Colour E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

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

Seitenzahl: 355

Beschreibung

Building on the achievements of Goethe in his Theory of Colour, Rudolf Steiner shows how colour affects us in many areas of life, including our health, our sense of well-being, and our feelings. Distinguishing between 'image' and 'lustre' colours, he lays the foundation, based on his spiritual-scientific research, for a practical technique of working with colour that leads to a new direction in artistic creativity. His many penetrating remarks on some of the great painters of the past are supplemented by a deep concern to see a cultural, spiritual renewal emerge in the present time. 'If you realize', he states, 'that art always has a relation to the spirit, you will understand that both in creating and appreciating it, art is something through which one enters the spiritual world.' This volume is the most comprehensive compilation of Rudolf Steiner's insights into the nature of colour, painting and artistic creation. It is an invaluable source of reference and study not only for artists and therapists but for anyone interested in gaining an appreciation of art as a revelation of spiritual realities.

Leseprobe

RUDOLF STEINER (1861-1925) called his spiritual philosophy ‘anthroposophy’, meaning ‘wisdom of the human being’. As a highly developed seer, he based his work on direct knowledge and perception of spiritual dimensions. He initiated a modern and universal ‘science of spirit’, accessible to anyone willing to exercise clear and unprejudiced thinking.

From his spiritual investigations Steiner provided suggestions for the renewal of many activities, including education (both general and special), agriculture, medicine, economics, architecture, science, philosophy, religion and the arts. Today there are thousands of schools, clinics, farms and other organizations involved in practical work based on his principles. His many published works feature his research into the spiritual nature of the human being, the evolution of the world and humanity, and methods of personal development. Steiner wrote some 30 books and delivered over 6,000 lectures across Europe. In 1924 he founded the General Anthroposophical Society, which today has branches throughout the world.

COLOUR

Three lectures given in Dornach6 to 8 May 1921with nine supplementarylectures given on various occasions

RUDOLF STEINER

Translated by John Salterand Pauline Wehrle

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

Translated by John Salter (lectures 1 to 3)and Pauline Wehrle (lectures 4 to 12)

Rudolf Steiner PressHillside House, The SquareForest Row, East Sussex RH18 5ES

(The first three lectures were previously published as Colour in 1982)

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Originally published in German under the title Das Wesen der Farben(volume 291 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) byRudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized translation published bykind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

Translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 1992

The moral rights of the translators have been asserted under the Copyright,Designs and Patens Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the priorpermission of the publishers

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

ISBN 978 1 85584 275 5

Cover art: Rudolf SteinerCover design: Andrew MorganTypeset by DP Photosetting, Aylesbury, Bucks.

Contents

Foreword

Synopses

PART ONE: THE NATURE OF COLOURThe basis for a spiritual-scientific understanding of colour for artists

Lecture One   Dornach, 6 May 1921COLOUR EXPERIENCE—IMAGE COLOURS

Lecture Two   Dornach, 7 May 1921LUSTRE AND IMAGE

Lecture Three   Dornach, 8 May 1921COLOUR IN MATTER—PAINTING OUT OF COLOUR

PART TWO: SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURES FROM OTHER CYCLES

Lecture Four   Dornach, 26 July 1914THE CREATIVE WORLD OF COLOUR

Lecture Five   Dornach, 1 January 1915MORAL EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLDS OF COLOUR AND TONE

Lecture Six   Dornach, 5 December 1920LIGHT AND DARKNESS—TWO WORLD ENTITIES

Lecture Seven   Dornach, 10 December 1920HUMAN LIFE IN THE REALMS OF LIGHT AND WEIGHT

Lecture Eight   Dornach, 21 February 1923THE TWO FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF COLOUR THEORY IN SUNRISE AND SUNSET AND THE BLUE SKY. HEALTH AND ILLNESS IN RELATION TO THE THEORY OF COLOUR

Lecture Nine   Dornach, 2 June 1923FROM SPACE PERSPECTIVE TO COLOUR PERSPECTIVE

Lecture Ten   Dornach, 9 June 1923SPIRIT AND NON-SPIRIT IN PAINTING-TITIAN'S ASCENSION OF MARY

Lecture Eleven   Dornach, 29 July 1923MEASURE, NUMBER AND WEIGHT-WEIGHTLESS COLOUR ESSENTIAL FOR NEW DIRECTION IN PAINTING

Lecture Twelve   Dornach, 4 January 1924THE HIERARCHIES AND THE NATURE OF THE RAINBOW

References

Notes

Foreword

The core of this volume is formed by the short course of three lectures held on 6, 7, 8 May as the basis for a spiritual-scientific understanding of colour for artists.

