The nature of art

Karl Blossfeldt’s portfolio of plant studies continues to influence both conventional and conceptual photographers to this day. Giridhar Khasnis writes about the photographer, who witnessed art in nature .

Just four years before he died in December 1932, 63-year-old Karl Blossfeldt, professor at the Institute of the Royal Arts and Crafts Museum in Berlin, became an international celebrity. 

It was the publication of his ground-breaking portfolio of magnificent botanical studies, Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature), which suddenly brought him to limelight. Comprising 120 single-sided rotary gravure plates, and prefaced with an introductory text by collector and gallerist Karl Nierendorf, the publication went on to receive flattering reviews by prominent critics of the day. 

Among them was Walter Benjamin, the famous German philosopher and literary/social critic, who lauded Blossfeldt as “the creator of this collection of plant photographs” had “accomplished something new, a scrutinising and redefining of the inventory of perception which will modify our view of the world in an unforeseeable way.” 

Benjamin went on to add: “These pictures reveal an unimagined treasure trove of analogies and shapes from the world of plants, something only photography could achieve… This touches the innermost and least fathomable of all created forms — that variant unfailingly selected by genius, by the collective creative spirit and by nature.”  

The 6,000 hardbound copies of the book were sold out within eight months of its release. A second edition followed in 1929. Blossfeldt’s pictures also started appearing in avant-garde exhibits and a variety of publications, as illustration for essays ranging in topics from geology, neurology to the sexual nature of flower forms. 

His work received praise and support from artists of New Realism as well as Paris Surrealists. There was an Indian connection too! The famous Indian physicist, biologist and botanist Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) used Blossfeldt’s photographs to illustrate one of his articles on neurology of brutal processes.

Shortly before his death, Blossfeldt’s second book Wundergarten der Natur (Magic Garden of Nature) was published with a new set of 120 images; a third book of the artist’s photographs — Wunder in der Natur (Wonders in Nature) — was released posthumously in 1942.

Urformen der Kunst became one of the most discussed photographic books to be published between the wars, and continues to influence both conventional and conceptual photographers to this day. It was included in The Book of 101 Books: Seminal photographic books of the Twentieth Century (2001), as well as The Photobook: A History, Volume I (2004). It is also one of the few photo-books to attract the attention of art dealers who enthusiastically trade individual plates as treasured collector’s items.

Nature connected

Blossfeldt’s life story reveals his unremitting connection with nature. As a child, he is said to have enjoyed working in his parents’ garden; he drew plants and animals at a fairly early age. Later, when he trained as a sculptor at a foundry, he would use a freshly-plucked leaf or flower on his workbench while working on his models. He would also venture out on his bicycle regularly to gather wild herbs from the countryside.

During his long teaching career, he employed photographs as constant and indispensable teaching aids. Interestingly, for one who never had any formal training in photography, all his astonishing photographs of plant studies — over 6,000 in number, taken over 35 years — were created with a homemade camera with interchangeable lenses of different focal lengths.

Blossfeldt’s technical mastery made his work unique. In his enduring quest to grasp the abstract shapes and organic forms in nature, he not only captured the subjects truthfully, but also revealed their beauty in unprecedented magnified detail. The result of his efforts was an extraordinary range of intricately unfolding life patterns as seen in tendrils, twigs, flowers, buds, pods, stems, seed capsules and other plant materials. 

All his pictures of meticulously arranged flowers and stems were starkly composed against plain backgrounds and carefully controlled lighting. He often cropped just one part of a plant, be it a section of a twig or the tip of a bud, before fixing it with putty, pegs, nails or sheets of glass and photographing it. He made sure that his work brought in a distinctly sculptural aspect to a firmly two-dimensional art form. 

Curiously, when he created his extraordinary catalogue of studies of natural forms, Blossfeldt’s primary intent was to educate his students about design elements in nature. Over time, he also wanted his work which presented everyday garden flowers and plants with their rhythmic forms and exotic characteristics to act as an inspiration for architects, sculptors and artists.

Surreal forms

Blossfeldt believed that “the best human art was modelled on forms pre-existing in nature,” and that “the plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure.” For him, the plant never lapsed in to mere arid functionalism. “It fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form.” 

He also wanted his botanical documents to contribute to restoring the link with nature. “They should reawaken a sense of nature, point to its teeming richness of form, and prompt the viewer to observe for himself the surrounding plant world.”

Historians continue to be amazed how Blossfeldt photographed his influential plant portraits with such simplicity and originality in the period between Art Nouveau and the birth of Modernism; and how his fusion of scientific observation and surreal composition ushered in new approaches to both modern art and photography. 

“Blossfeldt’s images are like magic tricks in which you suspect sleight of hand but are nevertheless filled with wonder as the rabbit is extracted from the top hat,” wrote a critic. “You are left suspended, unable to decide what is art and what is nature, temporarily stripped of your commonsense with its assumptions as to the nature of nature, let alone the nature of art.”

An exhibition of Blossfeldt’s original vintage photogravures from the first edition of his landmark 1928 publication, Urformen Der Kunst is currently on at Tasveer, Sua House, Kasturba Cross Road, and will conclude on October 31.