Art and Knowledge of Art (GA 271) is a collection of eight lectures Rudolf Steiner gave on the spiritual sources of the arts, delivered between 1909 and 1921 in Berlin, Munich, Vienna, and Dornach. The volume gathers a single famous Berlin lecture from 1909 with a later cluster of wartime and post-war talks given to anthroposophical audiences. Its core subject is the question of where artistic creation comes from: not the techniques of painting or sculpture, but the relationship between sense perception and the spiritual world that, in Steiner's view, every genuine work of art makes visible. The German series title, Kunst und Kunsterkenntnis, points to that double aim, the making of art and the knowing of it.
Place in Steiner's Work
This volume belongs to Steiner's aesthetic writings, a strand of his thought that runs from his youthful work on Goethe to the founding of eurythmy and the building of the first Goetheanum. The earliest lecture here, given in Berlin in October 1909, predates the First World War and the public architecture projects in Dornach. The six middle lectures, all from 1918, were spoken in the shadow of the war to listeners who already knew his spiritual science. The two final talks, from 1920 and 1921 in Dornach, were given once the Goetheanum stood as a built argument for everything he had been describing in words. Reading the volume in order, you can watch a single idea pass through three quite different rooms: a public Berlin hall, intimate wartime gatherings in Munich and Vienna, and finally the unfinished hall of the Goetheanum itself.
What holds the collection together is a thesis Steiner returned to across his life: that art occupies the threshold between the world of the senses and the world of spirit. He calls this the sensible-supersensible, a phrase he drew from Goethe, for whom beauty was nature revealing her hidden laws to the eye. In the closing lecture, The Psychology of the Arts, Steiner traces his own struggle with the question back to a talk he gave in his twenties to the Viennese Goethe Society, titled Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic. The volume can therefore be read as Steiner taking stock of an inquiry that occupied him from his student years to the last years of his life. It is one of the clearest places to see how his early Goethe scholarship and his later spiritual science were, for him, one continuous line of thought rather than two separate careers.
Themes and Structure
The opening 1909 lecture, The Nature and Origin of the Arts, is the most striking piece in the collection and unlike anything else Steiner published on the subject. Rather than argue, he tells a visionary tale. A soul falls asleep in a frozen landscape and meets, one after another, the spiritual beings standing behind each of the arts: dance, mime, sculpture, architecture, painting, music, and poetry. A messenger born from the sunset speaks two words to her at the start:
"Thou art Art."
Each art is presented as a being that has descended from the spiritual hierarchies and lost something of itself on the way into the physical world. Dance is bound up with the sense of balance and the Spirits of Motion; the lost offspring of that being, Steiner says, survives in us only as the three little canals of the inner ear. Sculpture is tied to the Spirits of Personality, architecture to the Spirits of Form, painting to intuition and the Seraphim, music to inspiration and the Cherubim, and poetry to imagination and the Spirits of Will. As the soul unites with each being, she warns herself not to step beyond the boundary where noble form would collapse into mere passion. The tableau closes with the soul waking beside a second woman, who turns out to be Human Knowledge, half frozen, and warming her back to life. The image makes Steiner's claim plainly: art and knowledge are companions, and beauty is the path by which cold knowing is brought back to warmth. The lecture ends with a verse couplet, that only through the dawn of beauty does one reach the country of truth.
The 1918 lectures translate that vision into the sober language of spiritual science. Under titles such as The Sensible-Supersensible in its Realisation Through the Arts and The Sources of Artistic Imagination and Supersensible Knowledge, Steiner examines how the artist works from a perception that is neither purely physical nor purely abstract. He argues that the genuine artist neither copies nature nor illustrates ideas, but lifts the sensory toward the spiritual while keeping it sensory, so that a painting tells us something about the inner life of color and a piece of music sounds like a sister of the wind and the thunder rather than a recording of them. Each art is given its own spiritual signature: sculpture working outward into noble form, music welling up from inside the soul where no outer model exists, painting carrying soul-light into color and surface. The lecture from Vienna in June 1918, on spiritual knowledge and artistic creation, draws the two halves of the volume's title together, insisting that to know the world spiritually and to make art are two motions of the same human faculty.
The final two Dornach lectures, The Supernatural Origin of the Artistic and The Psychology of the Arts, are the most personal and reflective. Here Steiner sets his mature view against the academic aesthetics of his youth, naming the philosophers Robert Zimmermann and Eduard von Hartmann. He recalls Zimmermann mounting the lectern with stiff ceremony to teach an aesthetics of pure form, and von Hartmann treating the arts, in Steiner's vivid image, as though one were skinning a living being to study the hide. From both he says he had to free himself. His conclusion is that a philosopher who tries to dissect art is like a person who wants to speak but has gone mute and can only point with chaste gestures. One should instead speak about art artistically, staying inside the creative mood rather than standing outside it with concepts. Throughout the eight lectures, the volume insists that a work of art is not decoration but a form of knowledge, a way the spiritual world becomes perceptible to ordinary sight and hearing.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entries in the Thalira glossary draw on GA 271 as a source. This study guide serves as the hub for the terms it grounds:
Art and Knowledge Artistic Imagination The Nature of Beauty The Origin of the Arts
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of the volume alongside the original German. Printed editions and related titles can be found through SteinerBooks at their catalog search for Art and Knowledge of Art. Because the eight lectures were translated by several hands over many years, comparing two renderings of the same passage is often the quickest way to feel where Steiner's German is doing something the English can only approximate.
Continue Your Study
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to see how the arts connect to Steiner's wider vocabulary of soul and spirit.
- Begin with the central idea of this volume through the entry on Art and Knowledge, the pairing the closing tableau dramatizes.
- Follow the creative thread into Artistic Imagination and The Nature of Beauty to see how Steiner links making and knowing.