KARL BLOSSFELDT|11 MIN READ

What Inspired Karl Blossfeldt's Art

Seven classroom studies of leaves, ferns, a calyx, a flower head and milkweed buds became a book that made a sixty-three-year-old teacher world-famous. Behind the prints are a dismissed dragonfly wing, an early magazine appearance and a banker with an eye for avant-garde art.

WRITER Moryarty

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Blossfeldt - Urformen der Kunst, 1928
Karl Blosfeldt, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Karl Blossfeldt art most people know began where few famous series of photographs begin: in a classroom. The close-up studies of stems, seed pods and unfurling ferns were made so that design students could see what the naked eye skims over. Seven of those studies carry the story that follows. Published in Berlin in 1928, Urformen der Kunst turned a modest art teacher into one of the celebrated photographers of his day.

Each of those seven studies took its own route into the book. One grew out of a dismissed dragonfly wing, another ran in a magazine two years before the volume appeared, and a third owes its public life to a banker with an eye for avant-garde art. What joins them is a single conviction: the forms nature solves every day are worth copying at the drafting table, on a gate, in wallpaper and on a wall.

Acanthus mollis and the book plates sold for framing

In 1881, at sixteen, Karl Blossfeldt began an apprenticeship as an iron caster at the Art Ironworks and Foundry in Mägdesprung, where the foundry made wrought iron grilles and gates decorated with plant motifs. The young apprentice learned to look at a leaf the way a designer looks at a material, as something to study before it becomes something to use. Acanthus mollis, an acanthus, the classic ornamental plant of ancient columns, belonged to exactly that world. For Blossfeldt its jagged leaves were a teaching subject, a structure a student could examine and then translate into ironwork, wallpaper or any other manufactured surface.

Acanthus mollis

The study became plate 92 of Urformen der Kunst, the book Ernst Wasmuth published in Berlin in 1928. There the plate is captioned Acanthus mollis. Akanthus. Bärenklau, the botanical Latin followed by two German names. The photograph sits among 120 numbered plates, each with an explanatory note, in a volume introduced by the gallerist Karl Nierendorf, so the acanthus study belongs to an orderly collection rather than to any independent publication.

Art dealers treated Urformen der Kunst as a source of pictures worth framing. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger note in their photobook history that dealers bought copies of the volume to break them up and sell the plates singly, to be framed and hung. A page from a teaching book became a picture in its own right. When you hang one of the book's botanical plates in your own room, you're seeing what those dealers saw: a plate worth a frame.

Polystichum munitum and the teaching experiment that began with a dragonfly

The experiment behind Polystichum munitum began, of all things, with a dragonfly. Blossfeldt had made a large model of a dragonfly's wing for his teaching, and the school's director dismissed the model as trivial. According to Hanako Murata's essay for MoMA, Blossfeldt's answer was to photograph the insect enlarged instead. The teaching experiment with enlarged photographs grew from this episode.

Polystichum Munitum

That method found its home in the modelling course Blossfeldt taught at the Institute of the Royal Arts and Crafts Museum in Berlin from 1898 to 1930. The class worked from living plants. In it, Blossfeldt showed students how the solutions nature arrives at could be applied to ironwork and wallpaper design. What began as an answer to one sceptical director stayed at the centre of his teaching for some thirty years.

The fern study records a leaf of a prickly shield fern at sixfold enlargement and became plate 38 of Urformen der Kunst. When the book appeared in 1928, Blossfeldt was sixty-three, with a long teaching life behind him and no published photography book to his name. The fern plate is the work of a patient teacher in his sixties, not of a young photographer at the start of a career.

A published photogravure of the plate survives in the National Gallery of Art's portfolio of the book, a gift of Mary and Dan Solomon and the Patrons' Permanent Fund.

Cobea scandens and the camera behind Blossfeldt's close-up art

Karl Blossfeldt was never formally trained as a photographer. He came to the camera as a sculptor and teacher with a practical problem. His students needed to examine plant forms closely. He built his own equipment for that task.

