in
protest against the Vietnam War—at a moment when American involvement in
Vietnam had nearly peaked. To make these photomontages, she seamlessly combined
images of the war with advertisements and illustrations of fashionable American
home interiors, many published in the magazine, House Beautiful. By
bringing together images of war and domesticity so that they appear to share
the same space, she references the “living room war,” a phrase coined to
characterize the Vietnam War as the first major military conflict to be
extensively broadcast into people’s homes on television. “The series is
called House Beautiful…because it really is centered on the idea of
domesticity, safety, space, and aesthetic rightness,” she has explained. “But
also Bringing the War Home because I am literally bringing images of the war
into spaces having to do with our domestic life.” Rosler considered these
images to be agitprop, originally disseminating them as photocopied flyers at
anti-war demonstrations.