Urformen der Kunst is an important and influential work, a cornerstone of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement in Germany and a consensus highlight of twentieth-century photobook collecting. Karl Blossfeldt had initially trained as a sculptor and, as an amateur botanist, was fascinated by the underlying structures of nature as explored by Ernst Haeckel in Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904). He began photographing plants and flowers against a plain card background in the late 1890s for use at the Berlin Kunstgewerbemuseum (School of Arts & Crafts), where he taught industrial design and applied arts courses for over thirty years. In his classes, Blossfeldt explored the link between the structure of plants and artistic form, using his photographs to show students how solutions anticipated by nature could be applied to products such as ironwork and wallpaper designs.

Blossfeldt's photographs were first exhibited in 1926 at the Nierendorf Gallery, Berlin, where they were shown together with African sculpture to emphasise their primitive and anthropomorphic aspects. Karl Nierendorf helped prepare the work for publication as Urformen der Kunst and contributed to the introduction. Blossfeldt died in December 1932; in his second book of photographs, Wundergarten der Natur, which was published earlier that year, he wrote:' The plant must be valued as a totally artistic and architectural structure… [nature] is an educator about beauty and intrinsic feeling. My documents of plants shall promote again the unity with nature'.

First edition; folio (312 × 242 mm, 12¼ x 9½ in); black-and-white photographs printed in gravure by Ganymed, Berlin; foxing to edges and to plain endpapers, green cloth-covered boards, spine titled in gilt, lightly dulled, upper side titled and with a design after one of the photographs in gilt, lightly bowed, black-and-white photo-illustrated dust-jacket, worn and torn with internal repair to lower panel, an excellent copy with a good dust-jacket.

Regards sur un siècle de photographie à travers Le Livre 27; Fotografia Pública: Photography in Print 1919-1939 p59; The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century pp48-9; The Photobook: A History, I p96; The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present 66-7; 802 photo books from the Auer collection p133; Autopsie: Deutschsprachige Fotobücher 1918-1945, I pp188-201.