Art E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The being of the arts; Goethe as the founder of a new science of aesthetics; Technology and art; At the turn of each new millennium; The task of modern art and architecture; The living walls; The glass windows; Colour on the walls; Form - moving the circle; The seven planetary capitals of the first Goetheanum; The model and the statue 'The Representative of Man'; Colour and faces; Physiognomies.

Leseprobe

ART

Also in this series:

(Practical Applications)

Agriculture

Architecture

Education

Medicine

Religion

Science

Social and Political Science

(Esoteric)

Alchemy

Atlantis

Christian Rozenkreutz

The Druids

The Goddess

The Holy Grail

RUDOLF STEINER

ART

An Introductory Reader

Compiled with an introduction, commentary and notes by Anne Stockton

Sophia Books

All translations revised by Christian von Arnim

Sophia Books An imprint of Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2012

For earlier English publications of individual selections please see Sources

The material by Rudolf Steiner was originally published in German in various volumes of the ‘GA’ (Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized volume is published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach (for further information see Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures)

This edition translated © Rudolf Steiner Press 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 339 4

Cover art by Rudolf Steiner. Cover design by Andrew Morgan Typeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Contents

Introduction by Anne Stockton

PART ONE

1. The Being of the Arts

2. Goethe as the Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics

3. Technology and Art

4. At the Turn of Each New Millennium

PART TWO

5. The Task of Modern Art and Architecture

6. Colour on the Walls

7. Form—Moving the Circle

8. The Seven Planetary Capitals of the First Goetheanum

9. The Model and the Statue ‘The Representative of Man’

10. Colour and Faces

11. Physiognomies

PART THREE

12. The Arts and Their Mission I

13. The Arts and Their Mission II

14. Transformation for Artistic Evolution

15. The Hierarchies and the Rainbow

16. Rainbow Meditation

17. The Being and the Countenance

Notes

Sources

Further Reading

Note Regarding Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures

Introduction

by Anne Stockton

Thank God our time is now!

When wrong comes up to face us everywhere

Never to leave us till we take

The longest stride of soul human beings ever took.

Affairs are now life size,

The enterprise is exploration into God.

It takes so many thousand years to wake

But, will you wake, for pity’s sake?

Christopher Fry1

These words were never truer than now, in our present time. The minutes to midnight are ticking. Have we begun our awakening?

A great challenge is before artists today and art is at a loss. From nothingness, death in the abyss, we must build a new culture! Now we must transform our very material itself and spiritualize it, rather than as in the past, be inspired by the spirit and bring it into matter.

‘Modern’ art began at the end of the 1880s and 90s with Impressionism, then Expressionism. Those gave way to Cubism, then to the Abstract, reacted to by Surrealism, dying into Op- or Pop-art. The twentieth century actually gave us a hundred years of great artists if not great art.

We can think of Cézanne and Van Gogh in painting, Picasso and Matisse, later Kandinsky. There are so many moderns one can only hint at: Brancusi, Barlach, Giacometti, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth in sculpture; Gaudi, Corbusier and the early Bauhaus in architecture; Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham in dance; and Stanislavsky in theatre; Webern pioneering in music. The Futurists in Italy tried to capture movement. These were a few. There were many others and in other arts, trying the new and beginning anew. Many, reduced by poverty of common culture and going it alone, alienated from the waves of fashion, came to a dead end in suicide, drugs, insanity or depravity. Mostly, the effort was desperately sincere and not cynical. ‘Art is the final test of sincerity,’ says Professor Roger Scruton.2 ‘It cannot be faked.’ Nowadays, one can wonder!

Many others were seeking, struggling to make sense of their experience, actually trying to find meaning at that crisis of history, the turn to the twentieth century. They tried in all ways to crash through the barrier of materialism, across the threshold to the spirit, but they stand as lonely pioneers, out of context of the past and unable or unwilling to link in a common culture of the day.

Professor Scruton also observes that ‘Art in our tradition has evolved from two enduring impulses: the aesthetic and the spiritual. Modernism attempted to keep those two impulses united while in Post-Modernism the two impulses are pulled apart when the spiritual is discarded, and only the aesthetic remains.’ Alone, the purely aesthetic is empty.

‘It is necessary to break from the Greek aesthetic,’ Rudolf Steiner said, and artists are trying instinctively to do this—but at what a cost, as they seek to make more connection with today’s ‘reality’. Perhaps this serves only to show how far we have fallen into depravity.

