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“Practice Spirit Beholding!”
Artwork: Marion Donehower (Visual Arts Section)
Rainer Maria Rilke / Paul Cézanne
Chers amis,
One of the unique aspects of our Section for the Literary Arts & Humanities is its very close connection to the visual arts and to the Section for the Visual Arts.
Most of you know that our 21st century Section leader Christiane Haid (who joined us for our North American Conferences in 2024 and 2025) est le chef de file de la Section for the Visual Arts of the School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum, as well as the leader for our Section for the Literary Arts and Humanities (called Section des belles sciences in German). In addition to her literary pursuits and scholarship in the humanities, Christiane is a practicing artist and painter.
“Parzival’s Quest” by Christiane Haid / from the 2023 Grail Conference at the Goetheanum
Artistic Creativity Has Always Been of Central Importance to Our Section . . .
But you may not know (or you might have forgotten) that the person chosen by Rudolf Steiner as the first leader of our Section was also a practicing visual artist, in addition to his other talents as a poet and novelist and dramatist.
I’m talking about Albert Steffen.
“Albert Steffen was an anthroposophist before he was even born.”
– Rudolf Steiner, spoken at the Christmas Conference, December 24, 1923, at 11:15 in the morning
“Say what?” Albert Who?
Albert Steffen is a person whose name and activities are no longer so well known to many friends in North America.
Some folks even feel very uncomfortable or nervous when Albert Steffen’s name comes up. This is often due to their memories of the very difficult and traumatic crisis-laden years following the death of Rudolf Steiner more than one hundred years ago when the General Society founded by Rudolf Steiner at the Christmas Conference tore itself apart.
Perhaps now that we are in the second hundred years after the death of Rudolf Steiner it is time to look at that situation in the 1930s and 1940s in the movement and Society since it highlights a theme of great existential importance, which is . . .
Amitié spirituelle
One of the ongoing research themes of our Section group that has met regularly in Northern California since 2010 is Amitié spirituelle. We have spent several meetings in discussion of spiritual friendship over the years: for example, the friendship of Goethe and Schiller, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Blake, Novalis and Ludwig Tieck. We also looked at the friendship between Albert Steffen et Percy MacKaye, the American poet and playwright; father of Arvia MacKaye Ege et Christy MacKaye Barnes. Percy, like Albert, is largely ignored or marginalized these days, but for different reasons.
At various meetings over the years, I have tried to highlight Percy MacKaye and his extended family. I did this in order to re-enliven a discussion of the history of our Section and the history of the anthroposophical movement in the 20th century. The spiritual friendship of Percy MacKaye (and other members of the MacKaye family, including Henry Barnes) with Albert Steffen is very important to the history of our Section . . . as well as to the history of the Society in the context of the crisis years of the twentieth century following Rudolf Steiner’s death in March 1925.
It is a fraught subject, laden with drama and performative contradictions . . . perhaps worthy of some young novelist or playwright or screen writer, yet to find his or her voice or audience.
I’ll return to this theme of the spiritual friendship of Albert Steffen and Percy MacKaye in later meetings and posts. Keep an eye on this website. But in the meantime . . .
Rainer Maria Rilke; Paul Cézanne / Two Essays by Albert Steffen
I want to share two essays by Albert Steffen excepted from his book Buch der Rückschau [Book of Recollection], published in 1938. These previously appeared in the Journal de l'Anthroposophie, now defunct. I chose these essays because they illustrate the spiritual friendship between our Section for the Literary Arts & Humanities and the Section for the Visual Arts. We discussed this close friendship between visual arts and literary arts when we studied the English poet William Blake. And when we studied Blake, we even brought music into the discussion. Visual Arts Section leadership council member Patricia Dickson performed two songs from Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, songs composed expressly for Patricia Dickson’s voice.
Perhaps at a future Salon New Moon meeting of the Northern California Section group, poems of Albert Steffen or Percy MacKaye can be sung as well?
“I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision . . . but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser, a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. . . . but to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees . . . To me, this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination…”
— William Blake, in a letter to Reverend John Trusler, 1777
Two Recollections
par Albert Steffen
“A Poet and a Painter”
Recollection One
The Poet Rainer Maria Rilke
My meetings with Rainer Maria Rilke fall in the war years (1914-1918), which I passed in Munich. In the little restaurant where I took my mid-day meal my interest had long been held by a patron who appeared sporadically, sat down unobtrusively at a solitary table and hastily, without troubling himself about his surroundings, consumed a simple repast, only to be off once more. The unassuming yet distinguished air of this elusive stranger was sympathetic to me from the start, but I never inquired who it might be that so obviously concealed himself behind this exterior, because I, too, loved to go incognito. Yet in this respect the two solitary ones were very different. Rilke pondered within. I, from my youth, was accustomed to observe attentively, and this had been sharpened by my scientific studies, so that it had become my habit to sketch people’s faces— profile and shape, inclination of the head, bearing and gesture—and only then would I turn to the mood, seeking from that to penetrate to the interior qualities which showed themselves as coloring of the soul.
