Dali House

A bit more rooting around in other people’s boxes of stuff lately. Nothing to get alarmed about though. Specifically it’s the curiosity cabinets alluded to in previous posts on Mark Ryden and assemblages.

Due to my adolescent predilection for collection, I can’t get enough of the boxed sets carefully laid out by 16th- and 17th-century Europeans, as wonderfully detailed by McGill University history buff GillesThibault on his lovely website (high-school French or better required).

Folks back in the just plain curious days before television gathered together all the oddities they could from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms and arranged them in fine wooden cabinets to show their friends. They were evidence of serious scholarship for some, conversation pieces for most, but they were usually always interesting to look it, certainly a lot more so than the sticks of furniture surrounding them. See the rest.

scher’s fame preceded him across the Atlantic with the publication of articles about him in Time and Life in 1951, with boosted orders for his work.

He had his first one-man exhibition in the United States in Washington, and was in demand as a lecturer, both to arts and science followers, in the US and Canada. Shown here is a computation of an Escher tesselation, and above, “Order and Chaos” from 1950.

British-born HSM Coxeter (1907-2003), pictured here, was a mathematician at the University of Toronto when he met MC Escher in Amsterdam in 1954. They began a correspondence that continued until the latter’s death.

“I’m engrossed again in the study of an illustration which I came across in a publication of [Coxeter],” Maurits wrote. “I am trying to glean from it a method for reducing a plane-filling motif which goes from the centre of a circle out to the edge, where the motifs will be infinitely close together. His hocus-pocus text is no use to me at all, but the picture can probably help me …” See the rest.

This is Fiumara. Throughout the 1930s Escher continued exploring Italy just as he had begun with his adventurous companions years earlier, seeking out the most remote regions of the south on foot and by mule. In Calabria’s endless vistas and clattering towns piled up in the dust of centuries, he found some sort of paradise. Shown below is “Fiumara, Calabria” from 1930.

Escher in San Marco Leone. In 1927 he made his first lithograph. His first wood engraving, which permitted finer lines thanks to harder wood used, would come four years later. He enjoyed early success in both shows and sales, but throughout his life there were periodic slumps in public interest.

In 1932 the director of the Dutch Historical Institute in Rome ended one such dry spell by suggesting ideas for new works that were published as a book titled “Emblemata”, and the following year Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum bought 26 prints.

In 1934 Escher’s “Nonza, Corsica”, shown here, won third prize in the Exhibition of Contemporary Prints at the Art Institute of Chicago, which purchased the print – his first US sale.

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See the rest.

Some time ago I was admiring one of MC Escher’s prints showing a village perched on a cliffside in Italy and went looking for it on Google Earth. I subsequently discovered that, before Escher started metamorphosising birds into fish and building impossible staircases, he’d spent many years in Italy and came up with amazing pictures of almost everywhere he went. The surprising thing is that so many of these stunning images are true to life.

My further reading about a man who’d first impressed me when I was in high school resulted in a 68-piece Google Earth tour fully illustrated with his drawings. Following is some of the text and images used.

In a way, MC Escher – who died 35 years ago come March 27 – just happened to come along at the right time. When his mesmerising work first became globally known in the 1960s it found admirers it in a generation of young people who, if not actually eyewitness to such constructions in their own minds thanks to hallucinogenic drugs, discovered a contrary art form almost made for them. Stirred by rebelliousness, Alice had made another trip through the looking glass, and this was what she found.

On the other hand, Escher was no hippie. If occasionally playful, he was sobre, conservative, studious, neat, pragmatic, scientific, hard-working, a devoted family man and, because the fascists had made his own life difficult, accepting of the need for war. (Mussolini was at his first child’s christening, but that had to do with local celebrity, not ideology.) See the rest.

Making his third visit to the Dali House and again leaving a trail of chalkdust everywhere he goes is Julian Beever, the British title holder in pavement painting.

See the previous posts on this Warhol of the walkways here and here.

Once again thanks to Terri in California who really ought to be emailing me more often, but I forgive her because she’s such an aficionado of urban artwork.