Wikipedia entry
Introduction
Maurits Cornelis Escher (; Dutch: [ˈmʌurɪts kɔrˈneːlɪs ˈɛɕər]; 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics. Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world. His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Donald Coxeter, and the crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation. Early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks. He traveled in Italy and Spain, sketching buildings, townscapes, architecture and the tilings of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Cordoba, and became steadily more interested in their mathematical structure. Escher's art became well known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Apart from being used in a variety of technical papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books and albums. He was one of the major inspirations for Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Wikidata
Q1470
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
Getty record
Introduction
Dutch printmaker best known for his fantastic visions of the natural world structured into impossible visual puzzles and perspective games. In his works, the division of the picture plane is concerned with metamorphosis and images multiplied to infinity. These images are typically rendered in black and white, in a severe, stylized manner.
Nationality
Dutch
Gender
Male
Roles
Artist, Designer, Lithographer, Muralist, Graphic Artist, Illustrator, Painter, Photographer, Sculptor
Names
M. C. Escher, Maurits Cornelis Escher, Mauricio Escher, Mauk Escher
Ulan
500007222
Information from Getty’s Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License

Works

4 works online

Exhibitions

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