The German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s exquisite illustrations for Art Forms in Nature (1899–1904) depicted newly discovered marine creatures and microscopic planktonic species that were not readily accessible to the ordinary viewer. An early supporter of Darwin’s evolutionary theories, Haeckel intended the book to outline for a general audience a visual catalogue of organisms that revealed the order and beauty of unfamiliar lifeforms.

Although the initial drawings were produced from real specimens, Haeckel’s complex forms were not simple reproductions of nature, but elaborations of symmetries expressing evolutionary similarities between all forms of life. He believed that ornamentation in nature revealed a systematic order that demonstrated the unfolding development of species. Haeckel chose to concentrate on the natural forms of organisms that reinforced his biogenetic ideas, such as jellyfish, radiolarians or nudibranchs, while his sinuous, floral or crystalline flourishes reflected the Art Nouveau taste of his time.[1]

The delicate symmetry of the drawings was adopted for the decorative arts, in designs for chandeliers, furniture and jewellery, extending the vocabulary of style at the turn of the twentieth century. The artists Gustave Klimt, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Max Ernst absorbed various elements of Haeckel’s images into their innovative work.[2] 

OCEANOGRAPHIC

Schematising the naturalism of Art Nouveau, early Modernist abstraction’s lyrical modes employed biomorphic and facetted shapes in a dynamic formalism. For example, the luminous, abstract silk screens of Alun Leach-Jones are hard-edged, yet sections of their surfaces teem with organic forms. Divisions (1969) features a segment of wriggling microscopic forms, reinforced with a vibrating contrast of orange and blue. These evoke the generative energy of planktonic growth, while the remaining divided circle may be interpreted as the slow separation of species over the passage of time.

In a more three-dimensional mode, the coralline forms of Grahame King’s lithograph Microform V (1971), with its lumpy extrusions, suggest barnacles, sponges or cellular structures, recalling the marine origins of life. Rather than an explication of nature through culture, as Haeckel’s illustrations proposed, these abstract works seek an immersion in the primeval origins of life.

 (Anne Taylor Aug 2019)

[1] The source for the first two paragraphs is Olaf Breidbach, “Brief Instructions to Viewing Haeckel’s Pictures,” in Art Forms in Nature, ed. Michael Ashdown (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2004), 9–18.

[2] David Brody, “Ernst Haeckel and the Microbial Baroque,” Cabinet, no. 7 (Summer 2002), https://www.cabinetmagazine.org.