Spengler Writing The Decline of the West at His Desk on Top of the Kitchen Table, 1980

In Town’s painting, the pioneering cultural theorist Oswald Spengler sits sublimely elevated above the mundane domestic world that supports him, his head ironically placed under a light bulb that showers him with swastika-like rays. Spengler’s 1918 book The Decline of the West was considered prophetic of Nazism; he argues that autocratic rule is the necessary last stage of Western civilization, though Spengler himself condemned Nazi race theory and demagoguery in the 1930s and was duly censored in Germany. The light bulb and triangular composition of Town’s painting bring to mind the painting Guernica, 1937, by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), another vision of doom.