Both in the creation of art and in its appreciation, the spirit plays an important role. But especially when it comes to the enjoyment of art, the spiritual aspect is often overlooked. How can I become more receptive to the spiritual in art?
Sensory perception is the starting point in art. At the same time, art provokes the life of thinking, and this can already be a path to the spirit. The connection between percept and concept is crucial to Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy of knowledge. If one can experience perception and thinking separately, one will also be able to become aware of their connection.
Through the paintings of Paul Cézanne, for example, one can concretely experience the separation of perception and thinking and their reconnection. Cézanne: “[T]hese two parallel texts: nature seen and nature felt, the nature which is out there . . . (he indicates the blue and green plain) and the nature which is in here . . . (he taps himself on the forehead) both of which must unite in order to endure, to live a life half human, half divine, the life of art, listen a little . . . the life of God. The landscape is reflected, becomes human, and becomes conscious in me. I objectify it, project it, fix it on my canvas. . . .” “Within the painter, there are two things: the eye and the brain; they must serve each other.”1 Something similar applies to contemporary art in general.
A Guitar!
Once, while looking at a work by Picasso, I had a pivotal experience. I was gazing at a simple relief made of cardboard and twine, ingeniously shaped. From the proper angle, it looked like a guitar, but after shifting my gaze, only the materials remained. When I saw this, I experienced how, with just a slight turn of the head, a concept suddenly shot in like an arrow, and I “saw” a guitar again. I had discovered the origin of our thoughts! They shoot into us from behind. Normally, we experience concepts only after they have united with sensory impressions to form fixed mental pictures. Contemporary art is helpful in loosening them from this connection.
Every painting, piece of music, or poem requires its own approach. But the common gateway is always, first and foremost, careful, pure perception. “You do not see what you see.” That sounds paradoxical, but it is often the case. To grasp the true particularity of what we’re looking at, a second look is required. Generally, one does not perceive what is actually present, but merely what one has conceptualized. For both pure thinking and pure perception, one must be able to set aside mental pictures. For seeing that creates mental pictures deludes us, as Franz Marc wrote: “The appearance is eternally flat, but remove it, completely remove it, entirely from your spirit—think it away along with your image of the world—the world is left back in its true form, and we artists sense this form.”2
This removal does not happen of its own accord. Pure thinking and pure perception are the result of training. The aim is what Rudolf Steiner once described as being able to “absorb, without concepts,” the impressions from the external world.3 The experience of one’s own thinking activity enables one to remove thinking from perception. This is more the path of science; art opens up another. This path also leads to the spirit. In his lecture, Rudolf Steiner described “how the spiritual penetrates us through the sensory world and organizes us,” and he said, “When we have sensory impressions, what is conscious is only that which is initially, I would say, the external sound, the external color,” but in reality, the spirit already lives within it.4
Two years after the death of Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), there was a retrospective of his work at the Gropius Bau in Berlin. There, I had another pivotal experience. Many people were crowded around a sculpture. It was called Hasengrab [Hare’s grave]. At first glance, it looked as if Beuys had swept out his studio and mounted everything on a table—empty paint tubes and so forth. But suddenly I felt a resonance with something within me. It was the repository of yet-to-be-transformed afterimages—what Rudolf Steiner characterized as the “memory mirror” or Jacques Lusseyran as the “junk room.”5 I thought, “Aha! So that’s where the hare is buried! It’s an indication of the realm of ‘afterimages.’” Many of Beuys’s works take effect primarily through the counter-images and afterimages they generate in the viewer. In general, and as it does here, art can bring to the surface what lies within. When something dominates us within, we can only freely confront it once it becomes objective.
