Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

It is not necessary to speculate about the ultimate mission or purposeof the Spirit of the Age who was in charge from the beginning of theRenaissance until 1879 when, according to Steiner, a change of regency tookplace. It is sufficient for our purpose to notice that, in general, artists in theEgyptian and Graeco-Roman epochs (including the Middle Ages) tended todraw or paint objects in the flat two-dimensional sense, either shadowless oreven bathed in a supernal light as indicated by a gold background. There aresome exceptions to this, but they do not alter the general point being madehere. It was not until the beginning of the Renaissance that the depiction ofphysical objects in simulated three-dimensional space, made possible by thediscovery of the laws of perspective, began to dominate the consciousnessof artists. This corresponded to the awakening of the scientific spirit, whichenabled man to explore the purely physical aspects of objects with increasingacuity. This one-sided concentration partook of the illusion that artistsconjured out of pigments, colors, and shadows in a simulated, increasinglymore realistic light. At first both scientists and artists remained aware of adivine framework within which these endeavors took place, but this factorgradually became elusive in the course of the 18th and early 19th centuriesin Europe. It is of great interest that artists in the United States retained anawareness, which they applied to their work, of the divine ground of existenceright through to the 1870s —and, indeed, to a high degree.From the standpoint of Anthroposophy, it seems appropriate to pointto the temporal juxtaposition of the Luminist movement (dated roughly1850–1875 in this exhibition) with the succession to regency of the ArchangelMichael in 1879. Doubtless, the America of the third quarter of the 19thcentury, tortured as it was by the moral agony of the Civil War, was the onlyplace in the civilized world where light could still have been distilled “as aconcretion of divine essence” by a group of major artists. This looks like thelast triumph of what I should like to call traditional spirituality. The comingof Michael signified the call to create a new morality out of the situationgrowing from the irresistible momentum of a triumphant materialistic scienceand technology in the Western world.97