ABSTRACT
The essays included in this and the following section were written during the last decade of Appia’s life. They were probably meant to form the greater part of a volume that Appia himself intended to publish, but never did. In a letter to Craig at the end of the war in November 1918, Appia announced his forthcoming book, The Work of Living Art, and also mentioned plans for a volume of essays and prefaces. Several years later he referred to it again, as a volume ‘where the reader will find practical ideas and social practice’ (Beacham 1988: 286). In 1926 he wrote a ‘Preface to the edition of my essays in one volume’, in which he referred to ‘the New Presence’ as providing the ‘touchstone’ for these essays. Their common theme was to be the awareness of ‘Living Art’ and the consequences this would have on diverse forms of aesthetic expression: ‘[The New Presence] implies the giving of oneself and thereby demands an attitude … it will ignore the barriers with which, unfortunately, we surround our personality, for it demonstrates the common humanity in each of our gestures, our emotions, and our thoughts’ (Appia 1989: 171).
