The form-creating power that rises unconsciously in the artist, which Steiner read as a dim first foretaste of Imagination, the opening stage of spiritual cognition.
Artistic Imagination is the faculty by which a painter, poet or sculptor receives living figures and forms from the subconscious and pours them into a work of art. Steiner placed it at the threshold between waking awareness and seership, kin to spiritual knowledge yet still bound to the body. The artist creates out of feeling and willing while ordinary thinking grows quiet.
In Steiner's Own Words
From time immemorial, people have felt the affinity between artistic imagination and supersensible knowledge, with what can be called seeing consciousness, or, if one is not misunderstood, which would be easy, seership. For the spiritual researcher of the present day, who, starting from the point of view of the present, attempts to penetrate into the spiritual world, this relationship between artistic creation and supersensible knowledge is much more significant than the other, often emphasized relationship between the visionary life, which is fundamentally based on pathological conditions, and that which is really only in the soul, without the help of the body, is vision.
What it Means Today
Steiner's claim is precise rather than romantic. In his lecture of 5 May 1918 in Munich he distinguishes three things that are easily blurred: the sick visionary, the trained seer, and the working artist. The artist does not lose composure to compulsive visions, nor does he sit in the deliberate calm of the seer. Instead, while ordinary perceiving and remembering fall partly silent, his feeling and willing grow active, and form-impulses out of the spiritual world rise unnoticed into the finished canvas, score or verse. This is why Steiner names creative fantasy the first dim reflection of Imagination proper, the opening rung of supersensible cognition that the meditant later learns to hold in full waking clarity.
This reading is still worked with as living research, not museum doctrine. At the Goetheanum in Dornach, the School of Spiritual Science keeps a dedicated Section for the arts, and Michael Howard's 2016 study Educating the Will traces Steiner's idea that the artist sculpts from the willing pole rather than the head. The practical consequence is concrete: an art that means to nourish the soul cannot be copied down from outer nature alone, nor squeezed out of clever theory. It asks the maker to quiet the calculating intellect and let form arise, so the work carries a trace of the spirit it was drawn from. Artistic Imagination, in this light, is less a talent than a threshold one learns to keep clean. Artistic imagination becomes restless seeking in Leonardo da Vinci.
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