THE WORLDS OF M.C. ESCHER: NATURE, SCIENCE, AND IMAGINATION
LEONARDO DA VINCI’S CODEX LEICESTER AND THE CREATIVE MIND
Through Jan. 17
$12–$18 (ticketed together)
North Carolina Museum of Art
2110 Blue Ridge Road, Raleigh
919-839-6262
www.ncartmuseum.org
When we spoke with Nasher Museum of Art director Sarah Schroth for the museum’s 10th anniversary, she noted that, while she loves contemporary art, it doesn’t speak to everyone. That’s one reason she wanted to mount El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III, which paid off: It remains the Nasher’s most highly attended exhibit to date.
Though I, too, love contemporary and experimental art, I took her point. The cutting-edge stuff critics rave over is not for all, or even most, tastes and knowledge bases. And neither being popular nor being old necessarily makes a work of art unimportant. On the contrary, the opposite is often true. The North Carolina Museum of Art is clearly bearing populist appeal in mind with a pair of new exhibits, ticketed together, which shed new light on two over-familiar names who meet each other, in different eras, at the nexus of art and science.
The Worlds of M.C. Escher: Nature, Science, and Imagination is the largest career survey of the 20th-century Dutch printmaker ever produced in the U.S. By delving into and expanding around Escher’s famous optical illusions, it challenges shallow notions of him as a mere pop-culture trickster. Meanwhile, Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester and the Creative Mind reminds us, through a rare chance to explore one of his handwritten notebooks, that the original Renaissance man’s contributions to Western civilization go much deeper than “Mona Lisa.”
If you think you know these two, it’s time to think again. Brian Howe
Did you know the M.C. in M.C. Escher stands for Maurits Cornelis? Had it ever even occurred to you to wonder?
To many, calling Escher a serious artist is like calling Rube Goldberg a serious engineer. For 20th-century gatekeepers, the Dutch draftsman and printmaker was too gimmicky and decorative, too zany and pictorial, with too many fiddly bits for not enough payoff.
The New York Times‘ Roberta Smith summed up the prevailing view by describing his work as being “for beginners, an esthetic first love, like the poetry of Khalil Gibran or Pachelbel’s Canon, that is soon outgrown.” The insinuation is that immediacyand perhaps, popularity itselfis intrinsically vulgar.
Growing up in Hillsborough, I didn’t know from Gibran or Pachelbel, but I loved Escher, mainly for the space-warping lithographs that make up a relatively small part of his work compared with the outsize space they occupy in his reputation. You know the ones: A waterfall that flows back up to its own crest, a loop of endlessly ascending stairs, people traversing corridors and landings where up, down, left and right lose all meaning.
I also loved the tessellations, where identical figures, often of animals, are interlocked in airtight mosaic patterns. Many are raked by virtuosic transformations, so that geography, people, creatures and pure shapes evolve into one another, revealing a mathematical fabric of reality.
In the wholesale threshing of childish tastes that comes with the onset of adulthood, much that falls by the wayside deserves to. But there is always collateral damage. One would be remiss to write off E.E. Cummings because his poetry has a surface pizzazz a young person can appreciate as well as subtler depths to discover in adulthood.
Heading into The Worlds of M.C. Escher: Nature, Science, and Imagination at the North Carolina Museum of Art, I wondered how Escher would hold up.
Assembled by the museum’s European art curator, David Steel, the career-spanning exhibit includes more than 130 pieces, including woodcuts, lithographs, mezzotints, drawings and more, made between the 1920s and the 1960s. Said to be the most comprehensive Escher exhibit ever mounted in the U.S., it includes every iconic print I could think of and many that were new to me, as well as sketches, photo references, mathematical diagrams and sculptures that informed Escher’s lucidly rendered spatial fantasies. Supplemented by video tutorials on his plate-making and printing processes, for which he used a bone spoon or rolling pin instead of the mechanical presses we have today, the exhibit underscores his work ethic and astounding technical skill.
The show overflows in two auxiliary projects: a collaborative effort between Raleigh Murals Project and David Eichenberger to paint Escher quotes on downtown buildings until the end of the exhibit, and Engineering Infinity, an interactive, immersive “infinity cube,” created at the museum by N.C. State engineering students in response to both the Escher exhibit and the new Leonardo da Vinci show (see our story) with which it is bundled on a single ticket. Together, they form a blockbuster study of the transitional space where art meets science and math.
It’s also a chance to reassess Escher in the context of a museum instead of ubiquitous coffee-table books and dorm-room black light posters, which have made us so incurious about him that I never paused to consider that M.C. might stand for something.