What Rudolf Steiner conveys in these lectures given in 1921 is the fruit of his efforts to arrive at an understanding of colour, which spanned four decades.

A close connection to the world of colour can be traced through the whole of Rudolf Steiner’s life’s work, and this fact becomes particularly poignant when we realize that it was Goethe’s Theory of Colour that was the starting-point for this life’s work.

When Steiner was only 21, his well-founded knowledge of the colour theories both of Goethe and of conventional physics persuaded his friend and teacher, Karl Julius Schröer, then a well-known Goethe scholar, to suggest that he should be chosen to edit Goethe’s scientific writings for the new Kürschner Edition of Goethe’s works to be published in the 1880s. When the first volume, the morphological writings, appeared in 1884 it was immediately recognized by the experts of the day that Rudolf Steiner had comprehended Goethe’s central importance in relation to the science of the organic. In his Introduction he demonstrated that Goethe had found the fundamental principles of organic science: ‘The processes in the starry heavens were observed long before Kepler and Copernicus, but they discovered the laws. The kingdom of organic nature was observed long before Goethe, but he discovered its laws. Goethe is the Copernicus and Kepler of the organic world.’

Some years later Rudolf Steiner was also called to collaborate on the edition of Goethe’s works to be published in Weimar, where he consequently lived from 1890 to 1897. At the turn of the year 1890-91, just after he had moved from Vienna to Weimar and exactly one hundred years after Goethe had commenced his studies on colour, the volume on the Theory of Colour edited by Steiner appeared in the Kürschner Edition. This contained a fundamental Introduction and nearly 1,500 longer or shorter comments. In the Introduction Steiner wrote: ‘It would not, of course, occur to me to attempt a defence of all the details of Goethe’s colour theory. It is the principle that I want to see maintained. But neither is it my task here to derive from his principles all the phenomena of the colour theory that were still unknown in Goethe’s day. Such a task could only be achieved if I should one day be blessed with sufficient leisure and means to write a Goethean theory of colour that could do justice to the modern advances of natural science. I should regard such a possibility as one of the most gratifying of life’s tasks.’

Rudolf Steiner was never to write such a theory of colour. Instead, however, he gave in his lectures and colour sketches an abundance of suggestions that taken together could furnish the foundation for an entirely modern work on colour–possibly far exceeding any plan he might have had for a book.

After the publication in 1897 in the Kürschner Edition of the volume Materials for a history of the colour theory, Rudolf Steiner’s period in Weimar came to an end. There followed from 1902 onwards the step from colour in the physical world to colour in the world of soul and spirit. This took place side by side with the beginning of Rudolf Steiner’s public advocacy of anthroposophy. In his exposition of the path of spiritual-scientific development in his books Theosophy and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, he began to describe the auric colours as they are seen with spiritual perception, shining with their own light.

A few years later came the first practical steps in finding new ways of painting that could do justice to the artistic representation of spiritual mysteries. In the first Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation (1910), the artist Johannes Thomasius paints in a way that lets the ‘form’ appear as ‘the work of the colours’. Later, Rudolf Steiner returned again and again to this expectation and expression of the need to paint out of the colours, out of the inherent qualities of the colours. In the following year he himself painted his first picture in this way for the easel of Johannes Thomasius in the second Mystery Drama, The Soul’s Probation. The painter in the play says of this picture:

Then in the gentle ether-red of spirit worlds

I tried to densify what is invisible,

by sensing how the colours nurse a longing

to see themselves in souls, transfigured into spirit.

(trans. Ruth and Hans Pusch)

During the work on the first production of this play the actor playing the part of Thomasius asked Rudolf Steiner about the meaning of such a picture. Having hitherto only drawn and sketched, he now took up his brush and produced a tempera, a painted work of art that signified the start of the new style: the form is to arise out of the work of the colours.

