The Aesthetics of Rudolf Steiner and Spiritual Modernism.

Abstract

Around 1900, a wave of European artists and intellectuals turned to spiritual themes and modes of thought to reform a society perceived as dominated by rationalism, materialism and mimetic art. My dissertation places at the center of this movement Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)—the Austrian philosopher, artist, architect, pedagogue and social reformer. I trace Steiner’s influence on canonical modernists and show that his writings are deeply resonant with contemporary developments in the visual arts, art theory and architecture. In Chapter One, I examine the influence of Steiner’s theory of dematerialization on Wassily Kandinsky’s conception of abstraction. While exploring significant points of connection between both thinkers, I argue that Steiner ultimately does not aim for abstraction but instead for a return to the phenomenological world in an immersive mode characteristic of Goethean thought. In Chapter Two, I bring Steiner's art historical theory into dialogue with the writings of the German art theorist Wilhelm Worringer and the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl. I argue that both Steiner and Riegl conceive of the history of art as the expression of a collective aesthetic drive, what Riegl calls Kunstwollen, and that Worringer and Steiner understand “abstraction” in philosophical rather than periodic terms. Chapter Three turns to Steiner's first Goetheanum building, placing it in the context of Expressionist architecture on the one hand and anti-war responses to the First World War on the other. I bring Steiner’s theory of the first Goetheanum as promoting peace into conversation with three contemporaneous thinkers and projects: Bruno Taut and his Glashaus Pavilion from 1914; the German fantasy writer and illustrator Paul Scheerbart; and Sigmund Freud’s 1915 anti-war text “Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod.” My project makes three interventions into the field of modernism studies. First, by considering Steiner's place within Expressionism, it adds to the heterogeneity of this movement. Second, it contributes to the neglected subfield of what I call "spiritual modernism," arguing that the spiritual was never historically “excluded” from the modern. Finally, my dissertation broadens our understanding of modernism by complicating traditional binaries such as religious/secular and pre-modern/modern.