Walter Kugler’s new book [in German] offers visual aids for Rudolf Steiner’s blackboard drawings.
All of a sudden, Rudolf Steiner’s works became present in the art world—in the Portikus Frankfurt, the Albertina Vienna, the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, in Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, and at the Venice Biennale. A lot of the written works may have disappeared from the shelves of bookshops, but the sketches created during Rudolf Steiner’s lectures began appearing everywhere. What was going on?
Ever since the exhibition of forty of Steiner’s blackboard drawings at the Monika Sprüth Gallery in Cologne in the summer of 1992, there have been exhibitions of Rudolf Steiner’s blackboard drawings in galleries and museums around the world every year. The initial impetus for this surprisingly successful series of more than fifty solo exhibitions came from Beuys’ students Walter Dahn and Johannes Stüttgen. They benefited from Walter Kugler’s enthusiastic and energetic support and his unconventional, congenial communication in the decades that followed. Kugler was then director of the Rudolf Steiner Archives in Dornach, co-editor of numerous volumes in the Rudolf Steiner Complete Works, and author of highly readable essays and books on Rudolf Steiner.
The success was at least partly due to the public’s willingness to get involved—to be enchanted and touched. The time seemed ripe for such a challenge and such a gift: “The chalk drawings are among the most impressive exhibition events” (Kunst-Bulletin, 1992), “a minor sensation” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1999). In the relationship between anthroposophy and the public, these exhibitions and their reception from the 1990s onwards played an astonishingly effective and conciliatory role and helped create a completely different perception of Rudolf Steiner than the one that was later attacked with distortions and slander.
These exhibitions had a predecessor in the art milieu that set the scene and shifted the horizon for art viewing—namely, the magnificent, landmark exhibition “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985”, which finally came to The Hague from Los Angeles via Chicago in 1986/87. Eight years later, there was a memorable follow-up at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in 1995, with the exhibition “Occultism and Avant-Garde—From Munch to Mondrian 1900-1915,” accompanied by a catalog weighing several kilos.
What happened among anthroposophists with the exhibitions of the blackboard drawings and the public response to them? Unanimity in anthroposophical circles is not that common when it comes to something new, even if it comes from Rudolf Steiner. Some were enthusiastic, others shook their heads in disbelief: “That’s not art, and Steiner didn’t mean it that way”; “You can’t look at it in isolation.” With so much fervor to read and understand Rudolf Steiner’s sketches, we have been (infinitely) far removed from the obvious—namely that we can also look at them, as the art historian Michael Bockemühl once aptly remarked. It was now possible to start seeing them, simply because the drawings were displayed in rooms where works of art are exhibited, and people could come to view them (as works of art) and even admire and enjoy them.
Visual aids are available in this latest book on the blackboard drawings, as indicated by the subtitle: “Sichtbare Anthroposophie” [visible anthroposophy]. However, take the opportunity to practice your eyesight on one or other of the 1,100 originals whenever you can, because, unfortunately, the numerous reproductions in this book are often too dark with too little color differentiation—an unforgivable flaw on the part of the publisher, especially in a book of this kind. In short chapters, Kugler’s clever observations under “Kleine Schule des Sehens und Übens” [A small school for seeing and practicing] serve as stimulating aids for viewing and reading the blackboard pictures. The main themes revolve around curves and straight lines. Kugler structures his offerings into “Gedanken-Striche” [thought lines], “Denk-Bilder” [thought pictures], and “Denken in Farben und Formen” [thinking in colors and shapes]. When you add to this the sometimes astonishing statements from the selection of quotes under “Rudolf Steiner über Linien, Tafelzeichnungen und Kreide” [Rudolf Steiner on lines, blackboard drawings and chalk], then there is no stopping you until you have translated the words of the entire volume into pictures—and this of course entirely in the spirit of Rudolf Steiner: “For example, I would very much like to draw the content of my philosophy of freedom. That could be done quite well.”
Book Walter Kugler, Liebe und Freiheit–Sichtbare Anthroposophie auf den Wandtafelzeichnungen Rudolf Steiners [Love and freedom—visible anthroposophy in Rudolf Steiner’s blackboard drawings,] Verlag Freies Geistesleben, Stuttgart 2025.
Translation Laura Liska
Title image Rudolf Steiner’s blackboard drawings at the Venice Biennale 2013, Photo: Walter Kugler