Post-Modern art has found a new polarity in ‘environment’ or ‘happening’ art, or conceptual art. But there is a vacuum nowadays filling with commercialism, technology and blasphemy. The more fantastic it is the more it makes its mark. Or the laws and dictates of the machine take over. A visit to the Tate Modern in London or to the Museum of Modern Art in New York—any contemporary Western art exhibition reveals this. Actually, what now fills the art galleries and museums or takes the fancy of the critics and art dealers is desecration, urine, excrement and dirty beds! Art becomes commercial traffic moving from shock to sensation. Let us hope it will shake us into seeking a new connection to something more redemptive.

Let an outstanding few speak their message: Bridget Riley3 in her deeply thought book The Eye’s Mind explores the problems of the modern artist in an accurate way. Speaking of Mondrian, she says, ‘He attempts to make a universal statement about life—a task on a dimension traditionally only accomplished through the agency of biblical subjects and antique mythology. The fact that this whole sphere of representation was no longer available had been an essential mainspring in the formation of modern art in the nineteenth century. Mondrian had to discover for himself that literary symbolism and personal invention could not make up for this loss. The creation of a common social language does not lie within the scope of an individual, and the lack of such a basis has to be accepted by modern painting.’ Art has moved from ‘our’ experience to ‘my’ experience and self-expression, and needs to find universal experience anew.

Bridget Riley has observed very well the problems of colour, perspective, three and two dimensions, but her answer has been Op-art, so called, which works on the eye and nervous system in a purely physical way. It does not shock and can appear quite beautiful sometimes. But it is very unsettling.

At the other pole, art expressing or using technology and the machine is sterile. A large piece in the Tate Modern uses eight different pistons, which imitate the movement of the lemniscate, that most living of forms. Instead, this is totally repetitive and unfree, leading to no metamorphosis or seed forces of life.

Mark Rothko,4 an artist on the frontier today, was loath to resort to words, but spoke by his works, out of colour. His incommunicable squares of marvellous shades and tones try to speak of the human soul. It was for its neutrality that he used the square, but by that took away the freedom of the colours to express themselves out of their own nature. Other artists reduce themselves to line alone, to spots, to black alone or white on white, reaching for every possible device to be original. To turn back, to repeat the past, was and is impossible, as Riley says—for them and for us. The names could go on indefinitely, but this is to describe a few straws in the wind of today.

While most of the critics and professors have hastened us on our destructive path with their intellectualism as ‘spin doctors’, other voices can be found. Two professors I quote give tribute to Richard Demarco,5 entrepreneur of arts. He is a dynamic visionary and discoverer of Joseph Beuys.6 Joseph Beuys was one of the hopes of Demarco. More social commentator than artist, he turns from art to demonstrate his political sermon. Impressed by the blackboard drawings Rudolf Steiner made to accompany his lectures on spiritual matters, Beuys turns to the blackboard himself—and yet his marks on it lack spirit and remain intellectual enigmas. Though Demarco was not a particular fan of Steiner’s followers, he was impressed by his influence on Beuys and wrote in a letter to me, ‘Now, in this materialistic age, Rudolf Steiner is in need of you. He deserves to be honoured exactly as Rothko is, as a great twentieth-century artist in the mainstream of the great history of ideas which feed the contemporary art world.’

A serious and deep realization comes from the Irish monk Mark Patrick Hederman,7 who describes three kinds of art in his book The Haunted Inkwell: ‘... an art of propaganda, which tries to persuade you of a particular point of view; [...] an art of entertainment, which can be high-brow or low-brow [...] and there is an art of excavation and exploration seeking meaning where scientific words or normal human discourse can no longer be trusted to register the subtlety of what is experienced.’ He is writing about an art in search of Being.

Now, Professor Scruton asks what is meant by ‘spiritual’ and answers his own question, saying that Western art, perhaps all art of the past, has been motivated by a religious end. He does not mean, he says, that art has always been in the service of religion but that it provided ‘a secular vindication of a sacred view of human life’.

The other professor I quote, John Haldane,8 also seeking to support a spiritual art, speaks of its relation to alchemy: ‘The real ambition of the late medieval and Renaissance alchemists was not to convert base metal into gold but to turn the mortal spirit into an immortal soul9 and alchemy’s counterpart, the artistic impulse. Starting with paper, canvas, wood, plastic, metal or whatever else, the artist applies various techniques and transforms mere matter into something of meaning and value. This has the power to transform the spirits of those who view it as well as those who make it.’ Here the situation is pinpointed.

