Escher Today

In April 1980 Douglas R. Hofstadter wins the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Gödel, Escher, Bach takes the form of an interweaving of various narratives. The main chapters alternate with dialogues between imaginary characters. The book contains many instances of recursion and self-reference and is full of wordplay and puzzles. It's a very ambitious book that doesn't succeed on all levels, but Hofstadter's optimism and his drive to explore the huge amounts of knowledge available in the world make that you want to read it again and again.

Convex and Concave (March 1955) has a nightmarish quality: where is the entrance, are we going up or down, are we inside or outside? The construction in the middle, where two perspectives merge, produces a sensation of dizziness.

During the first months of 1934 Escher worked on a series of prints of Rome by night.

‘This amazing, beautiful, night-time Rome, whose architecture I love so much more than I do during the day’.

In the winter of 1925/1926 Escher worked on a series of six woodcuts about the creation of the world as told in the Book of Genesis, ‘I sei giorni della creazione’. The series gathered a lot of appreciation, both in the Netherlands as in Italy where he exhibited them in…

Escher produced a number of prints based on the concept of the Möbius strip, discovered by the German mathematician and astronomer Ferdinand Möbius (1790-1868).

Escher visited Sicily while it was still untouched. In the spring of 1932 he made his first trip to the island, together with his friend and painter Giuseppe Haas-Triverio.
One of the places they visit is the cloister at the cathedral of Monreale. It is considered as one of the most beautiful in Italy. In March 1933 Escher created a wood engraving which is based on this visit.

On 6 March 1938 Jan Escher is born. Following George (1926) and Arthur (1928), he is the third son of Maurits and Jetta. Just as he did for Arthur, Escher created the birth announcement card himself.

In March 1932 Escher created a lithograph of a lion.

In March 1958 Escher creates an eight-sided woodcut called Path of Life I. Stingrays swim in ever decreasing circles as the heart of the composition approaches. The work fits in a series in which the artist explores through shrinking or growing figures the concepts of eternity and infinity.

In February 1950 Escher produced Contrast (Order and Chaos). Occupying centre stage in this print is a perfectly symmetrical spatial figure: an almost transparent stellated dodecahedron that has been merged with a glass sphere.