Haeckel’s Radiolaria

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I’ve been admiring (and plundering) Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature, 1904) for many years, but until this week I hadn’t thought to look for other books by the German biologist. The plates in Haeckel’s Kunstformen fascinate for the way their drawings emphasise the aesthetic qualities of the animals being studied, without taking the wild liberties one finds in early zoological books or being photographically faithful to the specimens.

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Of particular fascination are the many plates devoted to Radiolaria, tiny marine protozoa whose mineral skeletons look less like the product of living creatures than abstract decorations, crystalline growths or even pieces of alien architecture. These unusual forms were the ones that captured the imagination of René Binet, a French designer and architect who collaborated with Gustave Geffroy on a whole book of architectural and household designs derived from Haeckel’s plates. So too with Salvador Dalí who wasn’t above borrowing (or “quoting”) from Haeckel’s Radiolaria.

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Haeckel was evidently just as fascinated with the protozoa, enough to write and illustrate a substantial monograph. Die Radiolarien (Rhizopoda radiaria): Eine Monographie (1862) is available at the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Internet Archive in a mammoth four-volume set, a large portion of which is explanatory text. There’s also a separate volume with a selection of the plates alone which is easier to browse. These drawings show much more variety than the Kunstformen plates which represent the examples that Haeckel considered most visually appealing; they also show us how much Haeckel tailored his renderings for Kunstformen, favouring symmetry and harmony over natural imperfections. Oscar Wilde would have approved of Haeckel’s adjustments, as he writes in The Decay of Lying: “My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.”

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René Binet revisited

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I wrote something about French designer and architect René Binet (1866–1911) a few years ago while exploring the creation of the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. Binet designed the remarkable monumental gate that formed the entrance to the exhibition, a structure that demonstrated his proposal that natural forms might replace historical pastiche as a basis for architecture.

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A book by Binet and Gustave Geffroy, Esquisses Décoratives (1905), argued the case with 60 plates showing Binet’s designs for new forms of architectural style and decor derived in part from the plates in Ernst Haeckel’s Kunst-Formen der Natur. At the time of the earlier post there wasn’t a copy of the book online but there is now thanks to the Smithsonian Libraries and the Internet Archive. In addition to architectural designs there are suggestions for various forms of jewellery based on Haeckel’s radiolarians and other organisms. See the rest of the plates here or download the book here.

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Le Grand Globe Céleste, 1900

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I’m sure I’ll run out of things to say on this subject eventually but it’s showing no sign of happening yet. In an exposition with its fair share of unusual buildings, the Grand Globe Céleste in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 was one of the more notable constructions. An enormous globe built on the banks of the Seine close to the Champs de Mars, the Grand Globe Céleste was some 50 meters in diameter with its attractions including a restaurant and an exhibition space in the interior showing planetary orbits and maps of the stars. Enormous globes became a common feature of later world’s fairs which makes me wonder whether this example was the first of its kind. A far larger structure was proposed for the 1893 exposition in Chicago but never built.

The poster here is from the archives at Gallica. Searching around for other images turned up a wiki I hadn’t come across before devoted to the Exposition Universelle. The page there for the Grand Globe has a picture of one of the exposition’s tragedies caused when a footbridge leading to the attraction collapsed, killing five people. (The intact footbridge can be seen on this view facing towards the river.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
Tony Grubhofer’s Exposition Universelle sketches
The Cambodian Pavilion, Paris, 1900
Le Manoir a l’Envers
Suchard at the Exposition Universelle
Esquisses Décoratives by René Binet
Le Palais de l’Optique, 1900
Exposition Universelle films
Exposition jewellery
Exposition Universelle catalogue
Exposition Universelle publications
Exposition cornucopia
Return to the Exposition Universelle
The Palais Lumineux
Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
Exposition Universelle, 1900

Tony Grubhofer’s Exposition Universelle sketches

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The Exposition gateway.

In a blizzard of work this month I finished another project with a Victorian theme (not more Steampunk!) which I won’t reveal just yet as I dislike spoiling the surprise for publishers. Part of the preparation involved yet more trawling through scanned volumes at the Internet Archive, looking this time at British art magazines from the 1890s. As with the German magazines of the period, some of these are more interesting than others: The Magazine of Art, for example, has its moments but for the most part it’s a champion of the stodgily dull, conservative fare which no one would ever want to revive today. Their columnists also hated the Decadents; I found a wonderful rant against Aubrey Beardsley’s art from 1897 which suggested that the artist and others like him ought to stop poisoning the soul of the nation and emigrate to France. Poor Aubrey only had a year to live, and, as things turned out, ending up dying in that iniquitous nation. I think it’s fair to say he’s had the last laugh.

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The Chateau Tyrolien.

The Studio magazine, on the other hand, was very sympathetic to the Decadents and Symbolists in general, and to Beardsley in particular, who had his work featured in the first number of the magazine in 1893. The drawings in this post are a surprise find in one of the numbers for 1900, and concern that locus of everything The Magazine of Art loathed: Paris! We’re back again at the Exposition Universelle, a subject which has been explored here on so many occasions I’m surprised I keep finding anything new that’s worthy of mention.

Tony Grubhofer (1854–1935) was apparently an Austrian artist who in these drawings manages to crop his views so selectively that many of them don’t look like they’re part of an exposition in one of the world’s capital cities. Of interest for me are his watercolour of René Binet’s monumental gate, which gives an idea of how the structure would have looked at night illuminated by the novelty of electric light, and his view of Eliel Saarinen’s Finnish pavilion which he renders as though it was a provincial church. This was Saarinen’s first major commission (he was 27 at the time), and Philippe Jullian in his book about the exposition declares this design to have been the most interesting and successful of all the national pavilions that year. It’s certainly better than Edwin Lutyens’ pastiche of an Elizabethan manor for the British pavilion. Eliel Saarinen had a very successful career, as did his more well-known son, Eero Saarinen, one of the major architects of the 20th century.

Volumes 20 to 22 of The Studio can be downloaded here.

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The Finnish Pavilion.

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The Cambodian Pavilion, Paris, 1900

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Despite being one of the most striking and beautiful national pavilions in the Exposition Universelle of 1900, the Cambodian building seldom features isn’t featured in any of the exposition guides I’ve seen. These photos are from the excellent set of William Henry Goodyear views presented by the Brooklyn Museum at Flickr. If it wasn’t for the people visible in the picture below (and the Parisian lamp-post) you wouldn’t know these were from the exposition at all.

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Another trace of Cambodia appeared via the Tour of the World exhibition where a variety of “exotic” buildings were forced to occupy the same plot of ground. This group does appear in the guides, the view here being from L’Exposition du Siècle by Albert Quantin. The multi-story confection dominating this scene may superficially resemble some of the Angkor temples, but for me it’s more reminiscent of buildings like the Casa Milà which Antoni Gaudí was constructing in Barcelona a few years later.

Previously on { feuilleton }
Le Manoir a l’Envers
Suchard at the Exposition Universelle
Esquisses Décoratives by René Binet
Le Palais de l’Optique, 1900
Exposition Universelle films
Exposition jewellery
Exposition Universelle catalogue
Exposition Universelle publications
Exposition cornucopia
Return to the Exposition Universelle
The Palais Lumineux
Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
Exposition Universelle, 1900