The Representative of Humanity: Experiencing Rudolf Steiner's Group Sculpture Through Drawing

The Representative of Humanity: Experiencing Rudolf Steiner’s Group Sculpture through Drawing gives an introduction to a great work of art created by Rudolf Steiner and Edith Maryon. Saved from the fire which destroyed the first Goetheanum building, the sculpture now stands in the second Goetheanum as a poignant memory of the lost building and as an example of a new living style of art born out of anthroposophy. 

The drawings are by Manuela Angel, Louise van Blommestein, Caroline Chanter, Christine Cologna, Ernst Georg Haller, Gwenola Hemlin, Christian Hitsch, Valerie Jacobs, Van James, Joachim Karsten, Arne Klingborg, J. Georg Müller, Bettina Müller, Georg Nemes, Heinrich Roemlein, Melanie Stoye, Veronika Thiersch, Peter A. Wolf, Margarita Woloshina, and Natalya Yeshchenko.

“I have often mentioned the fact that a figure of the archetypal human form, which one can also speak of as the Christ, and which will have Lucifer on the one side and Ahriman on the other, will stand in an important position in our [Goetheanum] building. What is concentrated in the Christ figure will be sep-arated out, divided, in as much as it can be divided, anew into Lucifer and Ahriman – what is united sculpturally in the one figure we make musical, so to speak, by creating a melody out of it : Christ-Lucifer-Ahriman.”
-- Rudolf Steiner, Lecture of July 31, 1915, CW 162

At the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland, a unique work of art – the 'Group Sculpture' – waits to be discovered, and rediscovered. Carved in elm wood, the sculpture stands nine and a half metres (over 30 feet) in height. It was intended to be the central work of art in the first Goetheanum building which was destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922/1923. The sculpture, however, due to its unfinished state, had not been placed in the building, and so it survived. It now stands in a room especially designed for it in the present Goetheanum building. The room is open to the public and the sculpture continues to be appreciated by an ever growing number of visitors.

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) and the English sculptress Edith Maryon (1872–1924) are the two artists responsible for the creation of the sculpture. Their joint undertaking can be followed by studying the row of preparatory models which show the various stages of the sculpture's development. The first model was created after Steiner's concept by Edith Maryon in 1914, and a number of models followed culminating in the full-scale plasticine model on which work began in 1916. In 1917 a group of artists and helpers began carving the sculpture in wood.

The collaboration between Edith Maryon and Rudolf Steiner was a meeting of two different artistic approaches, and it is interesting to follow the development of the sculpture with this in mind. Edith Maryon, trained in the classical-academic manner of the nineteenth century, had the skills and technical expertise to help Rudolf Steiner realise his artistic concept. As the work on the sculpture advanced, Edith Maryon's classical handling of the figures receded into the background. The artist Assja Turgenieff described how her 'beautiful forms' were transformed by Steiner as he worked on the full-scale plasticine model:

'While Dr Steiner was away on his numerous travels, Miss Maryon prepared the work for him. He had hardly arrived back when he began work once again and it was as if a storm was raging in the atelier. Everything was in movement; all the surfaces and edges of the forms were transformed in a rush of superhuman drama. The eye could no longer rest in the beautiful forms, but had to live with them, pass through them, the forms themselves disappeared to become pure movement, expression and being.'1

Due to her selfless collaboration, Edith Maryon enabled the spiritual researcher Rudolf Steiner to initiate a new living art of sculpture. For herself, she also had the privilege of taking part in the birth of a unique future-orientated work of art, created in the service of humanity.