The First Goetheanum was erected on the hill in Dornach (1913-1922/23) to house the Mystery Plays. A group of artists using Rudolf Steiner’s sketches and colour indications painted the two cupolas with plant colours. In the lecture about the creative world of colour, which Rudolf Steiner gave to the artists on 26 July 1914, he began drawing their attention to the need for experiencing the moral qualities of colour in order to reach their real inner nature. The new task was to try and find the artistic method for painting ‘auric colours shining in their own light’. Lecturing on the theme of the Goetheanum building in Dornach on 21 October 1917 Rudolf Steiner indicated that this new artistic approach has to be looked for where it corresponds to a certain extent with the human aura. And he states even more emphatically in the lecture held in Berlin on 3 July 1918, ‘When we paint the spiritual content of the world we are not dealing with figures illuminated by a source of light, but with figures shining with their own light.’ This required an entirely different artistic approach. If you paint a person’s aura, for instance, you do not paint the light and shadow produced by the source of light shining on the object, as you would if you were painting a physical form. An aura is an object that shines with its own light, therefore the whole character of painting is entirely different (GA 181). However devoted the artists were to their task they found that their very naturalistic training made it difficult for them to do justice to these intentions. Therefore, at their request, Rudolf Steiner himself worked on the painting in the small cupola from 1917/18 until October 1919. This uniquely great work of imaginative art, ‘the painting of spiritual mysteries from out of the inner nature of colour and of light and dark’ (lecture on 17 January 1917 [GA 292]) was destroyed by fire on New Year’s Eve 1922/23.

In the late autumn of 1919, shortly after the completion of the cupola paintings, the teachers of the Independent Waldorf School, which had just been founded in Stuttgart, asked Rudolf Steiner to give them lectures on the phenomena of light and heat to help them enliven their physics teaching. He thus held two courses on spiritual-scientific impulses for the development of physics: the Light Course given around the turn of the year 1919/20, and the Heat Course in March 1920 (GA 321). In both these courses Rudolf Steiner began indicating further steps in the development of an exact science of the theory of colour. He hoped in those days that these beginnings would be taken up by trained anthroposophical scientists and proved by experiment. On 24 February 1923 he told the specialists: ‘On the basis of this course a proper theory of heat can be written and a proper optics on the theory of light. Then the physicists will see that it is possible to treat such subjects in an anthroposophical way ... that a theory of heat and optics can be written anthroposophically on the basis of these principles. I have made myself perfectly clear.’

Soon after these two courses were given, a scientific Research Institute was founded in Stuttgart where it was hoped to have a department working on similar lines undertaking new tests for producing plant colours. However, this Research Institute became a victim of the severe economic crisis of the times, and it had to close down actually during Rudolf Steiner’s own lifetime.

In January 1920 Rudolf Steiner began giving lantern slide lectures on the ideas behind the building of the First Goetheanum and also on his own artistic endeavours in the small cupola. In response to requests from the other painters working in the Goetheanum at the time, Rudolf Steiner gave three lectures in May 1921 published under the title Colour. Proceeding from Goethe’s theory, which presupposes a single source for science and for art, Rudolf Steiner showed his listeners how to look at colours in a way that raised not only the theory but also practical technique into the realm of art. This way of knowing had also given rise to Goethe’s thoughts on metamorphosis, thoughts which Rudolf Steiner held to be one of the greatest and most significant phenomena of recent intellectual life and which he so profoundly carried further, enabling the forms and colours of the First Goetheanum and also of eurythmy to unfold a new artistic style. Especially in eurythmy, the new art of movement in which every gesture is either light or dark and every mood of soul or music is felt to be coloured, was born an experience of the laws and subtleties of colour metamorphosis.

Those three lectures in Colour are permeated by the processes of metamorphosis right down to the subtle suggestions of painting technique. In them is introduced the distinction between image and lustre colours, both entirely new concepts in the theory of colour. Observation of the differentiated colour qualities in the kingdoms of mineral, plant, animal and man, and also the metamorphosis of lustre into image and image into lustre colours, give the painter the basis on which to develop a painting technique in which the colour processes correspond to the kingdoms of nature.

Colour also deals with the significant question as to why matter appears coloured. Goethe did not really deal with this in his Theory of Colour ‘out of a certain intellectual honesty because he realized that with the means at his disposal he could not get to the heart of the problem: how is colour attached to solid matter?’ And Rudolf Steiner felt that this question was really left unanswered also by the ‘customary knowledge of the time’. It is a question, he says, which is ‘highly relevant to art and painting’.

