![]() ![]() “They’re lyrical and beautiful and have such artistry,” Baer said. In the exhibit section “Reflections,” their words accompany prints that are among Baer’s favorites. Recognizing Escher’s mass appeal, Baer asked cellist Yo-Yo Ma, theater director Diane Paulus, chef Barbara Lynch and other artists, designers and scientists to select a work they liked and write about its meaning for them. To Harvard University history professor Peter Gordon, it’s an allegory for the devaluation of the individual and dehumanization of totalitarianism. In the darkest work of the exhibit, “Ascending and Descending,” faceless drones walk up and down rooftop stairs in seemingly purposeless motion, while two lone and separate figures stand and sit below. In the lithograph “Belveder,” a ladder, for example, is both inside and outside a house wall, and in “Relativity,” figures appear to walk on walls and ceilings. In several disorienting prints which Escher called “impossible buildings,” elements defy gravity and other rules of physics. With similar images of transformation, “Metamorphosis II” is a 13-foot woodcut that starts and ends with the same maze and morphs from chessboard, tessellated lizards, bees, hives, fish, cubes and an Italian village with a chess piece tower. The only one of his prints to hang in his studio, “Verbum” – whose title is Latin for ‘word’ and refers to the ‘word’ that begins the Bible’s story of creation – can be seen to express the unity of all things. In the hexagon lithograph “Verbum,” black and white triangles morph into birds, fish and frogs against contrasting and symmetrical black and white backgrounds of earth, sky and water. They show a geometric grid with a pattern of fish, birds and frogs, which requires the brain to readjust vision from the dominant to less dominant images and illustrates the mathematical concept of translation symmetry. Inspired by mathematical principles, Escher was obsessed with tessellation, creating 137 drawings, of which four are on view. “The picture actually looks like someone in the act of creation to me. “I guess it’s the mixture of originality, artistry, geometry and a Dali-like sense of ‘anything goes’ that attracts,” Hunter said in the wall text. Both album covers are on view next to Escher’s prints. English musician Ian Hunter used that image in his solo album cover, and his band, Mott the Hoople, made an album cover of “Reptiles,” where small alligators rise from a two-dimensional drawing, climb onto a three-dimensional zoology book and other desk objects, lets out a snort, and crawl back to the page. In “Bond of Union,” a female and a male head – each made of ribbon-like bands – float next to each other, their forehead bands interlocked. Like the works of painter Salvador Dali, some have a dream-like bizarreness and alternate reality, which have appealed to rock musicians, college students, psychedelic experimenters and creative thinkers. In the early 15th century, artists represented themselves in curved glass surfaces. In a fascinating self-portrait “Hand with Reflecting Sphere,” a large hand holds a clear glass globe that reflects and distorts his face and penetrating gaze as he sits in the living room of his Roman apartment. “Escher said his work was ‘serious playfulness,’ but I think it’s also playful seriousness,” Baer said.ĭespite his unconventionality, Maurits Cornelis Escher, who died at age 74 in 1972, carried on the Dutch traditions of portrait, still life and landscape painting. From the playful to the serious, they intrigue and entertain. Although the works often appear surreal, they reveal on closer look the connections between living things and the continuous life cycle. Through 50 works, the exhibit explores his fascination with tessellations - repeated shapes that interlock and challenge perception, as well as his interest in the relativity of perspective, transformations, and reflections. How can we not consider him an artist? I’m full of appreciation now.” “But he was a master printmaker with fantastic imagination and obsessions. “Institutions haven’t been keen on him, and I wasn’t either at first,” said curator Ronni Baer. Escher: Infinite Dimensions” at the Museum of Fine Arts. ![]() The popular 20th century Dutch artist rarely has been showcased by art museums, though his works have inspired rock musicians, visual perception psychologists, mathematicians and a broad public. Escher reassure with the order and humanity that underlie their strangeness. In a time of jarring and disturbing events, the prints of M.C. ![]()
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