This can help us a bit in defining the spiritual as well as connecting with the role of art today. But Rudolf Steiner means even more than this and is more specific. He sought to awaken humanity to the spiritual and to the etheric,10 as did Goethe,11 the great German poet-scientist. Steiner offers a modern way. He challenges us to lift ourselves out of purely mechanical, physical laws and experience the etheric world of life in our science and art, thus to transform today’s materialism. He begins with our everyday power of thinking.

Rudolf Steiner foresaw this crisis of our new century. He was a seer. That means he was a man of vision, and at the same time he was a practical, modern man. He was ‘clear seeing’. That means with spiritual sight, with ‘clairvoyance’. Clairvoyance is ‘a dime a dozen’ so to speak but it is only an initiate who can put it all together and see the connections in the larger picture. Rudolf Steiner was such an initiate.

In 1919, Rudolf Steiner called the First World War the most terrible war in human history. He called it only a beginning. ‘Everything that remains of the old will have to be reduced to nothingness. The battle which will have to be fought by this or that means and which will follow this war—the battle between Orient and Occident, between Asia, Europe and America—will be the greatest spiritual battle ever waged by mankind. Then outer need will change to soul need and soul vision will be born.’ And he called on our equanimity, courage and trust in an all-wise cosmic guidance.

He was speaking in Basel, Switzerland in 1919, and nearly a century has passed, but his message is more timely than ever. He had been talking since 1910 about a new experience of Christ, which would gradually come to all humanity as a new experience of the Creator Being, the Being of Love, by whatever name he might be known. People have begun to experience this.

From the beginning Rudolf Steiner came with a spiritual message. He showed the need for a new spiritual thinking for modern human beings. He built on Goethe’s science of life, a world of ‘etheric’ forces and archetypes; a world of life enlivening the physical, mineral world. He emphasized the importance of this in order to understand and to prepare for that event to come, a turning-point in time towards the spiritual. This event, now and in the centuries to come, will be the return of the Christ promised in the Bible as coming not again in the physical, nor in the flesh, but ‘in the clouds’, in the etheric! Experiencing this will lead us again to a wholeness of cosmos, physical-spiritual, sensible-supersensible.

What has that to do with art? Everything! Steiner’s lectures on the arts published here show the relation of art, science and religion, and how art can become a discipline, a path to the spirit. It is an education of the soul to this realm of the etheric. It is also healing. I would like to point to the rainbow as a spiritual, an etheric, phenomenon visible in the physical world. After-images of colours are also a spiritual experience we may have with our senses. The rainbow is not only a promise, but also an archetypal experience of seven colours pointing to seven tones and seven forms manifest in planetary evolution. This is the message of the Goetheanum building, the ‘complete art work’, in Dornach, Switzerland.

Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual understanding—and specific suggestions—in meeting modern problems is revealed in the scope of his works. It is found in his books, in six thousand lectures, and in schools, farming and agriculture, healing centres and in the artistic heritage he has left us. It is modern, even though he was born in 1861 and died, prematurely it would seem, in 1925. Study of his works, if not immediately understandable, still show him to be waiting for us in the future.

He shows us in many writings a picture of the human being12 as made up of: a physical, or mineral, body; a life or etheric body in common with the plants; a feeling life or astral body; and the ego unique to each human being. The higher ego is the transformation of the egotistical me to the I AM, as the divine ego in each individual. Likewise, around us we may see the kingdoms of nature, the dead mineral world, the living world of plants, the feeling animals and the deeds, the destinies, of the human ego.

He describes history as a path of human evolution in its relation to spiritual development, and sees art as a record of the footprints on the way. We learn how humanity has travelled from a unity of one whole spiritual world—our consciousness becoming ever more divided into I and world. The unity of human experience begins to divide into thinking, feeling and willing and into expressions of their activities as science, art and religion. What was once a spiritual fullness becomes emptier and emptier.

Great rhythms in the history of art swing between experience of the soul, inward in Egyptian culture, and turned outward to experiences of nature as in Greece. Ancient, medieval and Renaissance, Romantic and Classical, Impressionism and Expressionism—these polar swings become more compressed and briefer, but they spring from the spiritual experience of their time. Over the centuries of human development such spiritual experience became lost. Art became more and more secular.

In the following pages, Steiner is offering life-giving substance as a starting-point for art into the future. He lifts art up to a reconnection with the spiritual, with creative Being. This leads to a new moral—not moralistic—content through a reality of meaning. As aesthetics was shorn of spirituality, so ethics fell short of morality.

Steiner speaks of that old tempter Lucifer,13 ‘interested to isolate the moral out of the world’s image, because its significant active force prepares the seed for future lives’. One must think of art as beauty reconnecting itself with truth.