He demonstrates how anthroposophical spiritual research could answer this question today because it recognizes the links between earthly existence and the cosmic forces of creation and can show how the different stellar forces such as those of sun and moon bring about earthly colouring.

The following year, 1922, the artist Henni Geek, who gave painting courses at the Goetheanum, asked Rudolf Steiner for a series of painting exercises. His 23 painting exercises given between 1922 and 1924 were in response to this.

Eight further pastel sketches arose in the same period, for painting lessons at the Goetheanum Continuation School–later on called the Friedwart School.

There are also lectures on Colour from this period, particularly in 1923. These include the basis of colour therapy, colour perspective, beauty and ugliness, and the concepts of measure, number and weight in painting. The lecture on 4 January 1924 deals with the world of the hierarchies and the nature of the rainbow.

In Rudolf Steiner’s last year of activity he painted five more aquarelles which were shown on the programmes for eurythmy performances. As these are not sketches, but paintings, they give us a direct impression of form arising out of the flow of colour, through tone, movement and balance. We see how the ‘form’ can be the ‘work of colour’.

Most of the aquarelles and other coloured sketches are available in coloured reproduction in their original format in the complete German edition of the works of Rudolf Steiner.

Synopses

PART ONE:THE NATURE OF COLOUR

The basis for a spiritual-scientific understanding of colour for artists

COLOUR EXPERIENCE—IMAGE COLOURSDornach, 6 May 1921

To arrive at an understanding of colour it is necessary to penetrate through to the being of the colours themselves and to bring the contemplation of colour into one’s feeling life. The direct experience of colour illustrated using the example of a green in relation to red, peach-blossom and blue. Colour in its true objectivity: the green of the plant world as the dead image of Life; the peach-blossom of the human skin as the living image of the Soul; white or light as the soul image of the Spirit; black or darkness as the spiritual image of Death. The arrangement of the colours black, green, peach-blossom and white in a circle: the ascent from death through life to the soul and spirit.

LUSTRE AND IMAGEDornach, 7 May 1921

The image quality of the colours white, black, green and peach-blossom. Distinguishing between the shadowy and the radiant. How green and peach-blossom come about. The lustrous quality of yellow, blue and red. Black, white, green and peach-blossom are in the broadest sense shadow colours; yellow, blue and red are modifications of radiance. Image and lustre colours in the spectrum. Forming a circle of the colour spectrum; yellow as the lustre of the spirit, blue as the lustre of the soul, and red as the lustre of life. Comparison of the image colours with the still pictures of the zodiac; the lustre colours with the moving planets. The importance of this understanding of colour for the artist. The golden backgrounds of early paintings. Colour uplifts the human being from the material into the spiritual.

COLOUR IN MATTER-PAINTING OUT OF COLOURDornach, 8 may 1921

The great riddle: how does matter become coloured? The relationship of the green in plants (image) to the moon, of their other colours (lustre) to the sun. Painting minerals, plants, animals and human beings in the light of the distinction between lustre, lustre-image, image-lustre, image. Early painters did not know the ‘lustres’, only the ‘images’, hence no landscapes yet. Painting out of colour. The dialogue of the soul with colour. Colour an inseparable unity with ego and astral body. The contemplation of colour in the soul as a living extension of Goetheanism.

PART TWO:SUPPLEMENTARY LECTURES FROM OTHER CYCLES

THE CREATIVE WORLD OF COLOURDornach, 26 July 1914

The human being’s relationship to colour. Man’s ascent out of the flowing sea of colour to clear self-awareness. The animal soul and the flowing sea of colour. The future path to the flowing sea of colour in connection with the spiritualization of man’s astral body. Living experiences of colour: red and blue as approaching and withdrawing; form and colour; stillness and movement. The hidden play of colour in the human organism. The future task of art: to delve once more into the life of the elements. The Goetheanum a beginning in this direction.

MORAL EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLDS OF COLOUR AND TONE AS A PREPARATION FOR ARTISTIC CREATIONDornach, 1 January 1915

The path to a new artistry. The moral-spiritual experience of colours and tones. The colours red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Knowledge of the inner nature of colour as a preparation for artistic creation. Form taking its shape out of colour. The creative activity of the Spirits of Form, the Elohim. The deepening and enlivening of human soul-life through the world of tone: the tonic, second, third, fourth and fifth. The struggle to achieve a consciousness of the connection of the human being with the leading divine-spiritual powers.

