In the course of over 6000 unscripted lectures given during his life, Rudolf Steiner often made use of blackboard sketches; sometimes to emphasise a term, or to draw attention to a name or a date; at other times to build up or resolve a complex set of circumstances for the listener, or even just to enliven a thought by a drawn gesture. Very often, these initially quite simple sketches were added to and worked with over the course of the lecture, so that by the end an ‘imaginative, colourful, flowing, complete picture’ (Assja Turgenieff) would come about.

The fact that around 1,100 of these blackboard drawings have been preserved is thanks to the initiative of one particular member of Steiner’s audience, Emma Stolle, who urged the conveners to put black paper on the surface of the blackboards from around 1916 onwards. The lecturer often had two or even three blackboards at his disposal that were prepared in this way.  

When the lecture was over, the black and white or coloured chalk drawings were set on the paper with fixative, dated and stored.  

Since their first exhibition outside the archive at the Gallery Monika Sprüth in Cologne in the summer of 1992, Steiner’s blackboard drawings have been on view in many prestigious museums. It is probably the extraordinary spiritual presence of these drawings and the immediacy of their pictorial effect which have made this late discovery of Steiner for and by today’s art scene possible.