Art Forms in Nature: Prints of Ernst Haeckel

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P/S: Probably not as important, but I would have liked individual lithographs to have been labelled. In a beautiful celebration of the natural world, Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature is a masterful union of science and art. René Binet, a pioneer of glass and iron constructions, Emile Gallé, a renowned Art Nouveau designer, and the photographer Karl Blossfeld all acknowledge and make explicit reference to Haeckel in their work. The spatial arrangement of organisms enhances the feeling of design, which is evocative of Art Nouveau style or some William Morris wallpapers.

i'd still like to get a good untrimmed copy to replace the bad one but i've already invoked the replacement mechanism once and i don't want to go through that hassle again. This output of systematic and descriptive work would alone have constituted a good life’s work, but Haeckel in addition wrote copiously on biological theory. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Those who know about his embryo fakery (he reproduced the same woodcut print three times and claimed they depicted the embryos of three different animals) wouldn’t be surprised.According to his “carbon-theory,” which has been far from achieving general acceptance, the chemico-physical properties of carbon in its complex albuminoid compounds are the sole and the mechanical cause of the specific phenomena of movement which distinguish organic from inorganic substances, and the first development of living protoplasm, as seen in the Monera, arises from such nitrogenous carbon-compounds by a process of spontaneous generation.

Darwin himself has placed on record the conviction that Haeckel’s enthusiastic propagandism of the doctrine was the chief factor of its success in Germany. It could change the way you look at the natural world and is surely great inspiration for artists and designers. As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträtsel (1895–1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution. This particular edition is a nice large format book and while the colours may be slightly muted on the matte paper, the plates are still gorgeous to look at and quite clear enough for reference, which is why I bought it.Among the notable prints are numerous radiolarians, which Haeckel helped to popularize among amateur microscopists; at least one example is found in almost every set of 10. The plates illustrate Haeckel’s fundamental monistic notion of the “unity of all living things,” and the wide variety of forms are executed with utmost delicacy.

He was, indeed, the first German biologist to give a whole-hearted adherence to the doctrine of organic evolution and to treat it as the cardinal conception of modern biology.He regarded the human soul with its inborn characteristics of reason as a ready-made being and did not inquire into its historical origins .

This last position he retained for 43 years, in spite of repeated invitations to migrate to more important centres, such as Strassburg or Vienna, and at Jena he spent his life, with the exception of the time he devoted to travelling in various parts of the world, whence in every case he brought back a rich zoological harvest. Every living cell has psychic properties, and the psychic life of multicellular organisms is the sum-total of the psychic functions of the cells of which they are composed.It was he who first brought it prominently before the notice of German men of science in his first memoir on the Radiolaria, which was completely pervaded with its spirit, and later at the congress of naturalists at Stettin in 1863. It happened that just when he was beginning his scientific career Darwin’s Origin of Species was published (1859), and such was the influence it exercised over him that he became the apostle of Darwinism in Germany. One prominent example is the Amsterdam Commodities Exchange designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage: it was in part inspired by Kunstformen illustrations.