LIGHT AND DARKNESS—TWO WORLD ENTITIESDornach, 5 December 1920

Hegel and Schopenhauer. Thought as the metamorphosis of the life of will in the limbs of the previous incarnation. The experience of thought as light in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. The human head and the cosmos. The light in the cosmos seen from the outside is thought; the human head: inwardly thought which is outwardly visible to clairvoyant perception as light. A world is continually dying away in thought in light: radiant beauty. Clairvoyant experience of the will as matter, darkness: the future arises in darkness. The warm side of the spectrum (red) connected with the past, the chemical side (blue) with the future.

HUMAN LIFE IN THE REALMS OF LIGHT AND WEIGHTDornach, 10 December 1920

The connection between nature and the morality of the soul-life. The gulf between the purely scientific and the religious world view. Spiritual science as a bridge between the physical and the moral world view. The world of light (i.e. of all sense-perceptions) as the dying world of thought from a distant past originating in moral processes. Present moral impulses as a world of darkness penetrated by the light. The transformation of the seeds of will back into a world of light. Moral world order becomes the physical world order of the future. Life in lightness, in light and in heaviness, in darkness. The effects of lightness and heaviness when passing through the different planetary spheres between death and rebirth. Imbuing the physical with morality by the spiritualization of concepts.

THE TWO FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF COLOUR THEORY IN SUNRISE AND SUNSET AND THE BLUE SKY. HEALTH AND ILLNESS IN RELATION TO THE THEORY OF COLOURDornach, 21 February 1923

The effect of colours on the human organism. The interaction of blood as organ of life and nerve as organ of consciousness in the human eye. Sunrise and sunset (light seen through darkness: red) and the blue of the sky (darkness seen through light: blue). Degenerative and regenerative processes in blood and nerve in response to colour perception. Making paints: red with carbon, blue with oxygen; yellow with blossoms and blue with roots. Goethe’s theory of colour as a defence of the truth against Newton’s. Understanding health and illness in connection with the principles of colour. How ancient nomadic tribes acquired their knowledge of the stars.

FROM SPACE PERSPECTIVE TO COLOUR PERSPECTIVEDornach, 2 June 1923

The nature of art. Painting. The deeper understanding of colour was lost in the fifth epoch and became a falsified, plastic one (naturalism). The first material of the painter is, however, the surface. The necessary development of linear spatial perspective must be overcome and revert to colour perspective. Colour is essentially spiritual. Colour in the mineral world: the colours of precious stones. The two-dimensional character of painting. The one-dimensional character of the musical arts. Apollo’s lyre.

SPIRIT AND NON-SPIRIT IN PAINTING—TITIAN’S ASCENSION OF MARYDornach, 9 June 1923

Beauty as a shining, self-revealing quality, ugliness as that which does not shine and conceals its true nature. Metals and colours. Colour, light and light/dark. Palette colours and liquid colours. Titian’s Ascension of Mary. Drawing and painting. Goethe’s trinity: wisdom, radiance and might. Impressionism and expressionism. Early church frescoes. Modern exhibitions.

MEASURE, NUMBER AND WEIGHT—WEIGHTLESS COLOUR ESSENTIAL FOR NEW DIRECTION IN PAINTINGDornach, 29 July 1923

Measure, number, weight. Truth, beauty, goodness. Beauty in art. Chaos and cosmos as interchangeable terms. The gold background in antique art. Icons and madonnas. Cimabue, Giotto, Raphael and the Renaissance. Need to strive towards an experience of colour as an element in its own right, to free it from weight. The programmes painted for the artistic performances at the Goetheanum should attempt this.

THE HIERARCHIES AND THE NATURE OF THE RAINBOWDornach, 4 January 1924

The activity of the spiritual hierarchies in the Earth’s Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions in relation to the genesis of darkness, light and colour. Imaginative contemplation of the rainbow: its formation by elemental beings. Man as the Fourth Hierarchy brings life into the iridescent world of colour.

