Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt – Studies in Berlin; first plant images in Rome

Karl Blossfeldt was born in Schielo on 13 June 1865. His artistic pathway began in 1881 with an apprenticeship as modeller and sculptor in an art foundry where he already frequently used plant leaves as templates for his decorations. At the age of nineteen, he enrolled in a basic drawing course at the teaching facility of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin. Even during this time, he cultivated photography as a great hobby, choosing motifs from nature as preference. On a scholarship in Rome from 1890 to 1896, he participated in a project run by his drawing teacher Moritz Meurer, who was compiling a comprehensive collection of teaching material for ornamental design. Karl Blossfeldt remained true to this approach and regarded the systematic photographic recording of plants as his life’s calling. His first works in this area then appeared in various publications by Meurer. The latter’s idea of using the basic forms of nature as a model for architectural and craft design had a decisive influence on Karl Blossfeldt’s understanding of art. 

A comprehensive archive of naturalistic plant photographs

Karl Blossfeldt understood more about fauna than photography, which he acquired mainly as an autodidact. In 1898, the artist himself took a teaching post at the Unterrichtsanstalt of the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum and in 1899 became a lecturer for the subject Modelling from plants. True to the example of his former teacher Moritz Meurer, Blossfeldt strove for detailed documentation of natural forms and structures. To this end, he made use above all of the photomechanical means of enlargement. Such enlargements had previously been made using drawing, a method which Blossfeldt disapproved of because he always saw a subjective element in it on the part of the artist performing the work. He hoped to achieve an objective reproduction of the actual condition of the plants depicted from a pure photographic enlargement, in complete contrast to an artistically deformed adaption with a drawing pencil. From the beginning, Karl Blossfeldt intended to produce a work of lasting value which would also be available to subsequent generations of students. 

Breakthrough after the first public exhibition

Karl Blossfeldt owed his extraordinary fame above all to the Berlin gallerist Karl Nierendorf, who was deeply impressed by the particular aesthetic of the highly detailed plant photographs and organised the first exhibition of Blossfeldt’s work outside the school system. The presentation alongside sculptures from Africa and Oceania was a great success and evoked positive reactions from weighty voices such as Walter Benjamin. It quickly became clear that the artist - who worked with a home-built camera - made a significant contribution to Modernism. Indeed, the immensely vivid pictures set against a neutral background, reminiscent of herbariums, still seem timeless today. In 1928, Karl Blossfeldt published his first book Urformen der Kunst, and immediately achieved widespread fame. After his retirement, a second illustrated book was published under the title Wundergarten der Natur, but Blossfeldt did not live to see its equally remarkable success. 

Karl Blossfeldt died in Berlin on 9 December 1932.