Dali House

MC Escher portraying the Loch Ness monster? I hadn’t heard about this until Dali House visitor Jessy made a comment on my Escher biography post, but the work in question was supposedly discovered in 2007.

A quick graze on Google turns up a very suspicious meme, though: a very rough-English message repeated in various online forums — without any proper debate and rarely having anything to do with the subject matter to which it’s attached. Why don’t the webmasters shave this stuff off if it’s completely beside the point? They don’t so it’s replicated all over the place.

In fact this whole thing may be a giant hoax. The artwork in question certainly lacks Escher’s usual precision, not to mention draughting skills.

In the case of Dali House, Jessy provided links to a pair of videos of newscasts and a downloadable PDF of the February 2007 Giornale di Polizia, in which the mayor of Rome is quizzed about the authenticity of “Black Man Without a Face”, then in the possession of the city’s Supervisor of Police.

All of the linked material is in Italian, and Babelfish is, as usual, as unhelpful as possible with the translation.

There’s talk of a “perverse game” and “emotional repercussions”, and speculation about the “fact” that the artwork was found in the southern town of Volturara Irpina, which evidently has its own underwater monster, based on a legend that someone named Gesio killed a dragon hidden in the lake. The storyteller goes on about making the town wealthy through the enticement of flute music, but I can’t follow it at all.

“You leave me to say,” concludes the mayor, “that the monster of Loch Ness has crossed the centre of the earth in order to reach from the famous Scottish lake to the disowned lake of Volturara Irpina.” From the shore of the latter, the serpent is beckoned by the flautist. See the rest.

The kubuswoning — cube houses — of Rotterdam make for a startling discovery amid Google Earth’s satellite sightseeing. They were the work, in the early ’80s, of architect Piet Blom (1934-1999), who also built a cluster in Helmond in the previous decade. MC Escher had nothing to do with them, nor Dali.

The tradional cube shape of a house is tilted 45 degrees and perched atop a hexagon-shaped pylon.

Another source refers to them as paalhuizen, which means “pole-houses”, and lived-in houses are what they are. All 32 kubuswoning in Rotterdam are occupied. One clever owner found a way to fend off the curiousity seekers, by designating a furnished “show cube” for tourists. 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.