PART ONE:THE NATURE OF COLOUR

The basis for a spiritual-scientificunderstanding of colourfor artists

LECTURE ONE

Dornach, 6 May 1921

Colour Experience—Image Colours

Colour, which is our subject for the next three days, concerns the physicist—although we shall not discuss this aspect just now.1 It also concerns, or should concern, the psychologist, the metaphysician, but it must above all concern the artist, the painter. If we look around at contemporary ideas about colour, however, we find that although the psychologist may have this or that to say about our subjective experience of colour, this contributes little to our understanding of its objective nature—a matter which is left entirely to the physicist. Moreover, there is little inclination to admit that art has anything decisive to say about the nature of colour—not at least for an objective understanding of coloration.

Nowadays people are very far from grasping the meaning of Goethe’s often quoted aphorism: ‘He, to whom nature begins to unveil her open secrets, feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, art.’

A person who, like Goethe, has a living experience of art has no doubt that what the artist says about colour is deeply connected with its real nature. Normally colour is regarded as belonging in the first place to the coloured surfaces we perceive, to the impressions we receive from the colours of nature. We can produce a certain range of colour with the familiar prismatic experiments and we can seek insight into the realm of colour in many other ways, too. But colour is still primarily regarded as a subjective impression.

You know that physics has long had the habit—we might say bad habit—of maintaining that the coloured world we see around us is present only for our senses and that, if we are to speak objectively, colour is no more than certain vibrations of the finest form of matter, known as the ether.

Those who think in terms of such definitions and explanations have no idea how their experience of colour is actually connected with a vibrating ether. But when people speak of the qualities of colour itself they refer only to the subjective impression. Then they look around for something else that is objective and in doing so they wander far away from colour. For in conjuring up all these ether vibrations nothing is left of the real stuff of our world of colour. In order to grasp colour objectively we must try to keep within the world of colour itself and not leave it; then we may hope to penetrate its real nature.

Let us try to sink ourselves completely into what we receive through colour from the rich and varied world around us. We must feel what is in colour if we wish to penetrate into its true nature, bringing insight into our feelings. We must question our feelings about what is living in the colour which surrounds us. To start with we must experiment, taking examples that are not too difficult to analyse but have some striking characteristic that can help us to reach the essentials.

Let us begin with the colour green, spreading it as a plain surface in a quite diagrammatic manner. If we now simply let our feelings respond to this colour, we can experience something in the green that needs no further definition. No one can doubt that we have the same experience from this colour as when we look at the plant-coloured earth about us; we cannot help it, of course, because it is green. We must disregard everything else the plants mean to us and look only at their greenness.

We could very easily insert the most varied colours into our patches of green. We will, however, limit ourselves to three particular colours; into the first patch I place some red, in the second a kind of peach-blossom colour, and in the third patch blue. Now from your immediate impression of these three examples you will agree that something quite different happens in each case. If I look at this red shape within the green, or the peach-blossom, or the blue, I have a quite definite feeling from each. The next step is to express what lies in these different feelings as our soul experiences them.

Abstract definitions can achieve very little; we must try to bring out the true character of our actual experience. Therefore let us try to enter imaginatively into the colours we have here. From the first example we may have the impression of a green countryside in which I have drawn red figures. It does not matter whether I give them red faces and skins, or red clothes; in the second, figures in peach-blossom colour (which is similar to the colour of the human skin); and in the third patch of green I have painted blue figures. We are not creating pictures but simply making a definite series of impressions. Imagine you have the following scene before you: figures in red, or figures coloured like peach-blossom, or figures in blue walking over a green meadow—in all three, quite different impressions! Looking at the first you might say: the red figures in their green surroundings enliven the whole green meadow. The meadow becomes all the greener because of the presence of the red figures while the green becomes richer, more living. I should find it disturbing if these red figures were not painted as moving figures. It would feel wrong in any other way: I should want to say—it just cannot be like that. I have to make these red figures like lightning; they must be moving. Still red figures in a green meadow! They are disturbing in their stillness. They are moving because of their very redness. They bring something with them into the meadow that cannot be kept still. We must experience a quite definite range of feelings if we are to gain any insight.

The second picture is entirely harmonious. The peach-blossom figures can stay there quite peacefully; they can stay there for ever. My feeling tells me that these peach-blossom figures have no especial relationship with the meadow and do not affect it by making it seem greener; they are quite neutral. They can stand where they like without troubling me; they have no inner connection with the green meadow.

