Word: escher
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...time, the Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher seemed a cultural anomaly. He loathed modern art-"I consider 60% of the artists nuts and fakes," he said of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum-and was duly ignored by it. For most of his working life, critics dismissed him as a pedantic illustrator. Born in 1898, Escher was 52 before his tightly executed woodcuts, lithographs and engravings began to attract even a crumb of attention. A retiring, ironic man with the bony nose and goat beard of an El Greco prelate, Escher took no part in art debates, lived quietly...
Vivid Warning. Yet when Maurits Escher died last month, aged 73, a cult had begun to gather round him. Through many channels, from head-shop posters to science magazines, Escher had been insinuated into world currency. A lavish book, The Complete World of M.C. Escher, will shortly be published by Abrams. This week an almost complete exhibition of his graphics opens at the Vorpal Gallery in San Francisco, where the prints Escher sold for $ 17 to $40 two decades ago are being offered...
...question is: Why? Considered as a formal artist, Escher was virtually negligible. His use of color was dull and his drawing had a serviceably vulgar look: the way Escher described the human figure, for instance, made Norman Rockwell look like Giorgione. Much of his architectural imagery is supermarket Piranesi...
...Escher's asset was an intricately schematic intelligence, and this he used with such wit and patience that he became, without modern rival, a master of visual paradox. A great many of Escher's prints were about teasingly blocked situations. They are scientific demonstrations of how to visualize the impossible. What they propose is a kind of n-dimensional reality in which the laws of perception are temporarily repealed. The most innocent images contain excruciating traps...
Died. Maurits Cornelis Escher, 73, Dutch artist known for his surrealistic woodcuts and lithographs; in Hilversum, The Netherlands. Escher worked in almost complete obscurity for 30 years, until, in the early 1950s, his vivid sense of fantasy and unusual uses of perspective won recognition in the U.S. His creations over half a century, about 270 works, now appear in museums on both sides of the Atlantic...