The Power of Thought-Pictures: On Rudolf Steiner’s Blackboard Drawings

Let's continue the science and architectural thread that started yesterday with a brief post on Rudolf Steiner. The Austrian philosopher, social reformer, esotericist, and architect designed indeed 17 buildings, among them the First and Second Goetheanums in Dornach, Switzerland. The construction problems and issues regarding them are quite intriguing, but we will have all the time to explore them in a future post since Kunsthal Rotterdam will celebrate Steiner with a dedicated exhibition opening in 2014. The event will look at Steiner as historical figure and as a major player in modern aesthetics.

Steiner's Goetheanums are somehow connected with his unique blackboard drawings. The First Goetheanum was designed in 1912, the same year in which Steiner founded Anthroposophy. The building became a meeting place and the organisation's home: Steiner developed at the Goetheanum many of his ideas and also held there a lot of his lectures.

In 1919 a colleague suggested to cover in thick black paper the blackboards Steiner used during his lectures so that his drawings wouldn't get lost. In this way over 1,100 images Steiner made during his lectures were saved.

These unique pieces – currently on display in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini at the 55th International Venice Art Biennale - were therefore not intended as artworks but as illustrations and visual aids.

Yet, in more recent years, critics reinterpreted them, analysing the relationships between graphic gestures (from arrows and circles to spirals, brackets and lines), looking at the importance of colours and considering the blackboard drawings as cosmic pictures. According to Steiner, colour was indeed linked with the forces of the cosmos and in his lecture "From Space Perspective to Colour Perspective" he described what we experience through colour as the unihindered movement of the soul in the cosmos.

These pedagogic aids employed for decades at the Goetheanums that proved influential for artists such as Joseph Beuys, have turned more recently into perfect examples of "thought-pictures", a sort of artistic and formative way of thinking, capable of reconciling and reuniting art and science.