Now let us look at the third example, blue figures in the green meadow. The green, surely, does not remain unchanged; the blue begins to dissipate the green meadow in which the figures stand. The meadow’s greenness is paralysed; it is no longer green. Let us try to grasp imaginatively what is going on: blue figures (they could just as well be blue spirits) are wandering about in a green meadow—this then ceases to be green and takes on a bluish hue. The meadow itself becomes bluish and ceases to be green. And if these blue figures were to remain long in the green meadow it would all slip away from me. Then I would find myself thinking that the blue figures are trying to carry off the meadow and dispose of it in some deep abyss. A green meadow just cannot stay as it is if there are blue figures in it; they take it up and make off with it.

This is how one can experience colour.

And we must be able to have colour experience, or we cannot grasp what the world of colour is at all. The imagination is a fine and beautiful instrument but we must experiment with it if we want to discover this for ourselves. We must ask what happens to a green meadow in which red figures move. Does it not become more vividly green, its greenness more intense, so that the green begins to burn? The red figures cause such activity in the green which surrounds them that they themselves can no longer stay still; they must run about. And if I want to paint in the right way I cannot paint people who stand still as red; I would have to paint them as if they were dancing in a ring. A ring of red figures dancing in a green meadow would appear quite natural.

On the other hand, figures the colour of the human skin could stand in the green meadow just like that for all eternity. They are quite neutral towards the green meadow; they remain just as they are without changing in the least—quite different from the blue figures who make off with the meadow, taking its greenness from it.

In order to discuss our actual experience of colour we need comparisons. A crudely philistine approach will not let us experience colour at all. We must make comparisons but not the usual philistine kind of comparisons to say, for instance, that one billiard ball pushes another. Stags push, also bullocks and buffaloes, but not billiard balls, in actual fact. We have to speak of ‘thrust’ in physics because we need the support of analogy in order to speak at all.

This makes it impossible to look into the world of colour as it is. It is within that world we must seek the real nature of colour.

Let us take a characteristic colour which we have already looked at—the colour green which we enjoy so much in summer time. We are quite used to seeing this as the colour that belongs particularly to plants. There is no other sphere in which we experience a colour so intimately bound up with the inner nature of an object as green is with the plant. If an animal happens to be green we do not feel it must be this colour and no other, but we have an underlying feeling that it could be some different hue. But with the plants we have the impression that green belongs to the plant as something peculiarly its own. We can now try through the green of the plant to penetrate the objective nature of colour instead of remaining as hitherto within its subjective aspects.

What is the plant which can reveal the colour green to us in such a special way?

From spiritual science you know that the plant owes its existence to the fact that, besides its physical body, it has an etheric body. It is the etheric body which is the source of life in the plant. But the etheric body is not green. What makes the plant green is to be found in its physical body; although green belongs to the plant in a most intimate way it is not the essential nature of the plant—that lies in the etheric body. If the plant had no etheric body it would be a mineral and it is the mineral nature of the plant that appears as green. The etheric body is quite a different colour although it does reveal itself in the plant through the green of the mineral element. If we study the green of the plant in relation to the etheric body, we have on one side the true nature of the plant which lives in the etheric world and on the other the green which has been drawn off and separated from the plant. But in taking green from the plant it is just as if we had made a copy of something. What has been abstracted from the etheric in green is really only a picture, or image, of the plant; this image, so characteristic of the plant, can only be green. In green we have the image of the plant. If green is regarded as the essential plant colour then it must also be regarded as a picture, or image, of the plant; in green we see the especial character of the plant as image.

This is absolutely essential. In the portrait gallery of an old castle it is obvious that only portraits of the ancestors hang there and not the ancestors themselves. Usually the ancestors themselves aren’t there, only their portraits! In the same way, the essential plant is no more in the green than the ancestors are actually present in their portraits. When we look at green we have no more than the image of the plant. Now think once more how green is peculiar to the plant and remember how the plant is above all the most characteristic form of life. The animal possesses a soul; man has soul and spirit. The mineral is without life. Life is the particular characteristic of the plant. The animal has, in addition, a soul. The mineral kingdom is also without soul. Man has, besides these qualities, a spirit. We cannot say of man, animal or mineral that life is the essential quality; in each case it is something else. With the plant, life is its essential characteristic—the colour green is the image of this life. We can therefore say quite objectively:

Green represents the lifeless image of the living.

