The Invention of Nature

By the turn of the century, Europe had entered the so-called Machine Age. Factories were powered by electric engines and mass production was driving economies in Europe and the United States. Germany had long lagged behind Britain, but after the creation of the German Reich in 1871 under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and with the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, as the German emperor, the country had caught up at a dizzying speed. By the time Haeckel published the first issue of Art Forms in Nature in 1899, Germany had joined Britain and the United States as an economic world leader.

By then the first automobiles were driving along German roads and a web of railways connected the industrial centres at the Ruhr with the large port cities such as Hamburg and Bremen. Coal and steel were produced in ever growing quantities and cities were mushrooming around the industrial hubs. The first electric power station had opened in Berlin in 1887. Germany’s chemical industry had become the most important and advanced in the world, producing synthetic dyes, pharmaceuticals and fertilizers. Unlike Britain, Germany had polytechnics and factory research laboratories which nurtured a generation of new scientists and engineers. These were institutions that focused on the practical application of science rather than on academic discovery.

Many of the growing numbers of city-dwellers, Haeckel wrote, were desperate to get away from the ‘restless hustle and bustle’ and from the ‘factories’ murky clouds of smoke’. They escaped to the seaside, to shaded forests and to rugged mountain slopes in the hope of finding themselves in nature. The Art Nouveau artists at the turn of the century tried to reconcile the disturbed relationship between man and nature by taking aesthetic inspiration from the natural world. They ‘now learned from nature’ and not from their teachers, one German designer commented. The introduction of these nature motifs into interiors and architecture became a redemptive step that brought the organic into the increasingly mechanical world.

The famous French glass artist Émile Gallé, for example, owned Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature

and insisted that the ‘marine harvest’ from the oceans had turned scientific laboratories into studios for the decorative arts. The ‘crystalline jellyfish’, Gallé said in May 1900, brought new ‘nuances and curves into glass’. The new stylistic language of Art Nouveau infused everything with elements borrowed from nature: from skyscrapers to jewellery, from posters to candlesticks and from furniture to textiles. Sinuous ornaments twisted in tendrilled floral lines on etched glass doors and furniture makers crafted table legs and armrests in branch-like curves.

These organic movements and lines gave Art Nouveau its particular style. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Barcelona architect Antoni Gaudí magnified Haeckel’s marine organisms into banisters and arches. Giant sea urchins decorated his stained-glass windows, and the huge ceiling lamps that he designed looked like nautilus shells. Enormous clumps of seaweed intertwined with algae and marine invertebrates gave shape to Gaudí’s rooms, staircases and windows. Across the Atlantic, in the United States, Louis Sullivan, the so-called ‘father of skyscrapers’, also turned to nature for inspiration. Sullivan owned several of Haeckel’s books and believed that art created a union between the artist’s soul and that of nature. The façades of his buildings were decorated with stylized motifs from flora and fauna. American designer Louis Comfort Tiffany was also influenced by Haeckel. The almost ethereal diaphanous qualities of algae and jellyfish made them perfect for his glass objects. Ornamental medusae were slung around Tiffany vases, and his design studio even produced a gold and platinum ‘seaweed’ necklace.

Binet’s Porte Monumentale at the Paris World Fair in 1900 (Illustration Credit 22.2)

Haeckel’s radiolarians that inspired Binet’s gate – in particular, those in the middle row (Illustration Credit 22.3)

In late August 1900, when Haeckel travelled from Jena to Java, he stopped briefly in Paris to visit the World Fair where he walked through one of his radiolarians. The French architect René Binet had used Haeckel’s images of the microscopic sea creatures as an inspiration for the Porte Monumentale, the huge metal entrance gate that he had designed for the fair. In the previous year Binet had written to Haeckel that ‘everything about it’ – from the smallest detail to the general design – ‘has been inspired by your studies.’ The fair made Art Nouveau famous across the world, and almost 50 million visitors walked through Haeckel’s magnified radiolarian.