To painters he said, enter the world of colour,14 ‘living, weaving, moving’ colour. It is the soul of the world. Between the static spirit-dictated icon and the soul-imbued Madonna—get up and move to new life! He issued a similar call of renewal to all arts in terms of their own language and medium, as colour is a language for painters.

This is not an easy road for artists, nor an instant one. I hold a letter from Gerard Wagner,15 distinguished painter of uncompromising integrity and lifelong dedication to painting and Rudolf Steiner’s impulse for it. To a questioning ambitious artist with seven years of study and great goals—‘up to the moon’ Wagner said—he answered, ‘but we haven’t yet begun!’ adding ‘and I include myself.’ All this is something for the future, and of immense importance for the whole of earth life.

To discover the secret of life, Rudolf Steiner said: ‘Study rhythm!’ This element leads us away from the dead, physical and mechanical into the realm of creative life. The etheric life forces—Bildekräfte in Goethe’s German—are immensely powerful. Nothing wishy-washy! ‘Observe the path as you go out,’ a scientist admonished us in a lecture on the etheric. Sure enough the concrete path, six inches thick, had been broken open by one spear of stem and a few leaves! Our science and our art need desperately to penetrate this life realm and thus give birth to a new vital art and culture.

Rudolf Steiner had a deep insight into the specific nature of each of the arts. This too shows itself in these lectures. He was working towards a relationship between and new unity of all the arts. He achieved this ideal in his great building, the first Goetheanum. It was known as the House of the Word. Throughout the First World War, artists of all the opposing nations worked on this building harmoniously. It was nearly completed in 1923 when, on New Year’s Eve, it went up in flames through arson, like the famous temple of Ephesus. This tragedy robbed Steiner of his life forces and our world, especially the Western world, of a visible inspiration, a way forward for the arts and evolution itself.

There is now something totally new in the second Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. Based on a model created by Steiner in a new style in concrete, it has been finished with original and transformed forms and colours inside. It may not be the same but it can inspire us still to similar purposes. Now Steiner is gone and we are on our own. In the following pages we turn to his vision to lead us on, to learn about ‘building out of nothingness’ and ‘speaking to the stars!’

The stars spoke once to man.

It is world destiny

That they are silent now.

To be aware of the silence

Can become pain for earthly man.

But in the deepening silence

There grows and ripens

What man speaks to the stars.

To become aware of the speaking

Can become strength for spirit-man.

Rudolf Steiner

PART ONE

1. The Being of the Arts

Art is working with magic, and bridges the sense and supersensible worlds. It will lead us across the threshold and therefore it becomes increasingly necessary to realize what we are about.

The artist is reaching for ‘something more’ and the first key is enthusiasm and wonder at the world, leading to reverence and then devotion—a path. Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks everywhere in his writings of enthusiasm and Steiner demonstrates in this tale how this key will reveal the world to us, the essence of each art in its meeting with this world and its source of life, as well as its borderlines.

We need to meditate on these possibilities and they will show us how we may relate to the different arts.

Let there be spread out before us a wide plain, covered with snow; streams and lakes here and there, frozen over. Partly frozen too, a seashore not far away, with floating icebergs; some scattered bushes and low trees covered with snow and icicles. It is evening. The sun has already gone down, leaving a golden glow in the sky. Close by stand the figures of two women. And from the sunset a messenger is born, sent forth from the worlds of spirit. He approaches the two women and listens attentively to what they have to say about their innermost feelings and experiences. One of them, standing there, presses her arms to her body; she shrinks into herself and says: ‘I am cold!’

The other woman gazes across the snow-covered plain, and across the frozen waters and at the icicles hanging from the trees. Words come from her lips as she utterly forgets her own feelings, forgets the cold that the physical landscape is making her endure: ‘How beautiful everything is!’ Warmth pours into her heart, for she has forgotten what she might feel under the influence of the physical cold. She is moved to the depths of her being by the solemn beauty of the frozen landscape.

