M.C. Escher at the New Britain Museum of American Art

Peter and I recently visited The New Britain Museum of American Art http://www.nbmaa.org/ a treasure not far west of Hartford, Connecticut. Special exhibits included one of Hudson River paintings, illustrations for pulp novels, and the one we especially came for: M.C. Escher: Impossible Reality, showing through November 14. We enjoyed the sketches Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) worked out on graph paper, and the range of his woodcuts, lithographs, and other prints. Apparently his brother was a geologist, who got him thinking about the symmetry found in crystallized forms. M.C. Escher said he found he usually had more in common with mathematicians than artists. Here is Ascending and Descending:



And just an edge of one of my favorites, Metamorphosis, which took up a wall:



My husband was really the one who wanted to see the show, as Escher's work can leave me dizzy. (It took lots of extra help one summer for me to make it through a college logic course: I had nightmares of tables turning into numbers and letters, and have a thing for solid ground.) But this show tipped me in a good direction, at least for the afternoon.

In 1965 Escher wrote: "I can't help mocking all our unwavering certainties. It is, for example, great fun to deliberately confuse two or three dimensions, the place and space, or to poke fun at gravity. Are you sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk up your staircase? Can you be definite that it's impossible to have your cake and eat it, too?"