Rilke hardly rested his eyes on the people who went in and out of the place, although there were some very interesting figures among them. I concluded that this was a habit which he had probably assumed in the city (Schwabing—where he lived—could hardly be reckoned a city), or as a means of self-protection, since his gaze, which was possessed of a searching quality, drew his whole soul after it, and, in order not to be wounded in its sensibilities, had perforce to guard itself against being held captive.
Also, when I encountered the stranger in other situations, particularly in the English Garden, he went as one who had a penchant for hearing rather than seeing.
Now the peculiar thing was that, to do justice to this figure, the inner observing sense had to seek new forms of expression. Thus, I was often driven to muse: “That brow is like a tower. The watchman on the lookout there beholds an army of spirits soaring overhead; yet they are not the angel hosts of Christendom but of Islam.”
And noteworthy was the mouth.
It reminded a barbel [a type of catfish], with its long beard-like strands, which I had so loved to watch as a boy, when it hung back in the clearly running spring water whilst the wavelets rippled over the glistening stony bed.
Suddenly I also understood the gleam, now bright, now shadowy, which flowed from those eyes—the inward alternation of trust and fear. A spirit who is free and yet senses that some terror hangs over him!
But what was this poet fearful of? Lest he be snatched from his native element?
Of course, by this time I knew who he was, and he had also learnt my name.
One day Rilke, who was ten years my senior, sat down suddenly at my table and started to talk of a play which he and I had seen the evening before: Georg Kaiser’s “From Morn to Midnight.” The story went that Rilke had already seen it five times. It was about Salvationists [Salvation Army Christians] who failed in their duty. We went on to discuss the relationship of the word to deed and doctrine.
I told of a friend who had obtained his doctorate in the history of art and then became an officer in the Salvation Army. Then the conversation turned upon the war. Rilke recounted how the painter, Kokoshka, who was a friend of his, experienced his first attack in the Dragoons. He had held his hands over his horse’s eyes to protect them.
When during conversation, I observed that knowledge affected my poetry productively, he kept silent, and I felt his opposition. It would have appeared indelicate for me to have quoted Goethe’s words:
“… by means of a secret psychological turn, or frame of mind, which would perhaps repay closer study, I believe that I have raised myself to a species of production which in full consciousness brought forth that which even now finds my approval, without maybe my ever being able to swim in the selfsame river again—aye, a frame of mind to which Aristotle and other prose-writers would ascribe a kind of madness.”
— Goethe, quoted by Steffen
That secret psychological turn had long since been known to me; I had of late found it, made trustworthy by knowledge, in the works of Rudolf Steiner. Without the exercise of it, I had to say to myself, the creative power of future poets would be bound to dry up or be engulfed by those achievements of technical science which are gaining the upper hand. I held the method which Goethe applied in the metamorphosis of the plants to be an aid in awakening and keeping alive the nascent forces of the soul. It appeared to me that it would also be of benefit to Rilke, who at that time often felt deserted by his genius.
Naturally I did not suppose that any form of training could ever replace sheer poetry. This was, and remained, grace. Despite this, the grain of the gods grew, more readily, if all unnoticed, on a field daily tended by such exercise.
Rilke was also one who trained himself—but not in this field of knowledge. Despite the admiration which can be felt for his poetry, this uncertain quality still clings to it. Thus, for instance, a strange contradiction runs through his work, which touches on the most profound and all-inclusive insight into destiny, the fact of repeated lives on earth. On the one hand it is said of him that he was convinced that “he had once lived in Moscow in a former incarnation”, whereas in the Duino Elegies he stresses like an incantation the once only of life on earth:
“. . . —why then
have to be human?—and, why do we, sidestepping
our fate, still long for that very fate? …
Oh, not because good fortune exists,
that precipitate gain presaging the loss to come.
Not out of curiosity, nor as an assignment given to the heart,
as if it too might be beating in the laurel tree . . .
But because being here does matter, and because all that’s here,
though fleeting, apparently needs us—in some strange way
concerns us. Us, the most fleeting of all. One lifespan
for each thing, single, unique. One time and no more.
And for
us too,
just once. Never again. But this
having once been, even if it’s only once:
this having been earth’s own, seems to be irrevocable.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from the Ninth Duino Elegy / trans. Alfred Corn
At that time there was announced a lecture by Rudolf Steiner on the representation of those qualities in art which are both revealed to the senses and at the same time suprasensible. From my place I had an opportunity of observing Rilke, who sat among the audience, and I almost had to assume that, as commonly happened with him at that time, he did not feel at ease.
