CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/28/2021

'Karl Blossfeldt: Variations' is NEW from Lars Müller

Featured image is reproduced from Karl Blossfeldt: Variations, Lars Müller Publishers' 416-page new release investigating how the Berlin artist, sculptor and teacher's turn-of-the-century plant photographs were disseminated in the popular media of the time, from magazines, to art and pattern books. "In the late 1920s a German book of plant photographs with the suggestive title Urformen der Kunst became an international bestseller," author Ulrike Meyer Stump writes. "Albert Einstein owned a copy, as did Kandinsky, Klee, Calder and Henry Moore. The producer of these highly successful botanical images, Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), trained as a sculptor and taught “Modeling after Living Plants” at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin from 1899 to 1930. He began photographing plants in the late nineteenth century as illustrations, patterns, and as teaching material for his classes, producing thousands of photographs in a highly uniform manner over the decades. A handsome selection from this voluminous material elegantly printed in photogravure was published in 1928, shortly before his retirement. With this publication, which was followed by countless new editions over the years, Blossfeldt the sculptor became world-famous as a photographer… This book traces the paths that Blossfeldt’s legendary plant motifs described—as specimens, illustrations, patterns, analogies, models, and abstractions—from their creation to their entry into the canonical history of photography, with occasional excursions into their reception in more recent art and design."