When Afterimages Remain
What are afterimages? Sensory impressions felt deeply enough can remain and become afterimages. In one of his notebooks, Rudolf Steiner wrote: “Afterimages: The will forces must be engaged to retain the afterimages; that means, the enduring part of the human being must take up these images; in doing so, they pass through the higher soul [Gemüt]; there they are taken up for the earthly life—if they pass over fully into the will, they are taken into the eternal being.”6
This cannot refer solely to complementary images. Such images are short-lived and belong only to the beginning of the afterimage transformation. Although they are already the property of the human being, they are still bound to the respective sense organ. Afterimages detach themselves. They live on, deeper in the soul, and can work there from within. Peter Handke once wrote: “But the longer the event recedes, the more it becomes an image that one might call an idealized image. In memory, it seems burned into one’s own life, an image that evokes nostalgia, and also the will to work on such images oneself: for only as an afterimage does it begin to work within oneself as well.”7 Like Handke, his friend Wim Wenders also speaks of afterimages. Noting how it seemed like an afterimage, Wenders once wrote about a painting by the Russian artist Alexander Deineka: “So that was what suddenly made me stand on tiptoe in the Hermitage’s storage depot in Leningrad, to be able to get to know this small image in the corner by the window better: I had recognized a FEELING and thus the LIGHT and AIR of the Midwest [. . .] No image richer in detail could ever be more precise than these afterimages.”8
When Rudolf Steiner introduced the experience of afterimages, he said: “But, in this process, there is something very, very significant. What three millennia ago was breathed in and out with the air, now the soul is involved. And, in a similar way to how the breathing process was perceived three millennia ago, we must learn to see the sensory process, how this process works in and through the soul.”9
With art, we are also dealing with higher levels of the spirit. Has any great piece of music ever been composed without religious inspiration? This holds true from Monteverdi and Bach to Gubaidulina and Pärt. Listening, too, becomes a higher experience. Modern art enables an ascent to higher levels of knowledge. It is already helpful for changing one’s habitual way of seeing when paintings are hung in such a way that one feels surrounded by them. Take, for example, Monet’s water lily paintings. From a distance, one sees flowers; up close, only colors. Moving back and forth, one can practically trace the emergence of the water plants within the painting. If we also move ourselves inwardly, we enter the world that the Basel art historian Gottfried Boehm aptly described, in reference to Monet’s Water Lilies, as “a world of imagination, of the inner stream of images.”10
Translation Joshua Kelberman
Footnotes
- Michael Doran, ed., Conversations with Cézanne, translated by Lawrence Cochran (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 111 (ch. “Joachim Gasquet, ‘What He Told Me . . .’ (excerpt from Cézanne, 1921)), p. 38 (ch. “Emile Bernard, ‘Paul Cézanne,’ L’Occident (1904)).”
- Franz Marc, Die Dinge reden: Aphorismen und Grüße [Things talk: aphorisms and greetings] (Vienna and Munich: Christian Brandstätter, 1987), 24.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Boundaries of Natural Science, CW 322 (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983), lecture in Dornach, Oct. 3, 1920.
- Ibid.
- Cf. Rudolf Steiner, Cosmosophy: Cosmic Influences on the Human Being, CW 207 (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1985), lecture in Dornach, Sept. 23, 1921; Jacques Lusseyran, “Against the Pollution of the I,” in Against the Pollution of the I: On the Gifts of Blindness, the Power of Poetry, and the Urgency of Awareness (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2016).
- Rudolf Steiner, “Aus einem Notizbuch vom Jahre 1922” [Out of a notebook from the year 1922], Anthroposophie 10, no. 34 (August 19, 1928).
- Peter Handke, “Die experimenta 3 der Deutschen Akademie der darstellenden Künste,” [experimenta 3 of the German Academy of Performing Arts] in Ich bin ein Bewohner des Elfenbeinturms [I am an inhabitant of the ivory tower] (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), 102 ff. (about the performance Titus Andronicus / Iphigenie, staged by Joseph Beuys, May 1969 at the Experimenta 3 festival in Frankfurt); cf. Rhea Thönges-Stringaris, “Je länger aber das Ereignis sich entfernt . . .”: Zu Joseph Beuys und Peter Handke [“The longer the event recedes . . .”: On Joseph Beuys and Peter Handke] (Wangen im Allgäu: FIU, 2002).
- Wim Wenders, “Autobahn nach Moskau” [Highway to Moscow], Zeitmagazin, no. 18 (April 28, 1989).
- Rudolf Steiner, Michael’s Mission: Revealing the Essential Secrets of Human Nature, CW 194 (Forest Row, East Sussex: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2016), lecture in Dornach, Nov. 30, 1919.
- Gottfried Boehm, “Strom ohne Ufer. Anmerkungen zu Claude Monets Seerosen” [Stream without shores. Notes on Claude Monet’s Water Lilies] in Claude Monet: Nymphéas. Impression–Vision (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel; Zürich: SV International, 1986), 125 f.