Proceeding inductively—as the learned should do—we have now arrived at the point where an objective description of the colour green is possible. Just as the photograph can be described as a picture of someone or something, so green can be described as the lifeless image of that which is living. I have passed from mere reflection on the subjective impression to the realization that green is the lifeless image of the living.

Now let us take another colour, peach-blossom. To be more precise, I should rather speak of the colour of the human skin, which naturally differs from one person to another. But this is really what I mean when I speak of peach-blossom: the human colour or the colour of the human skin. Let us now try to understand its essential nature. Usually we look at it only from outside; we look at a man and see the colour of his skin only from outside. Can we become aware of it, know it from within, as we have tried to do with the green of the plant? We can, if we do it in the following way.

If a man really tries to become aware that he is a being of soul and thinks of this inner life of soul as being present within his physical form, then he will also realize that the soul must be visible to some extent in the physical form. His nature is revealed by the way the soul flows into his physical form in the colour of his skin. What this means can best be realized by looking at a man whose soul is no longer fully present in his skin, whose outer form is no longer ensouled. What happens to such a man? He turns green. Life is still there, but he turns green. We speak sometimes of ‘green’ people and we know the peculiar green of the complexion when the soul is no longer fully present. The effect shows clearly in the human complexion. On the other hand, the more a man’s complexion takes on a particular ruddy hue the more we are aware of how he lives in it. If we observe the temperament of a ‘green’ person and one with a really fresh complexion it becomes evident how the soul lives in the actual colour of the skin. Each man’s experience of himself shines forth in the very colour of his skin. So we can say that the colour which appears in the human complexion is in fact an image of the soul. Of all the varied colours in the world around us peach-blossom is the colour we would select as being the nearest to that of the human skin.2 In painting we can only imitate the colour of the human skin by various artistic devices.

Now, while the colour of the human being is indeed the image of the soul, it is quite clearly not the soul itself. It is the living image of the soul. The soul, experiencing itself, is revealed in the colour of the human skin. And this colour is not lifeless like the green of the plant. Only when his soul withdraws does a person turn green; then he can become a corpse. But in this colour we have something that is alive:

Peach-blossom represents the living image of the soul.

We have now considered two colours; in both cases they have been ‘images’. We have endeavoured to understand the objective nature of colour, not merely to take the subjective impression and invent a theory of wave motion to explain it which is then imagined to be objective. It would be quite absurd to divorce human life from the colour of the human skin. It is a quite different physical experience to have pink cheeks or a greenish pallor. A definite inner existence is revealed through the colour.

Let us now take a third colour, blue. It is impossible to find anything of which we can say that blue is characteristic in the way that green is characteristic of the plant; nor could we speak of blue as we could of peach-blossom and the human complexion. Among animals there is no single colour that is characteristic of their nature as the colour of his complexion is of man, or green is of the plant. With blue we cannot start, as we have done so far, from natural phenomena.

If we want to continue our exploration of the nature of colour we should leave blue aside for the moment, and turn to the lighter colours. If we take the colour known as white we shall find that we shall progress more quickly and easily. White cannot be said, in the first place, to be the characteristic colour of any being in the outer world. We could, of course, turn to the mineral kingdom, but it would be better to look in quite another direction to form an objective idea of the colour white. Let us imagine we have some white in front of us and light is allowed to play upon it, illuminating it; at once we feel a certain kinship between the white and the light. At first this is merely an impression, but it becomes more than impression the moment we turn to the sun itself. For the sun has a certain whiteness in its light and is the source from which all natural illumination on earth is derived. But neither what we see as the sun, nor as white—with its inner kinship to light—appear in the same way as external colours do. External colours appear on objects. The whiteness of the sun, which represents light to us, does not appear directly on objects. Later on we will consider the kind of colour we may call the white of paper or chalk, but that will mean making rather a detour.

First of all, in order to understand white we should let ourselves be led by white to the light as such. In order to strengthen this feeling, we need only remember that the opposite of white is black. We have no doubt that black is darkness; we can very easily identify white with brightness, with the light as such. In short, we find an inner connection between light and white when we allow our feelings to speak to us. We will investigate this further in the next few days.

If we reflect on the nature of light—and are not tempted to cling to the Newtonian fallacy3 but observe things without prejudice—we shall say: there is a special connection between white, appearing as colour, and light. We will at first leave true white on one side.