GERARD WAGNER

A Description of the Painting Method of Gerard Wagner

Since the late 1920s Gerard Wagner (1906-1999) researched Rudolf Steiner’s training sketches for painters (originally given to Henni Geck in 1922 for her painting school in Dornach) as well as Steiner’s other paintings, practicing the specific color application sequences appropriate in building up each motif and thereby developing an exact feeling for the characteristic gestures, qualities, and tendencies toward movement of the individual colors and of their interactions with other colors. He discovered and explored further the “living laws” of these sequences, with each motif appearing to him as a kind of interrelated“ color organism.

Wagner would then undertake studies of how a particular motif with its typical color sequence metamorphosed when the same color sequence was painted on and thus interacted with a variety of different background colors. According to such methodical, “musical” watercolor painting experiments over many decades, he highly refined his skill at balancing the progressive interactions of the specific color sequences in terms of the usually quantitative elements of weight, measure, and number that he rediscovered as qualitative, non-material dimensions within the “living color organism” of each painting. Through such color interactions, it was always colors that gave rise to elements of form in each painting, a basic principle of Steiner’s approach to a new painting. Wagner’s research included many studies of the essential nature, seasonal growth cycles ,and metamorphosis of plants, often including images of the nature spirits involved in these processes. Especially during the last half of his career Wagner mostly worked with watercolors made from pigments from plant, rather than mineral sources., following a n initiative of Rudolf Steiner.

Wagner began his more independent artistic experiments (which could be called “color metamorphoses”) simply with only a couple of colors, one of which changed in minute steps from one painting or panel to the next through an entire series of perhaps 8 or 16 papers (e.g., from blue-green to yellow-green or from a cool red to a warm red, etc.) With each alternation/variation in color shade, the questions arose anew as to what should be the corresponding change in form in each panel. These experiments gradually grew more complex. By these researches, he said, “one seeks entry into the living world of formative forces.” Wagner’s paintings invite us to discover their subjects anew, from within, purely out of color, as he did.

 Wagner’s consistent, meticulously repeated and varied color experiments, as he said, “led to a series of metamorphosis which present an attempt to come to artistic insights through a methodical approach to color. . . . For above all, they were painted to establish the relationship between color and form.” He added: “This is not just a painting problem, but also a musical one. Colors, like the sequence of tones and intervals in music, follow a path through time, and become visible in space.” By his death Wagner had completed more than 4,000 paintings as well as many wall murals, book cover and packaging designs, and more.