The anthroposophical study of sculpture and the plastic arts, where carved and modelled form reveals the spirit working in the human body rather than copying outward nature.
Sculpture and the Plastic Arts in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of the modelling, carving and form-shaping arts as a path that draws the spirit out of three-dimensional matter. In The Arts and Their Mission (GA 276, 1923), Steiner treats sculpture as the art that meets the human being placed in present space: the modeller does not imitate a surface but reads the formative forces that built the head, the brow and the limbs. He distinguishes the two opposite gestures of the craft, the woodcarver who hollows inward toward the concave and the marble sculptor who builds outward toward the convex, each living inside the resistance of the material. Anchored at the root, where physical substance is overcome from within, this art today still shapes the modelling work of the Goetheanum and the formative training in Waldorf schools.
The Lede
Sculpture and the plastic arts, in Steiner's spiritual science, are the form-giving crafts through which the invisible forces that shaped the human body become visible again in wood, clay and stone. Sculpture does not photograph a pose. It follows how the higher hierarchies worked the head out of a previous life, how the nose answers the breathing chest, how mouth and chin bind us to earth. The modeller works the human form as an imprint of spirit upon the present.
In Steiner's Own Words
Above all, he must grasp what is concave with his artistic eye and hollow it out. The sculptor working in wood hollows out the wood. The sculptor working in marble or another material, in a hard material, does not consider how the eye goes in. He does not hollow out, but considers how the forehead comes out of the eye. He builds up. He considers the convex. The sculptor working in marble, even when he is working in plasticine or another material, in clay, must put himself into his material. Those who work with marble build up. Those who work with wood hollow out. You have to be able to live with your material. If you are an artist, the material must speak a living language to you.
What it Means Today
The clearest living example of what Steiner meant stands in the carpentry studio beside the second Goetheanum in Dornach. There the nine-and-a-half-metre wooden Group, usually called The Representative of Humanity, was carved by Steiner together with the English sculptor Edith Maryon between 1915 and the year of his death in 1925. The central figure holds the balance between Lucifer above and Ahriman below, and every plane of the elm wood was modelled, not decorated, so that the form itself carries the moral gesture. This is the plastic impulse Steiner set against l'art pour l'art: form wrested out of matter to speak of spirit. The same impulse trains the hand in Waldorf schools, where pupils from the upper grades model in clay and beeswax and later carve in wood, learning the concave-and-convex listening Steiner described rather than copying a model. Modern Goetheanum sculpture courses, run through the Section for the Visual Arts, still teach the metamorphosis of surfaces as a discipline of perception, not a style. The sculptor's task, in this reading, is to overcome the merely earthly while keeping both feet on the ground that the root chakra signifies. Sculpture and the plastic arts reach a Renaissance height in Michelangelo.
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