Lot 4 Dα

Today, Karl Blossfeldt, alongside Albert Renger-Patzsch and August Sander, is regarded as the protagonist of New Objectivity photography; his plant photographs are among the classics of 20th century photographic history. The present vintage print Eisenhut vividly demonstrates what the fascination for his work is based upon: the frontally shot and symmetrically placed fanned out plant leaf of which the contours stand out vividly in front of a monochrome, slightly chamois-tinted pictorial ground. The triple magnification and full-format reproduction contribute significantly to the impressive presence and the sculptural effect. Almost haptically, the delicate feathery leaf of the aconite seems to become palpable in this photograph; occasionally, the photographer has emphasized their relief-like, three-dimensional impression by fine retouches in the negative. The careful illumination of the object avoids stronger shadows and allows a precise reproduction of the leaf structure and surface texture up to organic details such as the fine veins that run through the delicate parts of the leaf. At the same time, however, and despite the documentary objective behind this shot, in the lens of the camera, the motif gains an aesthetic life of its own with the contours of the sheet appearing as an ornament delicately spreading across the picture surface.
Blossfeldt's Eisenhut photograph was included in his publication Urformen der Kunst, published by Karl Nierendorf in 1928, which suddenly made the photographer famous and was out of print after only a few months. In their clear directness, his photographs met the spirit of the time since they corresponded to the maxim of New Objectivity art of the 1920s, according to which things are to be represented by means of a sober, objectifying manner of representation and clear image concepts. An exhibition of Blossfeldt's photographs in Karl Nierendorf's Berlin gallery in 1926 preceded the publication. Blossfeldt, who at the time of the discovery of his photographic œuvre was already over sixty years old and had not perceived them as independent works until then. He was trained not as a photographer but as a modeller and art caster. They rather functioned as templates for his teaching at the 'Unterrichtsanstalt der Königlichen Gewerbeschule' in Berlin, where he taught the subject 'Modelling according to living plants' from as early as 1899. That his prints, pinned to the wall, served him as didactic material is revealed by the tiny pinholes which can be noticed in many of his prints and which are also found in this sheet.
His work met with a broad and positive response not only among contemporary artists (László Moholy-Nagy, for example, presented Blossfeldt's photographs of plants in 1929 as part of the legendary exhibition Film und Foto). With his focus on one single subject, which, reproduced in serial image form and varied in many ways, enables comparative viewing, Blossfeldt is regarded as the forerunner of conceptual photography as established in the 1970s. Bernd and Hilla Becher should be mentioned here, whose typologies are based on similarly objective recording methods and also on the principle of the series.