Urform

Karl Blossfeldt’s plant photographs,
shown the way he used them.

The book, 1928

Urformen der Kunst

Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin. 120 plates in rotogravure, each on a loose sheet 31.2 × 24.2 cm with its number printed bottom right. Scroll to leaf through 22 of them.

  1. The green cloth cover of Urformen der Kunst
    Cover
  2. Plate 6 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 6
  3. Plate 8 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 8
  4. Plate 9 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 9
  5. Plate 11 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 11
  6. Plate 17 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 17
  7. Plate 31 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 31
  8. Plate 35 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 35
  9. Plate 56 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 56
  10. Plate 57 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 57
  11. Plate 62 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 62
  12. Plate 64 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 64
  13. Plate 71 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 71
  14. Plate 72 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 72
  15. Plate 84 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 84
  16. Plate 86 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 86
  17. Plate 88 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 88
  18. Plate 94 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 94
  19. Plate 97 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 97
  20. Plate 99 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 99
  21. Plate 105 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 105
  22. Plate 106 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 106
  23. Plate 107 of Urformen der Kunst
    Plate 107

How it was printed

Rotogravure: the picture is engraved into a copper cylinder and printed on a rotary press, the process newspapers used for their photo supplements. It gives the deep, even blacks you see in the plates.

What the numbers mean

The plate numbers are the book’s own. The Rijksmuseum’s records give the sheet size and the process but not the plant, so we show these by number only. The named prints are on the grid.

After the book

It made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. Wundergarten der Natur followed in 1932, and Wunder in der Natur after his death, in 1942. Walter Benjamin reviewed the first one as “News about flowers”.