VI. Teaching Eurythmy, Music, Drawing, and Language

I have spent a great deal of my life in art studios and have seen how everything that modern artists produce, that is, sculptors and painters, depends upon a model. This leads people to think, for example, that the Greeks also depended upon models for their artistic creation, yet that is not the case. Those who properly understand something like the Laocoön group, or some other such figure—those of course are from the later Greek period—those who really go into such things will slowly come to recognize the independence, particularly of Greek artists, from the model. Certainly Greek artists could see things well and retain them in a picture. However, that alone is insufficient. The Greek artist, particularly as a sculptor, created from the feeling of a limb, from their own feeling and perception of a limb and its movements. Thus in their artistic creations they inwardly felt, for example, a bent arm and a balled-up fist, and that inner feeling was not simply what they saw with their eyes in an external model. It was not the external model that was reproduced in a material, but that inner feeling, the feeling of the human form. It is in fact this inner feeling of the human being that has been lost to European civilization since the time of the Greeks. We need to study the transition from the feeling of the human being, from an organic self-recognition that existed with the Greeks and that in the end is contained in every Greek poem, in every Greek drama. We need to recognize the difference between that feeling, between the organic self-recognition, or, better, self-observation or self-feeling of a human being, and what occurs through a simple imitation of what is seen, through basing work upon a model. It is clear that the Greek artists were able to achieve what they wanted. It is easy to say that the Greeks gained an overview of forms through the Olympic Games and such things, and certainly that was of some help. However, the most important aspect of artistic creation was that inner feeling, the feeling organ. Thus the Greeks were in their artistic creations very independent of the model, something that for them was a kind of preliminary design, which they held to externally.