Cobea scandens

The homemade cameras were fitted with custom magnifying lenses, and published accounts record enlargements of up to thirty times a plant's natural size. Thirty times was the upper limit of what the equipment could do, and individual studies used smaller enlargements.

Cobea scandens shows the system working at a deliberate, modest setting. The study records the calyx of the Mexican ivy at fourfold enlargement, a scale called out in the plate's published identification, and four times is enough to turn a small, easily missed structure into something a student can study: the curling tendrils, the clustered nodes, the way the plant builds upward. Blossfeldt's point was never spectacle but access, letting a class look at what ordinary inspection would miss. The calyx study appeared in the book in 1928. The Rijksmuseum preserves a complete copy of that volume, so the published calyx study survives there as a page of the volume, not as a separately catalogued print.

Adiantum pedatum reached magazine readers before the book

Adiantum pedatum doesn't settle into a single date. The Museum of Modern Art dates the negative to between 1898 and 1926, which means the photograph existed long before the famous volume. Its production belongs to a different moment from its publication, and the two histories are easy to tangle.

Adiantum pedatum

The first readers to see it in print weren't book buyers. The image appeared in the magazine Uhu in June 1926, in Robert Breuer's article Grüne Architektur. The caption there described the curled shoots as the bishop's crooks with which young fern fronds break through the earth each year. Magazine readers met the fern two years before the volume that made Blossfeldt's name.

In the book it became plate 55 of Urformen der Kunst. The caption identifies young rolled leaves at eight times magnification. The volume is the 1928 edition published by Ernst Wasmuth in Berlin with Karl Nierendorf as co-author, and it's the book, not the photograph, that carries the 1928 date.

The surviving objects make the distinction visible. MoMA in New York holds a vintage gelatin silver print dated between 1924 and 1932, a physical print whose dating concerns the print itself rather than the negative or the edition. The National Gallery of Art holds a photogravure dated 1928, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art holds a rotogravure dated 1928.

Chrysanthemum parthenium and Nierendorf's decision to exhibit plant photographs

Karl Nierendorf was a banker and a collector of avant-garde art. When he noticed Blossfeldt's plant photographs in 1925, he saw something the classroom had kept private: a body of work worth showing as art. He encouraged Blossfeldt to exhibit the photographs made for teaching.

Chrysanthemum parthenium

The first solo exhibition came in 1926 at Nierendorf's gallery in Berlin, where the plant photographs hung alongside African sculptures. The pairing made a point, and it made Blossfeldt's reputation among artists and collectors. Material compiled for industrial designers now had a public art context: the same forms, shown to a different public in a different room.

Nierendorf's part went beyond the gallery exhibition. He went on to edit Urformen der Kunst and write its introduction, so his involvement stretched from the first public showing to the book itself.

The effect was sharp. The book was conceived as a teaching tool for German industrial and commercial designers, yet it made Blossfeldt a celebrated photographer with astonishing speed. Chrysanthemum parthenium survives in the middle of that change: a photogravure from the 1928 portfolio, now in the National Gallery of Art's collection. The plate shows a single feverfew leaf against a pale background, its veining and serrated edges sharply in focus.

Allium ostrowskianum from classroom reference to collected print

The garlic-flower study began where all of these began: in the classroom. Its identification preserves the sixfold enlargement beside the botanical name, so the plate keeps the practical information a design student would have needed.

Allium Ostroroskianum

The published plate has a firm home. A photogravure titled Allium ostrowskianum, dated 1928, is held by the National Gallery of Art as part of its Urformen der Kunst portfolio, the plate as the book circulated it. A related study of Allium ostrowskianum is a gelatin silver print dated before 1928. It belongs to the Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin and was shown in the 2009 exhibition Plant Studies by Karl Blossfeldt and Related Works in Cologne. In Vienna, the mumok collection records a garlic-flower umbel enlarged six times, another institutional trace of Blossfeldt's long work with this one subject.

Each of these objects has its own identification, and the records don't confirm that the published plate and the Berlin and Vienna studies show the same photograph. What they do show is that Blossfeldt's studies of this one species are now held in three separate collections: the National Gallery of Art, the Karl Blossfeldt Collection at the University of the Arts Berlin, and the mumok in Vienna.

