ELISABETH WAGNER-KOCH

Elisabeth Wagner-Koch was born in 1923, the youngest of four children (two sisters and a brother) on the estate Wickershausen in Germany near Hanover.  Her father was a farmer; her mother came from a manufacturing family.  The secluded estate Wickershausen lies on the eastern slope of the Solling, an extension of the Weserberglandes, a mountainous region.  The wide, clear view from sunrise to sunset, the beautiful nature, and the sparkling night sky with its multitude of stars impressed themselves deeply and lifelong into the soul of the child.  The ruling lawfulness and harmony of nature became the foundation for her own feeling of life.

She spent her school years in Hanover, and graduated with the Abitur in 1942 (a secondary-school diploma which qualifies one for university study).  There she experienced the war years and the extensive destruction of city.  During this time she also came to know Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, which from then on became the spiritual center of her life.  She had an early love for all the arts, especially for music.

Her artistic path began with a training in sculpture.  For seven years she worked with clay, wood, stone and bronzes—the substances of earth.  The emergence of sculptural form was a musical experience for her.  But she also wanted to paint.  Studying Rudolf Steiner’s colour lectures led her to a question which occupied her deeply: how does form arise out of colour?

The painters she spoke with about this question could give her no answer.  So her path led her in 1950 to the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland.  In the painter Gerard Wagner she found the teacher she sought.   His schooling was an inner path, a journey into the life element of colour itself, out of which the form, the motif arises as an inner necessity.  To follow this path became her life’s calling from then on.

The study of painting with Gerard Wagner led to the founding of a school they led together, and also to her teaching painting for 30 years at the Pedagogical Seminar in Dornach, where the fruitfulness of this painting method for the growing child and for teachers became apparent.

Further trainings in eurythmy and eurythmy therapy joined fruitfully in the circle of the arts.  Eurythmy is a new art of movement inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner, which has as its foundation human speech and singing in their relation to the cosmos.  Each vowel is related to a planet, each consonant to a constellation of the zodiac in a cosmos of moving, weaving colour.  These indications of Rudolf Steiner, which stand in the most intimate relationship to the training of a painter, became the basis for decades of research.  Numerous painting studies for eurythmy, completely new coloured star charts and many other initiatives are the fruit of these efforts.

Thus eurythmy gave the arts of sculpture and painting priceless enrichment, from which there also arose a whole new creative relationship to the nature of language and the literary and dramatic arts.  A large number of poems, small plays and other writings emerged.  It became ever easier to experience how one art arises from another out of an inner necessity, and how only in combination can they take hold of the whole human being: architecture, sculpture, painting, music, the literary and dramatic arts, eurythmy.  That she was able to learn the four arts of sculpture, painting, eurythmy, and writing before her 50th year, deeply and thoroughly, and just in this sequence, may be experienced as a special gift of her life.

Out of the close collaboration with Gerard Wagner arose the step-by-step painting handbook The Individuality of Colour, now available in a beautiful new English edition.  Through numerous publications, painting exhibitions and other initiatives, Elisabeth Wagner-Koch worked to make Gerard Wagner’s work better known.  (See also the list of publications on this website.)

After Gerard Wagner’s death in 1999 she helped build up an archives for his more than 5000 paintings, drawings, and manuscripts, which have been given into the care of the Gerard and Elisabeth Wagner Association.