Word: hollander
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SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY Holland was a land of blood, sweat and beers. It fought long and fiercely to win complete independence from Spain; it amassed huge wealth by energetic trading at home and around the world, and like the U.S. today it developed a dominant middle class with a uniquely high standard of living. Unlike middlebrow Americans, the Dutch in their golden age prized paintings highly enough to buy them. In some towns, professional painters outnumbered the butchers. Perhaps a score of the artists achieved greatness; the works of a handful rivaled and vastly enriched the art of the ages...
...started in the winter of 1951 when our part-time correspondent in Holland, Israel Shenker, heard about the work of Escher, a little known Dutch graphic artist, and tracked him down. Shenker was struck by Escher's technique and cabled our editors that he was worth reporting. The result was a long story which described Escher's "brilliantly conceived" work, and was illustrated with pictures of his prints (TIME, April...
Immediately after reading the story, TIME Reader Charles Alldredge of Washington, D.C. sent a bank draft and an order for prints to Escher in Holland. He liked what he got so well that he ordered more. Several of Alldredge's friends became equally enthusiastic and began buying Escher prints by mail order too. Alldredge began plumping for an Escher exhibition in Washington, organized a committee of sponsors to back the showing and talked the Whyte Gallery into a date. Last week TIME was able to report that the show was both a critical and commercial success. Prints were selling...
Curiously, Escher has had little success in his native Holland. He lives quietly in Baarn, works up about half a dozen prints a year. An exhibition of his art in the Baarn high school (TIME, April 2, 1951) caught the attention of a few connoisseurs of the incomprehensible and led to last week's U.S. show. Critic Leslie Portner of the Washington Post and Times Herald reported that "critics in Europe have been trying for quite some time now to cubbyhole Escher," and proceeded to review the holes: "They have called him a mathematician, because he uses geometric solids...
Artist Escher once made naturalistic prints in Italy. Says he: "In Italy nature is so rich one must do nature. But in the north, in Holland, nature doesn't suggest anything to me, and so I have to work from imagination. It was lucky for me that I left Italy-but to do what I have done since, I had to have all that nature first." Even in his Italian days, however, Escher had a passion for patterns. Then the abstract mosaics in Spain's Alhambra suggested to him the possibility of combining tight, flat patterns with illusions...