I(Chris) was visiting The Hague, Holland – in May 2017 and spent a few hours to see the Escher in Het Palais. The semi-permanent exhibition is held in the former Winter palace of Queen Mother Emma of the Netherlands – Lange Voorhout Palace, which was built in the 1700’s.
The regular exhibition features fantastic, mathematics-inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints created by Maurits Cornelius Escher (1898-1972). You would likely have seen his works before.
Escher’s art became well known especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.
While his works were well recognized, the art world did not pay much attention. Perhaps, because the works often reflected a mathematical-mechanical theme, his works are being considered a lesser accomplishment.
I first saw Escher’s art in the Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach. And later I collected postcards of his works (when I went through a phase of buying a ton of postcards after every museum trip).
Early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants, all of which he used as details in his artworks.
His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations.
Here is an explanation of tessellation – the art of tiling a surface with repetitive irregular shapes.
A special exhibition entitled “Escher Close Up” was running. It shows for the first time, a selection of photos from Escher’s personal archive.
Three versions of the Metamorphosis, from the first small one, to the third, of 7 meters, shown in a circle. To appreciate it, you need to be there.
The exhibit is spread out on three floors, each room decorated with a chandelier made of crystals to form a shape (it has nothing to do with Escher).
In the atrium, a string of crystal artefacts were on display suspended from the ceiling.
The third floor of the museum is dedicated to optical illusion – many of which were featured in Escher’s works.
In this illusion, as you walk through the door way, there is a moment when you look as if you are inside the cube. There is a video monitor to show you the effect.
This illusion features an endless pit in the floor.
Very glad to have gone to visit the palace.