Doing Art > The Goetheanum offers practical approaches to the creativeness in art

Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland, 6 July 2022

Artistic activity makes familiar with creative processes. At the Goetheanum, the art impulse also lives as a stimulus for tasks in agriculture, medicine and education for instance. An Art Intensive Week reveals approaches in architecture, painting and sculpture.

Since the 1970s at the latest, dying trees, the decline in biodiversity and the disappearance of insects have been known as signatures of an ecological crisis. How does one come to change this initial situation? For Christiane Haid, art is a key to this. She is a painter and head of the Visual Arts Section and the Section for the Literary Arts and Humanities at the Goetheanum. “Let us look at Rudolf Steiner‘s ‘Nature Moods’. These sketches are not images of external natural events; they refer to an act that is effective in nature”, she adds. Dealing with the creative forces can become the starting point for facing tasks in the world.

In order to get to know this way of working, artists hold studios at the Goetheanum. One focus is on painting with the ‘Nature Moods’ as a starting point, the seven plinth motifs of the first Goetheanum to become familiar with laws of the transformation of form (metamorphosis) and the synthetic combining of tasks in architecture. Here, for example, the function of the future building, the individuals for whom the building is being constructed, the character of the surroundings, the building materials used and, last but not least, the actual time in which the building is being constructed must be taken into account.

The Goetheanum campus itself offers plenty of opportunities of studying its buildings and sculptures in the garden park. In addition, there will be 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 magazine ‘Stil’ also offers further options for study.

(1900 characters/SJ; translation by Monika Clément)

Art Intensive Week The New Art Impulse Centenary. Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, 31 July to 7 August 2022, Goetheanum

Exhibition Sun, moon and trees. Nature Moods. Centenary of motif sketches for painters (with nine originals by Rudolf Steiner), 31 July to 10 November 2022, Goetheanum Vernissage 31 July, 6 p.m., Goetheanum

Magazine ‘Stil’ (in German) Kunst und Natur. Centenary of Rudolf Steiner‘s ‘Nature Moods’

Contact person Christiane Haid