M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150624-arts-most-famous-illusion

by howsilly • 11 years ago

60 25 11 years ago

The bit in the article about Escher being approached by Kubrick to work on "2001"- that would have been quite the Chang rig he had said yes. I always felt the abstract visualizations at the end of the film lacking something. While it's fairly obvious that Bowman is going through something formless and indescribable, trading it for the surreal visual vocabulary of Escher would have made an much more memorable statement.

keithpeter2• 11 years ago

Not so sure. Escher's worlds strike me as locally coherent and tidy if globally impossible (as a commenter remarks above). My interpretation of the end of 2001 suggests that everything was being chaotically dismantled.

escherize• 11 years ago

My favorite aspect of Escher's art is seen in Belvedere, Ascending and Descending, and Waterfall. I love how it ties in with arguments about the Coherence Theory of Truth:

    Consider two propositions which do not belong to a 
    specified set. These propositions could both be 
    consistent with a specified set and yet be inconsistent 
    with each other. If coherence is consistency, the 
    coherence theorist would have to claim that both 
    propositions are true, but this is impossible.[1]

There's an analogy to Escher's art. When viewing those three images (and a few others) though a restrictive hole, Every possible circle viewable through the paper is drawn to be physically coherent! But of course we know that the systems in his prints are inconsistent.

When looking at an entire system through a keyhole (the way we edit code bases), it's possible that what we see at every possible view may well be coherent, and yet the entire system may still not be consistent.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-coherence/

gshubert17• 11 years ago

Douglas Hofstadter's book Gödel, Escher, Bach mentions aspects of self-reference and logical consistency in Escher's works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach

otherusername2• 11 years ago

I've always felt that people didn't really regard Escher as an artist because his works are too straight forward. He manages to take his thoughts on infinity, beginning and end, dimensions and other philosophical and mathematical concepts and put them into drawings in a very clear way.

To me, this feels like incredible talent. But perhaps the artist world balks at such straight forwardness. Things need to be more abstract for them; more room for imagination about the work itself, rather than its subject.

Take his work "Hand with Reflecting Sphere". To most people it is a very well executed drawing, but not much more. But it is much more. The reflection in the sphere is infinite. It encompasses the entire room; the entire world even. A two-dimensional drawing of an entire room projected onto a tiny surface. Those properties recur in his "Circle Limit III" piece.

I'm not sure I would regard him as an artist. Perhaps he's more a philosopher that chose drawings to express his thoughts rather than writing. Regardless of which label we put on him, his works are fascinating to me in an almost Zen-like way.

MichaelCrawford• 11 years ago

My ex-wife Bonita Hatcher is an abstract video artist; that is, she doesn't make TV shows, she makes videos that often don't make a whole lot of sense to anyone.

What you describe is "Didactic Art" that is, art whose message is plainly apparent. My take is that Didactic Art is in fact quite important, it serves society in many profoundly important ways.

That Napoleon was eventually defeated was the result - in part - of a painting that depicted a giant, rather inattentive, absent-minded giant eating a human corpse like a candy bar.

However, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design is heavily into what Bonita calls "Art with a Capital 'A'". More or less, that's art that only other artists understand, as well as art historians. I learned a great deal about art history while she studied there, and attended a few lectures, spent time in its small but excellent library; again there are many important reasons why we have Art with a Capital "A".

Escher was reviled by the other artists of his day because they regarded his work as revoltingly ugly. Consider that at the time we had stuff like Bauhaus and Art Deco.

I at one time had the email escher@apple.com

Hilarity ensued because everyone thought I was Christopher Escher, Apple's chief public spokesman. In reality I was hired as a contract script monkey for MacTCP, but I worked my way up by debugging its broken test tool strm_echo.

duncanawoods• 11 years ago

    That Napoleon was eventually defeated was the result - 
    in part - of a painting that depicted a giant, rather 
    inattentive, absent-minded giant eating a human corpse 
    like a candy bar.

If you are referring to Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" then I don't think it was even painted before Napoleon's defeat. In any case, suggesting Napoleon's defeat was "the result" of a painting is hyperbole to the point of absurdity. There are examples of art having significant impact in the world but this is not one.

artpolice• 11 years ago

Escher was reviled by the other artists of his day because they regarded his work as revoltingly ugly.

