Word: escher
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Maurits Cornells Escher (rhymes with mesher) looks like an El Greco cardinal in modern mufti. A gaunt, stooped 56, he wears his white spade beard, sport jacket and grey flannels with the air of a severe fellow who knows what matches what. Odd yet precise matches are Escher's forte. An exhibition of his woodcuts and lithographs in Washington last week featured flights of birds set off against schools of fish, lizards spinning in polyhedrons through the night sky, eerie figures climbing both the top and bottom sides of stairs. His art, as clear and cold as snowflakes...
...next step for Escher was to use such patterns merely as backgrounds for three-dimensional pictures. He learned to show nudes, lizards and hands looming out of the flat surface and blending back into it. The stunt points up one of Escher's chief concerns, the illusory nature of all art. "It is a very superficial picture which man creates for himself," Escher says. "Only in our thoughts do we try to animate the flatness of our images with depth. Suddenly it can become clear to us how silly we are, we maniacs of the flat image, with...
...Escher's Other World shows an even stranger craving, the desire to see in three directions at once. The three corner windows in the picture are repetitions of the same window looking out toward the horizon, down toward the ground and up into the night...
Wild Punch. His Balcony Escher describes as "a sort of self-mockery. I chose a town built on a hill so that in the sketch there emerged a powerful plastic suggestion by the perspective view of the blocks of houses. [Then I punched] the back of the paper. Now you can see the protruding tumor, and you see that these houses and sun were nonsense. But I, poor fool, what did I do? This wild effort to depict in appearance the reality seems also to have been illusion, for . . . the paper is as flat and smooth as before...
Actually, all Escher's prints are suggestions of suggestions. Done in a hard mechanical style, they intrigue the eye and mind without coming anywhere near the heart. "My works," he cheerfully admits, "are never successful. The idea you start with mentally is very fine, but as soon as you try to put it plastically, it's ruined. That's why you always begin again." Escher's brilliantly conceived beginnings may not be art in any strict sense of the word, but they may quite possibly broaden art's horizons...