The twilight deepens and the last red fades from the sky. The two women fall into a deep sleep. The woman who had felt the cold so intensely in her own body sinks into a sleep that could almost bring about her death. The other woman falls into a sleep in which there can be seen the consequences of her feeling, expressed in those words ‘How beautiful everything is!’ Through her sleep, her limbs are warmed, her being remains fresh. As she was falling asleep, this woman heard the words of the youthful messenger who had been born out of the sunset, ‘You are Art.’ She brought into her sleep the results of her experience, her impressions of the landscape described earlier. A kind of dream mingled with her sleep—and yet it was no dream, it had a certain reality, a quite special reality; only its form was like a dream. It disclosed a reality which her soul could not easily have approached before. What this woman experienced was no dream, only the likeness of a dream—what she experienced can be called astral imagination. The expression of that experience can only be clothed in words which describe the pictures by which imaginative knowledge speaks. The soul of this woman knew at this moment that what the youth had meant when he said ‘You are Art’ could only be described in any real, intimate way by using pictures taken from imaginative knowledge. So let the experiences of this woman be clothed in words belonging to imaginative knowledge.

As her inner sense awoke and she could distinguish something, she perceived a remarkable form—a form utterly different from what ordinary knowledge might picture as that of a spiritual being. This form was poor in any quality reminiscent of the physical world. The form recalled the physical world only in so far as it presented three interpenetrating circles—three circles standing at right angles to one another—as if one were horizontal, another vertical, and the third reaching from right to left. What flowed through these circles could be perceived, but was not anything that recalled an impression of the physical senses; it was reminiscent rather of something purely of the nature of soul, only to be compared with the soul’s sensations and feelings. Something streamed from this form that can only be described as like a reserved, intimate sorrow, sorrow that had a definite cause. When the soul of the woman saw this, she resolved to ask, ‘What is the cause of your sorrow?’

The figure responded: ‘Oh, I have reason to show this mood for I spring from a high spiritual origin. As I appear to you, I appear like the human soul. But you must go high in the realms of the hierarchies if you wish to discover my origin. I have descended hither from higher realms of existence. But human beings, who live on the other side of existence, in the physical world in which at this moment we are not, these human beings have torn from me the last of my offspring. They have taken from me the last being that originated from me and made it their own, and they have chained him to something like a rock after making him as small as possible.’

And the woman made the effort to ask: ‘Who are you really? I can only describe things with the words that I remember from life on the physical plane. How can you make your being comprehensible to me—and the nature of your offspring, chained by human beings?’

‘Over there in the physical world human beings refer to me as one of the senses, a quite small sense organ. They call me the sense of balance, which has become quite small and consists of three incomplete circles which are fixed into the ear. That is the last of my offspring. They have carried him over into their world, and they have taken from him what he possessed here, which made it possible for him to be free. Each of the circles they have torn, and fastened to a foundation. Here, as you see me I am not fettered, here I reveal in myself complete circles in every direction. This is my true form as you see it!’

Once more the soul of the woman was able to ask: ‘How can I help you?’

The spiritual form replied: ‘You can help me only by uniting your soul with mine, so that you carry over into me here all that human beings experience over there through the sense of balance. Then you will grow into me; then you will grow as great as I am. You will liberate your sense of balance and raise yourself—spiritually free—above the enchainment to earth!’

The soul of the woman did this. She united herself with the spirit form, there in the world beyond. And as she became one with it she felt that she must perform something. She put one foot before the other, transforming stillness into movement and transformed movement into the rhythmic performance of a dance, which she completed.

‘You have transformed me,’ the spirit form said. ‘Now I have become what is only possible for me through you, if you act as you have just done. I have become part of you; I have taken a form of which human beings can have only a dim feeling. I have become the art of dance. Because you wished to remain a soul and did not unite with physical matter, you could liberate me. At the same time, by following one step with another, you led me up to the hierarchies to whom I belong, the Spirits of Movement; and you led me to the Spirits of Form by completing the dance. But now you must go no further; if you were to make even a single step further than you did for me, everything you have done would be in vain. For it is the Spirits of Form who have had to bring about everything in the course of earthly evolution. If you were to encroach on the task of the Spirits of Form you would destroy again everything that you have just accomplished: for you would of necessity fall into that region of the astral world known as “burning desire” to those who, over yonder, bring tidings of spiritual realms.

‘Your spiritual dance would be changed into something arising from wild desire, as happens in dance today, because human beings have scant knowledge of me. But if you remain faithful to what you have now achieved, you will create through the form of your dance and, by bringing it to completion, an image of those mighty dances performed in the heavenly spaces by planets and suns to make possible the physical world of the senses!’

The soul of the woman continued to live on in this state, and another spiritual form approached her—again very different from what human beings picture as a spiritual being when they use an understanding based on the physical senses. A form stood before her, not possessing three dimensions, but complete in one plane. This form had a peculiar quality. Although it was only on a single plane the soul of the woman in her imaginative condition could see it from both sides at once. From one side or from the other, this form revealed itself in two utterly different ways.