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I’ve written before about my bewilderment regarding Rudolf Steiner. “Think these thoughts but do not believe them” should have been the watchword for his entire oeuvre, and the mystery is how he came up with some of the ideas that populate the more recondite texts of anthroposophy.
But the sentence I have quoted was extracted from Steiner’s work by Owen Barfield; and Barfield, from Poetic Diction to Worlds Apart to Saving the Appearances, deployed Rudolf Steiner to set forth some of the notions regarding the evolution of consciousness that have become commonplaces not only of cultural studies but of anthropology and of the various subdisciplines of those interdisciplines.
So it is somehow appropriate that the late Kurt Falk’s life work, The Unknown Hieronymus Bosch, should itself be such a conceptually odd book.
The book, presented by Falk’s wife Anne Stockton in the state in which it was left at the time of Falk’s death in 1986, is prefaced by a short essay by Robert Sardello that suggests that Falk’s text be read as a meditational guide for our imaginations rather than as art history. And indeed, Falk’s anthroposophical interpretations of Bosch make use of concepts that were almost certainly not known in that form to Bosch, although Falk accepts the idea that Bosch was a member of a heretical sect whose teachings are emblematized in the iconography of all Bosch’s work, in the Biblical scenes as much as in the visionary apocalypses and paradises.
Falk’s book does present a convenient chronology of forty-three paintings from Bosch’s oeuvre (insofar as a chronology can be established), and the book would be worth it just for the color illustrations of so much of Bosch at a reasonable price. And Falk analyzes the iconography in such detail, calling our attention to objects and creatures easily overlooked in smaller reproductions, that it doesn’t matter whether the reader agrees with Falk’s interpretations of them. Falk’s book transforms the quality of our attention, if not the content of our opinions.
It is deeply appropriate, in my particular reading of Falk, that his lifelong passion for Bosch was stirred by a Bosch painting of the Last Judgment in the art museum in Cairo. The painting, Sardello tells us, is almost certainly by an imitator of Bosch, but Falk wrests immense meaning out of the ways in which it differs from Bosch’s more famous Last Judgment in Bruges and the right-hand panel of The Garden of Celestial Delights in Madrid (better known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, or just The Garden of Delights, but I use Falk’s title for it).
The Cairo painting replicates segments of other paintings so exactly that it’s obvious why it’s considered to be an imitation, but we shall apparently never have decisive verification of its age via analysis of pigments or of the support on which it is painted, for the painting has been lost in the years since Falk saw it. The reproduction in Falk’s book is from a magazine photo published in 1966, apparently the only existing documentation.
Falk, who co-founded an art school in England after having been a biodynamic farmer in Germany and Egypt, certainly had no postmodernist intentions in producing this text. But the chequered history of the painting that inspired him is almost a parable of postmodernity: A painting, which may or may not be an homage or even an outright forgery, inspires a lifelong quest through the indisputably authentic. Eventually, the results of the quest are made public, but by then the object that was the linchpin of the quest has disappeared and there is no longer any hope of its authentication or even further evaluation of its possible falsity. But in the end its authenticity or inauthenticity scarcely matters; what matters is what imaginative use was made of it, and what authentic legacy has been left through its interactions with an audience.
So in the end one could give this book a Barfieldian reading, but Falk’s fragmentary bibliography gives a full list of the Rudolf Steiner lectures that went into its making, and a fair number of the secondary sources on Bosch that he consulted.
As with the painting in Cairo, what impact this book has on the reader is up to him or her.
But the sentence I have quoted was extracted from Steiner’s work by Owen Barfield; and Barfield, from Poetic Diction to Worlds Apart to Saving the Appearances, deployed Rudolf Steiner to set forth some of the notions regarding the evolution of consciousness that have become commonplaces not only of cultural studies but of anthropology and of the various subdisciplines of those interdisciplines.
So it is somehow appropriate that the late Kurt Falk’s life work, The Unknown Hieronymus Bosch, should itself be such a conceptually odd book.
The book, presented by Falk’s wife Anne Stockton in the state in which it was left at the time of Falk’s death in 1986, is prefaced by a short essay by Robert Sardello that suggests that Falk’s text be read as a meditational guide for our imaginations rather than as art history. And indeed, Falk’s anthroposophical interpretations of Bosch make use of concepts that were almost certainly not known in that form to Bosch, although Falk accepts the idea that Bosch was a member of a heretical sect whose teachings are emblematized in the iconography of all Bosch’s work, in the Biblical scenes as much as in the visionary apocalypses and paradises.
Falk’s book does present a convenient chronology of forty-three paintings from Bosch’s oeuvre (insofar as a chronology can be established), and the book would be worth it just for the color illustrations of so much of Bosch at a reasonable price. And Falk analyzes the iconography in such detail, calling our attention to objects and creatures easily overlooked in smaller reproductions, that it doesn’t matter whether the reader agrees with Falk’s interpretations of them. Falk’s book transforms the quality of our attention, if not the content of our opinions.
It is deeply appropriate, in my particular reading of Falk, that his lifelong passion for Bosch was stirred by a Bosch painting of the Last Judgment in the art museum in Cairo. The painting, Sardello tells us, is almost certainly by an imitator of Bosch, but Falk wrests immense meaning out of the ways in which it differs from Bosch’s more famous Last Judgment in Bruges and the right-hand panel of The Garden of Celestial Delights in Madrid (better known as The Garden of Earthly Delights, or just The Garden of Delights, but I use Falk’s title for it).
The Cairo painting replicates segments of other paintings so exactly that it’s obvious why it’s considered to be an imitation, but we shall apparently never have decisive verification of its age via analysis of pigments or of the support on which it is painted, for the painting has been lost in the years since Falk saw it. The reproduction in Falk’s book is from a magazine photo published in 1966, apparently the only existing documentation.
Falk, who co-founded an art school in England after having been a biodynamic farmer in Germany and Egypt, certainly had no postmodernist intentions in producing this text. But the chequered history of the painting that inspired him is almost a parable of postmodernity: A painting, which may or may not be an homage or even an outright forgery, inspires a lifelong quest through the indisputably authentic. Eventually, the results of the quest are made public, but by then the object that was the linchpin of the quest has disappeared and there is no longer any hope of its authentication or even further evaluation of its possible falsity. But in the end its authenticity or inauthenticity scarcely matters; what matters is what imaginative use was made of it, and what authentic legacy has been left through its interactions with an audience.
So in the end one could give this book a Barfieldian reading, but Falk’s fragmentary bibliography gives a full list of the Rudolf Steiner lectures that went into its making, and a fair number of the secondary sources on Bosch that he consulted.
As with the painting in Cairo, what impact this book has on the reader is up to him or her.
