Karl Blossfeldt

Karl Blossfeldt Centaurea kotschyana (knapweed) 1915 - 1925 Vintage, gelatin silver print. 30,3 x 23,8 cm. Inscribed in pencil on the reverse by Karl Blossfeldt himself, with stamp of 'Archiv Wilde, Köln' as well as detailed information on the motif in pencil by another hand. Provenance Private collection, Rhineland Literature cf. Karl Blossfeldt, Wundergarten der Natur. New pictorial documents of beautiful plant forms, Berlin 1932, plate 46 (variant) Karl Blossfeldt's photographic oeuvre only became known to a wider public in 1926 with the exhibition at the Galerie Nierendorf in Berlin. Early prints such as the ones presented here were originally part of his specimen collection and served their author as illustrative material in the subject "Modeling from living plants" at the "Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseums", where Blossfeldt worked. The production of photographic images of plant parts for teaching purposes had several advantages: on the one hand, it allowed perishable plant parts to be permanently fixed as models and, on the other, even the smallest natural forms could be studied in detail - with the appropriate magnification. Attached to the wall with pins - the prints here also have the corresponding small puncture marks in the corners - the photographs served the students as models for the creation of sculptures or drawings. Whereas the detail of the corolla of a knapweed with its hairy bracts has a rather flat, ornamental character, the photograph of the delicate bud of a maple blossom against a light, chamois background (see lot 513) has an almost three-dimensional effect. Both types of models from the fund of natural forms - those for sculptural designs and those for two-dimensional decorations - stand on an equal footing in Blossfeldt's work.