Karl Blossfeldt: Urformen der Kunst

When I was working as a designer in New York, a friend of mine introduced me to 'Urformen der Kunst'. It's a collection of photographs by Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), and it influenced me a great deal. Her copy was one of the original prints, which is beautiful and extremely rare, but you can order a paperback reproduction online for almost nothing- just do a search of Karl Blossfeldt on Amazon and you'll find several books for around $10 that contain the entire collection.


Flowers, stems, leaves, buds, tendrils, seed pods; all meticulously arranged to show the intricate, elegant structure of their natural forms. Whenever I was having trouble designing something, and I mean anything, I would take some time to flip through this book. And not for direct inspiration of forms, I might be designing something sleek and modern, without curves. It didn't matter; somehow looking at these always helped.


Maybe it's because looking through them makes me think about what it is that makes something beautiful. I mean, why do we find some forms to be more beautiful than others? When I'm teaching art, one of the most difficult things is trying to explain why certain photographs or drawings are more beautifully composed. There are rules for avoiding bad composition but frankly, composition and beauty in form are entirely subjective things, innately impossible to explain with rules or laws. What makes certain forms more pleasing to our eyes than others? How and why?


Somewhere in the evolution of mankind, we developed a strong sensitivity to form, to shapes, to curves, and to compositions of light and dark. And when I look through these photos, at the beauty of the natural forms, it seems almost obvious that our sensitivity to form, our desire for ornament, for art, came in the millions of years we were surrounded by nothing but nature. Then again, maybe not. I'm fairly certain that humans were around for a long time before art. But the beauty of these images seems so fundamental, so basic, that the root of our aesthetic sensitivities must have come from the forms of nature. It is usually at this point in my sloth-like thought process that I realize the title of collection is "Urformen der Kunst", which translates to "Origin of Art". Good to know that Karl and I agree on something.