The next day I met Michael Bauer and other acquaintances in our restaurant. For years I had been most deeply attached to Christian Morgenstern’s staunchest friend. In my diary is inscribed this sentence about Bauer: “Belief in a man is fellow feeling with his higher self.”
The assembled company was just discussing Rudolf Steiner’s lecture when Rilke entered. There was a general desire to know what he thought about it. After some hesitation I was persuaded to go over to him, as he had done to me not long since. Such a return visit, I felt, might be ventured.
Without expressing any opinion on Rudolf Steiner’s exposition, Rilke began to develop his own ideas on our connection with the super-sensible. “We receive impressions through the senses,” he said, “through. eye, ear, taste. Between these senses are “voids,’ which are still filled out in the case of primitive peoples, but with us have died.” And on a paper serviette he drew a circle, which he divided into separate sectors, shading these alternately, so that finally a sort of disc with black cuneiform characters arose. “It is necessary to render these parts capable of cultivation,” he continued. “That gives us enough to do.” And he began to speak of Huysman’s Symphony of Smells.
I rejoined that the new life which needed to be brought to withered faculties should arise at a higher stage—out of the sphere of cognition, not of sentiency—by means which were open to all, and no longer the privilege of a favored few.
Here I became sensible of that inner opposition once more, and I held my peace.
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
— Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Recollection Two
The Painter Paul Cézanne
At the Summer Exhibition of 1936 where, thirty years after Cézanne’s death, more than 180 of his pictures were assembled in the Orangery of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, several mementos were to be seen just inside the entrance: Cézanne’s last palette; his rucksack; some illustrated letters to Emile Zola and, in addition, a human skull and a Cupid which he had often drawn or painted.
These intimate relics one contemplates with reverent absorption. They are natures mortes, witnessing to the living spirit.
The palette had been used by him only two days before his death, when a thunderstorm took him by surprise at his work and brought on the illness which caused his death. The white paint, squeezed from the tube, has the appearance of a butterfly chrysalis, but has become hard and grey; the orange resembles crumbling clay from the wayside; the brightness has faded out of the red; the blue has gone dark; all is lifeless lava-like earth.
The visitor’s gaze then roves down the vista of picture-hung rooms to the most distant room of all, its rear wall filled by Cézanne’s chef d’œuvre, the giant picture, Les Grandes Baigneuses.
Although unfinished, it yet bears the character of completion. The oils are handled like watercolor, so that the predominant hues in this cloud of effulgence—the blues and greens—-appear as if created out of their own element, out of water itself. “Everything is born out of Water,” says Thales, “Everything is born out of Air,” says Anaximander. But then to the pre-Socratic philosophers of Miletus the elements were still endowed with soul.
Beauty, which sprang from Divine Nature, no longer expressed itself architecturally with Cézanne in the same way as it did among the Greeks, but with rhythmic movement; his forms have become at the same time sounds. The picture is rather composed than built; yet conforms none the less strictly to law.
The triangular form, characteristic of the marble pediment in the Greek temple, is here thrust aloft by arboreal power, curved outward and opened toward the top. In the fourteen female figures who, slim like the tree-trunks, are grouped among them, it is more the harmony of growth than the proportion of limb which is rendered. Thus, we may imagine the sacred grove of an ancient people with its life cult. Through the trees there gleams a flowing stream, arousing in us a longing to journey to Arcady, for over its liquid surface hangs, despite the banks plain to present vision, the sense of a dream of long ago.
A painter who can set such a picture into an epoch like ours, which looks at things so differently, carries in his eye not merely the outer picture which is projected upon the retina but a power of illumination coming out of his inmost nature and reaching back to a remote past. This picture is not thought out by the intellect but is achieved with a degree of profundity which has unfolded only through tireless practice and by slow degrees. It is the same capacity which can be detected in the great dramatists when with unexpected suddenness they lead up to the critical turning point in their tragedies. One senses in this work Mystery elements of pre-Christian times, and one is led back thousands of years.
And one feels moved at the thought of that storm which overwhelmed Cézanne at his last work. To him, the same elements out of which he created his life’s greatest composition, brought death.
Next to the palette, with its vestiges of color, lies the yellowish-brown rucksack which accompanied him on his country walks.
So eloquent is it that one instinctively visualizes the shoulders which bore it.
There, too, is the death’s head, and one looks for evidence of the use to which Cézanne put it. Its painted replica is to be found with two others (I’rois têtes de mort) set upon an oriental rug shewing a pattern of flowers in purple-brown colors of the same size as the somber eye-sockets. These hollows next to the darkly luminous blossoms, make one think of dark whirlpools, sucking in.
It is a post-mortem still-life. Against the richness of the fabric the death’s heads produce an effect not merely of death but of deathliness, like potentized death, the “second death” of which St. Paul speaks, which the risen Christ was able to behold after the Crucifixion.