I think this is still true, or at least aesthetic objections remain the principal rationalizations for deprecating Escher that I hear from the artists in my life.

My wife and I live in The Hague. She's an illustrator and photographer from a family of artists: her mother, a painter and now an art therapist; her sister also an art therapist; her father, an abstract painter. (Not as hobbies, or idle trustafarian pursuits, these are their real livelihoods.) When her family comes to visit, "going to see the Escher museum" is a recurring joke, as in "ha ha, never going to do that." Whenever I ask why, the mumbled complaint is usually "it's ugly and boring."

Really, 'reviled' remains the right word.

I think it's snobbery, to a great and unacknowledged degree - the visual art equivalent of "genre fiction" in the literary world. The problem I have with lumping Escher with hack painters of cowboys and motorcycles, or airbrushers of vans as "unserious art" is that it ignores his innovations in subject, form, and style and mastery of technique. But then, the "serious" art world of the west is very much a class construct of which snobbery is essential part.

jules2• 11 years ago

Abstract art has a high degree of pretentiousness and fakeness to it. What makes Escher's art attractive is that it is purely what it is. It's impressive on its own, and there is no need to elevate it into something that it is not.

beloch• 11 years ago

To me, one of the hallmarks of great artists is that their work is distinct and recognizable. Escher's work is unmistakable for that of anyone else, both because of content and technique. Even works that don't feature the impossible geometry or tessellations he became famous for are unmistakably his due to their execution.

Most artists who dare to be so utterly unique have little chance of achieving commercial success, but Escher remains one of the most popular artists of the twentieth century. His work is iconic. Escher's unpopularity in high art circles is likely due to this improbable combination of uniqueness and popularity. Few artists dare to be as different as Escher was, and those who try usually wind up as failures. In this sense, Escher is a subject of ultimate jealousy for any "serious" artist while simultaneously being one of contempt for his popularity.

Escher is a great artist. I don't care what some people say. They're wrong. They'd likely have the same view of Picasso if he had held himself more aloof.

tbabb• 11 years ago

Indeed. It doesn't matter at all what the "art world" thinks; Escher's images have made an indelible mark on culture, and that makes him a great artist.

keithpeter2• 11 years ago

Quote from OA

“Although he created something absolutely new,” says Piller, “Escher has not directly influenced any artists.”

No school, no younger artists working with the Master, and no teaching in the modern way in an art school, hence no tradition. I'm not sure the artist was especially worried about that mind you.

jules2• 11 years ago

That quote is saying more about artists than about Escher.

tinkerdol• 11 years ago

Occasionally, one gets the impression that this meticulous, sober man could be a little stuffy.
when Mick Jagger wrote to “Maurits” asking for permission to reproduce one of his pictures on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album Through the Past Darkly, Escher refused, informing the rock star’s assistant: “Please tell Mr Jagger I am not Maurits to him.”

Just want to point out, this could be a cultural difference and have nothing to do with his personality.

Note from the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_customs_and_etiquette#Ad...), in the Netherlands formal address is used for people "one does not know, or is only slightly acquainted with."

For us Americans it is hard to understand why it'd be a problem being too friendly -- you are simply trying to be nice and signaling that you are cordial and open, right?

Imagine that a stranger at a bus stop wants to talk to you: instead of caustiously approaching, and trying from few feets' distance to get your attention first, they come in for a full hug like a close friend would greet you. You might not want to interact with them further from that point.

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

now imagine that instead of going in for a hug, the stranger read your name off a name tag that you had on, and then cautioned you about how using hyperbole to bolster your point can, to eyes open enough to see, make your point actually appear weaker.

icc97• 11 years ago

I've lived in England and the Dutch speaking (Flemish) half of Belgium. Certainly trying to appear you're someone's friend when you don't know them is frowned upon. But Mick Jagger's English so he knows the customs - and they're fairly similar between England and Holland. There's probably quite a few people that would love to be called by their first name by Mick Jagger, but clearly Meneer Escher wasn't one of them.

IlPeach• 11 years ago

If you haven't been already, the Escher museum in the Hague is worth it. Seeing his works live gives you the idea of the amount of work and dedication he poured into his works.

ch215• 11 years ago

This reminded me of some graffiti next to the East Side Gallery, Berlin, which I found striking. There's a picture of the artist surrounded by the words: "MC Escher would be like, who the fuck is OBEY?"

M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion

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