2/24/2011 - West Side Leader
By Roger Durbin
On its official opening day Feb. 12, the Akron Art Museum’s newest exhibition, M.C. Escher: Impossible Realties, was drawing in the viewers.
Nearly 2,000 people visited the museum during the opening weekend, the largest since the museum’s re-opening in 2007, according to museum officials.
No wonder, for this rare and privileged opportunity to see firsthand the masterworks of Dutch-born Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972). The Akron Art Museum is the last of only two venues in the United States to show this “once-in-a-lifetime” loan from Athens, Greece, according to museum officials. The exhibit will be on display through May 29.
Escher created a total of 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and more than 2,000 drawings and sketches in his life. The 130 pieces on display represent some of his most recognizable, but certainly his finest, works, beginning with bookplates from the 1920s and moving through his landscapes and his tessallations (in which a collection of plane figures fills the plane with no overlaps and no gaps, like a honeycomb in nature) and on to jumbled visual worlds until the display finishes with his last work, the quite famous “Snakes” from 1969.
When walking through, a viewer would be hard put to name a favorite, for each work seems to invite the passerby in and captivates with its intricacies and its seemingly disheveled view of reality. His famous lithograph “Ascending and Descending” goes to the point. When looking at the work, the viewer cannot really tell which direction the figures are moving.
Escher seems to play with such dichotomies — up and down to be sure, as the one work’s title clarifies, but also with such simple but ultimately unfathomable concepts like high and low, or near and far, back and forth, end to end, and on to vague things like “neither fish nor fowl” or “no beginning and no end.” Take his work “Day and Night.” Sweeping from the left is a highly sunlit city and river with white birds flying overhead, while sweeping from the right of the work is the same city in the dark with black birds flying overhead. The contours of the white birds become the outline of the black birds and vice-versa in this tessellation by the artist.
Because of these “mind bending” qualities of his work, the viewer gets the feeling that Escher is capturing in his work a kind of mental free-fall, but one without end. In his works, there is the strong suggestion of infinity. His work “Reptiles,” for example, shows lizards endlessly crawling into and out of a drawing with them as subject. In his woodcut “Horsemen,” which is a depiction of a double-sided ribbon that turns on itself, there is no end to the parade of horsemen who cross through the inside and outside planes shown in the image.
Escher wasn’t a painter. He did drawings that served as studies for his real love of print-making through various techniques, such as lithography (or stone based masters for the prints), wood engraving, messotint and his favorite, woodcuts — all of which are represented here. Woodcuts are a difficult medium, as Escher himself noted when he first began his artistry. Even a cursory glance through the works displayed gives the viewer an idea of how painstaking, exacting and time-consuming the work can be. Some drawings, especially when side by side with the finished woodcut or wood engraving, as we see with “Flatworms” and “Reptiles,” illustrate just how much planning and technical achievement Escher needed to complete such complex works. The artist spent weeks or months working on details.
In the nearby Isroff gallery is a companion installation piece by Sarah Kabot titled Unfolding Space. Kabot presumably plays off Escher’s notions of the fluidity of space and time and whether “up” is really “down” in a given context by recreating in foam core the light fixtures and floor boards of the museum galleries and attaching them to the walls. It’s an interesting notion that doesn’t seem quite fully realized in this instance. The exhibit is on display through June 11.
To accommodate visitor enthusiasm for this exhibition, an “Extra Escher Evening” will take place March 4. The galleries will be open until 9 p.m.
The museum also is extending the showing of Claude Monet’s “Wisteria” through March 20 in the C. Blake McDowell Jr. Galleries.
Regular gallery hours are Wednesdays through Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. The museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays. General admission is $7 for adults, $5 for students and seniors and free for museum members and children 12 and younger.
On the first Sunday of the month, individual admission to the collection is free, although special exhibitions may require paid admission. Allow about an hour-and-a-half to see both exhibitions.
For more information, visit www.AkronArtMuseum.org or call 330-376-9185.
Roger Durbin is professor emeritus of bibliography at The University of Akron and an avid art enthusiast. To contact him, e-mail r.durbin@sbcglobal.net.