Cézanne always returns to this subject. It reaches back into his “dark period” when he showed a preference for brown, white and black in his pictures. In 1876 he had already painted une nature morte avec une tête de mort. Even in old age he could not escape from this model. It is related that for weeks on end he worked at it for several hours daily from 6 to 10 o’clock in the morning, as if making his will change the color and the form almost every day.
The fact that Cézanne was inclined to paint the same theme for long periods at a stretch was by no means due to a lack of imagination, but rather to the inexhaustible depths of his soul, He indulged in such exercises in no naive sense (like a child which can never have enough of a fairytale), nor in pious manner (like a saint who immerses himself more and more deeply in prayer), but as an artist seeking for knowledge, who makes of himself and his subject a study. He meditates upon the pictorial motive. Through a strengthening of the soul which he thereby achieved, that inner eye was sharpened which is nourished by the blood (and in the case of passionate people undergoes a dimming), whilst the outer eye—the physical mechanism which gives only lifeless mirror-images—was vitalized. Cézanne was thus able, as one of the first, to bring about the transition from the dark epoch of the nineteenth century to new illumination, a typical process with the foremost painters of that period.
In his “Still-life with the Black marble clock” the darkness of Cézanne’s first epoch finds symptomatic expression. Time seems to stand still.
Significantly, this motive is taken from Zola’s room. It was in their early youth that Zola and Cézanne met, and it seemed like fate that the famous painter should depict the famous writer with the look which the latter turned on his time—with an eye not as yet illuminated from within but radiating an unflinching will for truth.
Zola, as portrayed by Cézanne, is the keenly observing investigator and free spirit, the publicist who fights fanatically for justice. The picture I mean (“The poet Alexis reading to Zola”) is of the same epoch as the “Still-life with the black marble clock,” painted about 1868. Zola is sitting on a white cushion, clad in white. His garments, in spite of their ordinariness, have a strange charm. His pose, which suggests collectedness rather than repose, involuntarily gives rise to the thought: this might have been an Arab.
It certainly is of more than artistic significance that Cézanne paints Zola not upon a stool like Alexis—who is seen in profile on the left of the picture, crouching rather than sitting, with the manuscript in his hand—but almost at floor level, as if in a mosque, where neither stools nor benches are to be found.
In this room all is bare. Zola, with a concentrated yet open expression, holds his head forward and slightly bent. One hand hangs carelessly down; one knee is tucked under. Thus, he appears like a Caliph who has emancipated himself from Allah but has now transferred the will to fight, which formerly employed the sword, to the pen; he appears as the father of naturalism. His head reaches above a threshold at his back, into a very dark and narrow elongated space, cut off at the top. Despite the abstract effect of the geometrically divided dark and light surfaces, the picture is uncanny, its austerity oppressive. But Cézanne has succeeded in bringing light into the gloom which later suffocated Zola. It is as if his eye had derived vitality from those senses not yet bereft of their own life, the senses of taste and touch; as if it had converted itself into an organ of life. The geranium blossom with its dull pink can almost be felt upon the lips, whilst the rough green surface of the leaves almost invites a caress by the fingertips. In the landscape behind, shadow has vanished from the green. Light red glimmers forth. The mountain dissolves in violet-blue haze. The light which invades the space expands its boundaries, but the effect is not either of dissolving or of blurring, despite the incomprehensible extension, but rather of a deepening and strengthening.
The outlines of the earth remain defined.
Cézanne’s browns are of the purest, the brown of earth, of corn and of bread. One experiences everywhere access to an ethereal world. How heavenly does the sea, the hills and the woods now appear!
The world is presented to us anew—the tree, the plucked apple upon a plate, the plate itself, next to it the knife, the bottle, the cup, the tablecloth; every object, whether on kitchen-table or piano. The clay pipe in the mouth of the card player can be tasted visually.
People scarcely noticed in everyday life, housewives, peasants, have been so transformed by a touch of blue-green or blue-violet that one is never tired of contemplating them. And his homely wife, that good soul with her oval face, commands our reverence.
And next, there is the mountain, Sainte Victoire. One recognizes here the task given to Cezanne by the gods themselves, to paint it repeatedly until the beholder can take the picture with him as a goal for his whole life and the beyond. Let the earth fall into dust, its picture as painted by this artist will remain. What he has made of the mountain with its happy color stages, from orange-yellow to violet-red, we may retain; he has presented us with a goal—the new earth.
Remarkable, that one can take away more than one has seen on those canvasses. For if one closes the eyes and pictures the gallery to oneself, the visual space behind the eyelids is filled not only with the landscapes, portraits and still-life one has seen, but with many other beings which mingle with them.
And now the master himself stands before us. “Come,” he says, “there are still more beautiful things to paint.”
He lifts the rucksack, and as he buckles it upon his shoulders. One sees there are wings. . . He soars away.
6.19.25