

M.C. Escher: An Enigma Behind an Illusion - howsilly
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150624-arts-most-famous-illusion

======
tinkerdol
> 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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_customs_and_etiquette#Addressing_people:_formal_and_informal)),
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.

~~~
icc97
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.

------
otherusername2
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
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.

~~~
artpolice
> 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.

~~~
ArtBot-1
I think that's all true. Escher's art is accessible, it has very fine
technical control, superficially it's a one trick pony.

Isn't real art messy? Escher isn't messy.

But it's one hell of a trick. The math is more complicated than it looks, the
draughtsmanship is incredible, and there's real mood and atmosphere.

I wouldn't say it's ugly or revolting. I would say it's unique. It's a new
visual language, and no one has ever copied it successfully.

But I could be biased. I'm an artist, I work with code and math, and I can
appreciate the technique and the content.

Artists who hate code and math probably don't get it at all. If all they see
is some monks climbing an infinite staircase then yeah - that's going to seem
gimmicky and boring.

~~~
darkmighty
It reminds of a conversation R.P. Feynman had with an artist friend that goes
like Artist:"When I see a flower, I see beauty; you scientists pick it apart,
examine meticulously and it ceases being so beautiful.", while it seemed
Feynman had a hard time explaining that he saw _other, (sometimes) more
profound_ beauties, not just the one arising from it's color and immediate
looks. It's probably because the artist didn't even know what he was missing,
so the discussion is very asymmetrical in a way.

------
escherize
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/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-coherence/)

~~~
gshubert17
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel,_Escher,_Bach)

------
IlPeach
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.

------
wishinghand
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.

~~~
keithpeter
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.

------
keithpeter
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.

~~~
jules
That quote is saying more about artists than about Escher.

------
ch215
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?"

