51. Eurythmy Performance

But now art has another requirement. If you want to express something through artistic means, it must be rounded off into a picture. Certainly, much that is extraordinarily meaningful has been achieved in so-called plein-air painting, in Impressionist painting. But on the other hand, it has been shown that when man places himself in such a way in relation to nature, as has been attempted there, nature does not ultimately surrender to the image. Namely, one has tried to capture the momentary impression, as one just said, the momentary vision, what the light flooding over the objects, the or the calm air, to capture that as an immediate impression, I would like to say to capture it so quickly that one does not have time to think about the matter, so that nothing of the thought flows into the artistic reproduction. - The difficulty arose, however, that the means of artistic expression, when one excludes the thought in this way, nevertheless fail. You can't get to grips with color and form so that color and form really come together to form a picture. And so Impressionism actually failed to achieve what it set out to achieve.