Professor Karl Blossfeldt - Urformen der Kunst - 1929

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VERY SCARCE GERMAN PHOTOBOOK CLASSIC.
FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT ORIGINAL BOOK from 1929 (!) by Prof Dr Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932).

MENTIONED IN ALL RELEVANT BOOKS ABOUT PHOTOBOOKS:
- Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, page 48
- Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 1, page 96
- The Open Book, Hasselblad Center, page 66/67
- 802 photo books of the M.+M. Auer collection, page 133

VERY RARE SECOND EDITION - IN BREATH-TAKING PHOTOGRAVURE PRINTING.
Karl Blossfeldt was a German sculptor and photographer best known for his stark close-up portraits of plants, twigs, seeds, leaves, and other flora.

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Verlag Ernst Wasmuth A.G., Berlin. 1929. Second edition (first was published just one year before in 1928).

Hardback with full green cloth. 250 x 320 mm. 260 pages (20 pages with text, 240 pages with 120 black and white photographs). Photos: Professor Karl Blossfeldt. Introduction by Karl Nierendorf. Text in German.

Condition:
Inside all text and all photo pages fresh and flawless, clean with no marks and with no foxing; first two blank and last blank page lightly foxed (marginal, nearly invisible), at the rear side of the front cover with beautiful old ex-libris (see picture) and small beautiful old sticker of the selling shop (see picture) at the top right corner. Outside quiet fresh with little trace of use; a bit stained, lightly sunned and rubbed at the spine (golden letters on the front in very fresh condition, see pictures); lightly teared at the top of the spine. Lacks the super rare jacket. Overall fine condition.

A CLASSIC, A MILESTONE in the history of photobooks - in better than usual condition.

"In 1881 Blossfeldt began his studies as an apprentice at the Art Ironworks and Foundry in Mägdesprung, Germany, where he studied sculpture and iron casting. He then moved to Berlin to study at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbemuseum). In 1890 Blossfeldt received a scholarship to study in Rome under Moritz Meurer, a decorative artist and professor of ornament and design. Along with several other assistants, Blossfeldt created and photographed casts of botanical specimens in and around Rome. He continued to work with Meurer through 1896 and traveled beyond Italy to North Africa and Greece to collect specimens. Beginning in 1898 Blossfeldt taught design at the School of the Museum of Decorative Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule), and in 1930 he became professor emeritus. There he established a plant photography archive that he used to teach his students about design and patterns found in nature.
Blossfeldt had no formal training as a photographer and used homemade cameras that he outfitted with lenses capable of magnifying his subjects up to 30 times their natural size. The use of magnification resulted in images of extreme detail and clarity. With the precision of a botanist, Blossfeldt photographed the natural world for scientific and pedagogical purposes and inadvertently became a modern artist. His work was considered the forerunner to Neue Sachlichkeit photography, which favoured sharply focused documentarian images. In 1926, when Blossfeldt was already in his 60s, his work was exhibited to the public for the first time at Berlin’s avant-garde Galerie Nierendorf. The works exhibited there were published in the book Urformen der Kunst (1928; Art Forms in Nature [2003]). The first of his three photo books (the other two were Wundergarten der Natur, 1932; and Wunder in der Natur, 1942, the last published posthumously), it was enormously successful and remains one of the most-significant photo books of the 20th century."