6 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
stark, gigantic, modern, you need a table to read this book, May 29, 2004
This review is from: M C Escher (Hardcover)
My appreciation of art has been so influenced by the power of photography to capture things as I see them that I fail to see the works of M. C. Escher as being very artistic. If art is supposed to show the power of human beings to capture the essence of objects as we see them, Escher seems to be trying to show us things we could never see, but that try to be art like cinnamon rolls that come from a refrigerated can of dough and icing might try to replace real cinnamon rolls in our lives. Of the eight small pictures shown around the weird building topped with stairs and a tiny tower on the cover of M C ESCHER by Sandra Forty published by TAJ BOOKS 2003, a square near the lower right corner looks like a swirling combination of reptiles cooked up from splotchy shapes as a pattern emerges from the 10 x 10 squares around the edges, the shape of which suggests a pan of something from the oven.
I was introduced to the work of M C Escher about 33 years ago, after I was an adult attempting to understand the ways in which highly educated people understand the world. Or, in the case of M C Escher, there seems to be real questions about what people are doing here at all. On the stairs at the top of the building on the cover, the outer 14 hooded walkers seem to be climbing, holding the outer railing in their left hands, while the 12 inner walkers pass them descending the stairs with their left hands on the inner railing. The inner courtyard does not appear to be square, because the front wall is so much longer than the back, but due to perspective, each step appears to be higher or lower than any other step.
Maurits Cornelis Escher lived from 1898 to 1972, about the span of life of my grandparents, and page 5, which contains that information, also shows "House of Stairs" (my favorite Escher design) in the center of that page, though a larger copy, Plate 40 on page 51, is the same picture at about 6 inches by 12 inches. There are only a few pages in this book that don't have pictures on them. At the top of the pages of text up to page 11, there is a thin strip reproducing a long mural called "Metamorphosis" that is mainly black and white with a little color where a sky full of flying birds transforms into a city by a waterfront with a little bridge to a castle sitting on a chessboard. Escher did a lot, he "left over 2,000 drawings and 448 lithographs, woodcuts, and engravings. . . . His legacy is carefully guarded by the M. C. Escher Foundation at Baarn, The Netherlands." (p. 5). It is not surprising that this book contains some pictures that I did not have before. In the case of Plate 47, "Plane Filling Motif With Fish and Bird," (p. 58) I quickly saw four fish with eyes like circles, but it took me awhile to see a bird in the center between them, with an eye that looked like the number "6" which first seemed to be a cartoonish swirl to depict motion in whatever the fish were swimming in. There is nothing realistic in that picture: it looks more like a ragged potholder than a photograph, but the page is so black it can't be anything but ink on a page, which is what it is.
Escher's work is not totally devoid of women. One in a white dress is walking into "Convex and Concave" in Plate 56 (p. 67). Plate 7 shows "Jetta (Escher's wife)" 1925 woodcut 49.2 x 27.8 cm, looking very proper, with a collar that extends from shoulder to shoulder, holding a flower in front of a dark outfit that shows nothing of her figure, with her eyes lowered so that she can only see the flower if she is seeing anything. Her hair is neatly parted, but a tiny curl is visible by one temple. The picture is so black and white, the impression is that only her face, the flower and her hand are white, while her collar, neck and aura are trying to reside somewhere in between the light and the mystery where the shadow of her nose meets the edge of her lips. People who have worked with wood and a gouge will be able to detect each cut in the wood, and the only thing which is stark about the picture is that his use of technique is so visible.
A famous design, Plate 51 "Gravity" 1952 Lithograph and watercolor (p. 62), shows orange, purple, green, yellow, red, blue creatures standing on star-shaped planes with a point over the back of each creature. One point is a bit off center, with the five points of the plane on which the yellow creature is standing close to the edges of the picture, though five more points offset in the background suggest that the shape continues around to the other side. The creatures are arranged so each is shown from a different angle, each facing in a unique direction, but each seems to reflect the same dull recognition: I Know, I know, i know, i . . .
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