Asclepias syriaca in a book that became an international bestseller

Asclepias syriaca enters the record as one of the plates of the 1928 portfolio of Urformen der Kunst. Its publication places it inside a circulation no classroom ever anticipated. The book was intended as a teaching aid, and it became an international bestseller instead.

Asclepias Syriaca

The editions tell the story of that reach. Later editions followed the first, including editions in English, French and Swedish. Readers far beyond the Berlin arts and crafts school opened the book and met a milkweed stem as architecture. The plant studies had been made for students of ironwork and wallpaper, and now they were read by the world.

The art world followed the readers. In 1929, a year after the book appeared, Blossfeldt's plant photographs were included in the landmark exhibitions Film und Foto and Fotografie der Gegenwart. Bauhaus industrial designers drew on the photographs as source material, so a teaching collection ended up shaping the very design practice it had been made to serve.

The milkweed plate has a later chapter of its own. Its photogravure entered the National Gallery of Art in 2006, bought and given by Mary and Dan Solomon together with the Patrons' Permanent Fund. A page from a bestseller became a museum object, which is a fair summary of what happened to Karl Blossfeldt's art as a whole.

What these seven studies add up to is a stubborn, simple idea: the forms photographers usually walk past are the ones most worth looking at. Blossfeldt spent three decades teaching the same lesson with a homemade camera and a fern, and the world eventually agreed with him. His art is that agreement, plate by plate.

Did you know?

  • Blossfeldt was born on 13 June 1865 in Schielo, near the Harz Mountains.
  • A bookseller's description of the first edition of Urformen der Kunst gives it as limited to 6,000 copies.
  • Karl Nierendorf is credited with giving the book a formal rigour that goes beyond a scientific record.
  • The plants in Urformen der Kunst were photographed in such close detail that the plates look almost like microscope images.
  • Blossfeldt's second book, Wundergarten der Natur, appeared in 1932, the year he died.
  • The 2001 publication of his working collages raised questions about his association with New Objectivity.
  • In 2019 the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid showed 40 photographs from the album Urformen der Kunst.

Questions about Karl Blossfeldt

When did Karl Blossfeldt start making art? He began as a sculptor: at sixteen, in 1881, he took an apprenticeship as an iron caster in Mägdesprung. His plant photography began around 1898, when his teaching needed forms students could study, and students visiting the Berlin museum of applied arts were shown the photographs.

What was Karl Blossfeldt's artistic approach? He set single plant specimens against an uncluttered background and photographed them frontally, in sharp monochrome, so their structure read as clearly as an engineering drawing. The aim was to show design students forms they could apply to ironwork and wallpaper.

What is Karl Blossfeldt's most famous artwork? Fame came to Blossfeldt through the series rather than through any one plate. The 120 plates of Urformen der Kunst were received as a body of work, and from the start they were compared to African sculpture.

How did Karl Blossfeldt achieve his close-up photographs? He built his own cameras with custom magnifying lenses, capable of enlarging a plant up to thirty times, and he photographed specimens against a plain card background to keep every detail legible. He enlarged individual studies at different scales, such as four or six times, to show students forms the naked eye misses.

Where can I find Karl Blossfeldt posters and prints? The seven studies you have just met are available as reproductions in our Botanical collection, printed in our Barcelona workshop on fine art matte paper at sizes from A4 to A1. For originals, the National Gallery of Art, MoMA in New York and LACMA in Los Angeles hold plates and prints from Urformen der Kunst, with related studies held in Berlin and Vienna. A black aluminium frame suits their monochrome plates particularly well.

About the author

At Moryarty we find our posters in libraries, museums and archive collections. We restore each one by hand without changing its original design or tones, and print them in our Barcelona workshop on fine art matte paper with archival pigment inks. Botanical studies have a special place for us, because their monochrome detail rewards exactly the kind of close looking our reproductions try to protect. We hope you go back to the photographs ready to look that closely.

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