OSKAR KOKOSCHKA COMPLETED The Prometheus triptych in 1950 (Figs.1a–c). In an essay written to accompany its exhibition at the 1952 Venice Biennale, he defined his understanding of the role of the artist: ‘I was an active participant in the First and a passive participant in the Second World War, and I came to recognise that the social task of the artist is to crystallise his vision and experience, to interpret in its widest sense the meaning of existence . . .’. This statement might lead us to expect that the triptych extended the artist’s series of ‘political’ paintings of 1935–45. These works had ‘crystallised [. . .] his experience’ by referring to identifiable political figures and events that had impinged on his own life. They fulfil the artist’s ‘social task’ by expressing his abhorrence of current political developments.

THE COURTAULD GALLERY’S exhibition in 2006 of Oskar Kokoschka’s large-scale painting The Prometheus triptych (Figs.1a–c above) has prompted renewed interest in this important but often overlooked work, which the artist considered to be among his most significant. It has also led to the emergence of a group of some eighty photographs taken by Lee Miller of Kokoschka at work on the triptych at 56 Princes Gate, the London residence of the collector Count Antoine Seilern, who commissioned the canvases for the ceiling of the entrance hall of his house in 1950. The triptych, which consists of a central canvas of The apocalypse, flanked on the right by a dramatic rendering of the punishment of Prometheus and on the left by an image of Hades releasing Persephone from the underworld, was the largest and most ambitious work Kokoschka had ever undertaken. Miller’s photographs offer fascinating insights into Kokoschka’s production of this major painting. More specifically, they capture a crucial stage in the final phase of the work’s development, documenting one of Kokoschka’s most important late changes to the composition of the Hades and Persephone canvas. However, Miller’s photographs are more than simply documentary images. Rather, many of the shots present Kokoschka’s work on the canvases as an important event in its own right, which both artist and photographer must have considered appropriate to the monumental character of the triptych itself. For Kokoschka, Miller, who had produced some of the most powerful and uncompromising images of the Second World War, must have seemed the ideal photographer to capture the final stages of his epic response to the conditions of the post-War world.

FEW WORKS HAVE BORNE such dramatic witness to the vicis situdes of twentieth-century political and cultural history as Oskar Schlemmer’s painting Bauhaustreppe of 1932 (Fig.17). It is the artist’s last major painting, and an extraordinary synthesis of his work as a choreographer, easel- and wall-painter and theoretician, and capped the development of what Schlemmer termed a ‘grand figural style’, a classical, monumental approach to the human form that he had been developing throughout the 1920s. Schlemmer painted Bauhaustreppe in a studio at the Breslau Art Academy in September 1932, shortly before he left for a teaching job in Berlin, a final, short-lived employment before his career fell full victim to Nazi cultural politics. Schlemmer was one of the first artists to suffer persecution when his murals for the Weimar Bauhaus were painted over in October 1930. From the time of his dismissal from the Berlin Academy in 1933 to his death in 1943 he was able intermittently to work as an artist but was also obliged to do manual work that irreparably damaged his health. The last ten years of his life, wrote Max Bill in his obituary, were as if a curtain of silence had descended.

STUART DAVIS HAS long been recognised as one of America’s most accomplished modernist painters. During the years of the Great Depression he was also one of the political left’s most ardent artist-activists. Serving as President of the Artists’ Union, an editor of its journal Art Front, and National Chairman of the American Artists’ Congress Against War and Fascism, he was a tireless supporter of the economic and political rights of artists. But while he adhered to Communist political theory and was insistent that Marxism was ‘the only scientific social viewpoint’, he did not subscribe to orthodox aesthetics of the period and effectively denied that the Party provided any insight into artistic matters. As an artist committed to Modernism, he was unwilling to relinquish the techniques of bourgeois art. This refusal of Stalinist aesthetics, despite his political fellow-travelling, is one of the reasons that his work continues to invite further analysis.

