KARL BLOSSFELDT: PHACELIA

Vintage photogravure by KARL BLOSSFELDT (1865-1932)

Germany

TANSY PHACELIA, FLOWERING PANICLE

Black wood frame, framed size: 29 × 36.5 cm

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As a professor of art in Berlin during the 1920s, Karl Blossfeldt produced over 6,000 botanical photographs initially intended to inspire the industrial designers and architects among his students. With the publication of his three major works, Urformen der Kunst, Wundergarten der Natur and the posthumous Wunder in der Natur, Blossfeldt’s “straightforwardly scientific, greatly magnified, close-ups of plant form as isolated objects of unexpected aesthetic delight” helped generate the artistic movement known as Neue.

Strikingly beautiful, Blossfeldt's photographs are as desirable today, as when they were first published. These are taken from a 1942 First Edition of his third book Wunder in der Natur (The Miracles of Nature).

What made Blossfeldt's work unique was his extreme technical mastery of macro photography. Everyday nature is shot so that its rhythmic form is emphasised to the extreme and the plants become exotic.

A photogravure is a photograph etched into copper and printed traditionally with ink.