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By delving into the inner workings of Escher’s optical illusions and fleshing out the other, less well-known sides of his work, the exhibit challenges his one-trick reputation. It proves the extent to which he constructed his perspectival riddles from whatever was at handthe pictures show his immediate reality through a rarified prism. For example, the human-faced bird you see in several of Escher’s pictures was actually based on a statue he owned, which you can see and learn the story of at NCMA.
Escher tied space in loops using seamlessly jointed, semi-permeable planes, drawing multiple perspectives into pristine unities. Underlying them were “impossible objects,” which exploit two-dimensional forced perspective to create irrational three-dimensional constructs.
Some of these were from existing mathematicsthink of the Möbius strip or the Penrose Triangle, which Escher fashioned into his ever-rising stairsand some were of his own devising, such as the Impossible Cube, which formed the basis of the famous “Belvedere,” where a ladder leans on irrational terraces whose pillars weave together background and foreground. If you study the print closely, you’ll notice a figure holding an Impossible Cube at the bottom.
The show also reveals how the artist arrived at the topsy-turvy illustrations that made him famous: not all at once, but incrementally, as the solidly drawn scenes of his early pictures tilt toward the uncanny a degree at a time.
Escher finished his studies at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem in 1922 and then began to travel abroad, gathering architectural and topographical fuel for his later visions, which, though they bore traces of Art Nouveau and Futurism, were his alone.
In Italy, he began to heavily stylize the world. An ink sketch for “San Gimignano,” displayed side-by-side with the finished woodcut, shows how he reduced the real to bold, textured patterns and stark fields of light and dark. Of course, “reduced” is misleading, as the world actually seems enhanced with subjectivity and profundity.
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Escher drew many such studies of the Italian landscape, and its jumbled villas and vertiginous perspectives, already verging on geometric abstraction, readily proffered themselves to optical trickery. From the realistic canted view of “Street in Scanno, Abruzzi,” it takes only a slight tilt to get to the first impossible landscape, “The Bridge.” It’s fascinating to see how Escher’s most famous pieces were puzzled together; he was an optical magpie. A sketch of Chartres Cathedral later becomes “The Sunken Cathedral,” slipping under black water with its bells ringing. The image came to him during a performance of the Debussy prelude of the same name. Escher was very moved by music, but not so much by God, and while cathedrals often feature in his pictures, what seems to interest him is their angles, as if God resided in geometry itself.
Likewise, the Moorish patterns that impressed Escher in Spain accelerate into tessellations and mosaics that grow increasingly intricate in their subdivisions of the pictorial plane. The showstoppers in this exhibit are the long “Metamorphosis” pictures, particularly “Metamorphosis II,” which merits at least 15 minutes of close scrutiny on its own. Chess pieces, words, lizards, bees, fish, landscapes and other elements are drawn into an elegant continuum that is somehow temporal as well as spatial.
To be sure, some of Escher’s pieces max out at clever. It’s not hard to see why some consider him jejune, with his propensity for drawing cartoon smiley faces on his funny animals. And there is something of the high-school stoner in lizards that crawl in and out of mirrors and drawings-within-drawings, hands that sketch each other, eyes reflecting skulls and, of course, the famous self-portrait in a curved mirror that shows Escher drawing that very picture in a trippy infinite regression. The French call the effect mise en abyme, and surely we should defer to the French in such matters.
But that whiff of solipsism also plumbs something deeper and more durable in Escher. The mirror distorts what is in front of it, the lens what’s behind it, and the human eye is both. From this liminal space of layered realities, where perception shifts and bends like a bubble, Escher explored every possible vantage, mining the gap between the flatness of the page and the depths it represents, as deeply as Jorge Luis Borges did in prose. Kids will love this exhibit, but it isn’t simple or vulgar. The artist may have been embraced with the same shallowness as, say, Salvador Dalí, but he didn’t see himself as a mere prankster, because he wasn’t one.
Escher didn’t become widely known in the U.S. until the 1960s, when his rather psychedelic (if exactingly logical) fancies resonated with the counterculture movement. The esteem was not mutual. The artist bemoaned the garishly colored rip-offs and outright thefts of his pictures on albums, magazines and posters. “The hippies of San Francisco continue to print my work illegally,” he huffed in a letter to his son.
In 1969, according to the exhibit’s catalog, Escher got a letter saying Mick Jagger wanted to commission an album cover. He politely but firmly declined, citing other commitments. The letter had begun, “Dear Maurits,” and the artist concluded, “By the way, please tell Mr. Jagger I am not Maurits to him, but, very sincerely, M.C. Escher.”
Given the scope of the accomplishment demonstrated in this exhibit, he will be, for a long time to come, coaxing more young people into the world of art and challenging more adults to measure their pretensions and biases against his fantastic inventions.
This article appeared in print with the headline “Warp and heft”