, and National Chairman of the American Artists’ Congress Against War and Fascism, he was a tireless supporter of the economic and political rights of artists. But while he adhered to Communist political theory and was insistent that Marxism was ‘the only scientific social viewpoint’, he did not subscribe to orthodox aesthetics of the period and effectively denied that the Party provided any insight into artistic matters. As an artist committed to Modernism, he was unwilling to relinquish the techniques of bourgeois art. This refusal of Stalinist aesthetics, despite his political fellow-travelling, is one of the reasons that his work continues to invite further analysis.

STUART DAVIS (1892–1964) was born in Philadelphia, and his earliest success came from his paintings of commonplace scenes in New York. After the Armory Show of 1913 introduced him to abstract European styles of art, Davis embraced selected forms of Modernism, and his outspoken support of progressive painting grew during the ensuing years. In the autumn of 1932 he was finishing a mural with flat, simplified forms at Radio City Music Hall, New York, when he was invited to exhibit at the First Biennial of Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In October and November he created American painting using a moderately progressive style: objects and people were rendered in a linear manner, and inconsistent scale was employed. A black-and-white photograph is the only surviving record of the canvas as it appeared in 1932 (Fig.35). Years later, Davis substantially revised the painting (Fig.36), but here discussion is limited to the picture hung at the Whitney Biennial.

WITH THE APPROACH of the centenary of some of Wassily Kandinsky’s most important contributions to painting and art theory – the first Improvisation, for example, dates to 1909, the first Composition to 1910 – there has been a marked increase in scholarship on the artist. Contributing to this is the current exhibition Kandinsky – Absolut. Abstrakt, which originated at the Lenbachhaus, Munich, and is now at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (to 10th August), before going to New York. Closely related to it and important for its evaluation is Kandinsky – Das druckgrafische Werk, which ran concurrently in Munich and is at the Kunstmuseum, Bonn, to 12th July. The two catalogues for these shows, as well as Helmut Friedel’s and Annegret Hoberg’s Kandinsky provide new material and fresh interpre tations of Kandinsky’s life and work.

HEINRICH WOLFFLIN'S Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) begins with the story, derived from Ludwig Richter, of four painters who set out to depict the same landscape at Tivoli, each following nature as closely as possible. Despite their resolve not to deviate from appearances, the result was ‘four totally different pictures’, in styles that reflected the differing personalities of the four artists. In telling this story Wölfflin emphasises not that the objective transcription of nature is impossible, but rather that works of art have their own stylistic and historical reality apart from the appearances they imitate. Seen from a historical distance, Wölfflin comments, the four Tivoli landscapes seem in fact rather similar, in the ‘nazarenisch’ manner. On this basis Wölfflin develops his the ory of the ‘double root of style’, referring on the one hand to the artistic sensibility, seen within a historical context, and on the other to something deeper and more philosophical. For Wölfflin, the style of the ‘drawing of a mere nostril’ expressed individual temperament, and paintings expressed the style of a ‘school’ (or movement), just as they did for Giovanni Morelli or Bernard Berenson, whose studies in connoisseurship appeared in the 1890s. Like many of his contemporaries, Wölfflin also assumed that works of art expressed the style of ‘the country, the race’, and together, these four ‘expressions’ (temperament, school, country, race) constituted one of the ‘double roots of style’. Wölfflin’s important innovation was the definition of the other, second root, to be found in ‘the most general representational forms’ (allgemeinsten Darstellungsformen), which he consistently characterised as ‘optical’. ‘A deeper stratum of concepts may be discovered comprising representation (Darstellung) as such, and it is possible to imagine a developmental history of occidental seeing for which differences of individual and national character are no longer of great significance’. These ‘optical’ forms, Wölfflin says, develop internally, are simply and literally abstract and are never manifest in themselves; they are always ‘bound to a specific expressive content’, and so are separated only with difficulty from the expressions of the first root of style.