The Circular Flow of Man's Life within the World Of Sense, Soul And Spirit

GA 68b — 17 January 1906, Munich

39. Theosophy and the Visual Arts

Report in the “Münchener Neueste Nachrichten,” January 1906

Ch. Th. Theosophy and Art. The well-known theosophical speaker Dr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin spoke on January 17 and 18 in front of a large audience in the Prinzensaal of Café Luitpold about theosophy and art. In the first lecture, he sought to illuminate the essence of the visual arts, painting, sculpture and architecture from a theosophical point of view. According to the theosophical world view, as he explained in his introduction, the outer material nature is only the expression of the deeper world essence. In the nascent nature, the formation initially takes place inwardly in three stages, occultistically so-called “elemental realms”, from the formless to a world of forms and flowing images, models of the outer world. According to the speaker, the artist's creative process is connected with these realms. In the imaginative state, the artist rises again into nature as it develops, into these higher realms, beholds the images of the world that lie behind the world, and brings them into waking consciousness. He relives the formation of the world. The speaker believes that from his theosophical point of view he should point out that internalization, the spiritual deepening to rediscover the inner spiritual world, the stepping out to self-expansion and devotion to the universe was also the characteristic of the initiation into the mysteries, to which he somewhat strangely associated artistic talents.

The speaker believes he can find a difference in the visual arts in the fact that in painting and sculpture only the higher realm of images and figures is reproduced, while in architecture the formless is newly formed, and in this way it represents a repetition of the construction of the world from the formless natural forces. That is why the idiosyncrasy, the character, is so evident in architecture. Nothing is as closely related to the character of a nation as its architectural style.