Blumenbachia hieronymi

Karl Blossfeldt

1915–25 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Professor Karl Blossfeldt began his exploration of forms in nature in 1890, but his images were little known before their publication in Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) in 1928. The renegade Surrealist writer Georges Bataille was fascinated by the hallucinatory clarity and sinister sexuality of Blossfeldt's plant forms and used several of the photographs to illustrate his essay on the enigmatic "language of flowers" in the first issue of his review Documents in June 1929.

Artist

Karl Blossfeldt

Date

1915–25

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gilman Collection, Purchase, Denise and Andrew Saul Gift, 2005