Artistic activity familiarises us with creative processes. In Anthroposophy they are not put in a museum but provide inspiration in agriculture, medicine and education. An intensive art week opens up avenues in architecture, painting and sculpture.
Since the 1970s, at the latest, we have been familiar with dying trees, the decline in biodiversity, and the disappearance of insects as signatures of an ecological crisis. How do we arrive at actions to change this initial situation? For Christiane Haid, art is a key to this. She is a painter and head of the Visual Art Section and the Section for the Literary Arts and Humanities at the Goetheanum. «Take Rudolf Steiner’s ‹Nature Moods›. These sketches are not depictions of external events in nature; they point to activity that is at work in nature.» Engagement with creative forces can become the starting point for tackling tasks in the world. To convey this way of working, artists run workshops at the Goetheanum. One focus is on painting using the ‹Nature Moods› as a starting point, on the seven motifs of the plinths in the First Goetheanum to become familiar with laws of the transformation of form (metamorphosis), and on the synthetic bringing together of tasks in architecture. Here the function of the building to be, the people for whom the building is intended, the character of the surroundings, the building materials used, and, last but not least, the time in which we are building should, for example, be taken into account. The Goetheanum Campus itself offers numerous study opportunities with its buildings and sculptures in the garden park. In addition, there is an exhibition of artists from Europe and overseas who have worked with the ‹Nature Moods› or in other ways on the theme of nature. The issue ‹Kunst und Natur› (Art and Nature) of the journal ‹Stil› offers opportunities for further study.
Exhibition ‹Sun, Moon and Trees. Nature Moods›, 100 years of training sketches for painters (with nine originals by Rudolf Steiner), 31 July to 10 November 2022
Opening event: 31 July 2022, 18.00, Goetheanum.
Picture Edgar Spittler: Black Sun, watercolour, layering technique (detail)
