Print Gallery (M. C. Escher)
Lithograph printed in 1956 by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher
Print Gallery ( Dutch : Prentententoonstelling ) is a lithograph printed in 1956 by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher . It depicts a man in a gallery viewing a print of a seaport, and among the buildings in the seaport is the very gallery in which he is standing, making use of the Droste effect with visual recursion . [1] The lithograph has attracted discussion in both mathematical and artistic contexts. Escher considered Print Gallery to be among the best of his works. [2]
Origins
Bruno Ernst cites M. C. Escher as stating that he began Print Gallery "from the idea that it must be possible to make an annular bulge, a cyclic expansion ... without beginning or end." [3] Escher attempted to do this with straight lines, but intuitively switched to using curved lines which make the grid expand greatly as it rotates. [3] [4]
Seeming paradox
In his book Gödel, Escher, Bach , Douglas Hofstadter explains the seeming paradox embodied in Print Gallery as a strange loop showing three kinds of "in-ness": the gallery is physically in the town ("inclusion"); the town is artistically in the picture ("depiction"); the picture is mentally in the person ("representation"). [5]
Possible Droste effect
Escher's signature is on a circular void in the center of the work. In 2003, two Dutch mathematicians, Bart de Smit and Hendrik Lenstra , reported a way of filling in the void by treating the work as drawn on an elliptic curve over the field of complex numbers . They deem an idealized version of Print Gallery to contain a copy of itself (the Droste effect) , rotated clockwise by about 157.63 degrees and shrunk by a factor of about 22.58. [4] Their website further explores the mathematical structure of the picture. [6]
Post-modernism
Print Gallery has been discussed in relation to post-modernism by a number of writers, including Silvio Gaggi, [7] Barbara Freedman, [8] Stephen Bretzius, [9] and Marie-Laure Ryan . [10]
References
- ↑ Merow, Katharine (2013). "Escher and the Droste Effect" . Mathematical Association of America . Archived from the original on 2 August 2013.
- ↑ Locher, J.L. The Magic of M.C. Escher . Harry N. Abrams , p. 133.
- 1 2 Ernst, Bruno. De toverspiegel van M. C. Escher , Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1976; English translation by John E. Brigham: The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher , Ballantine Books , New York, 1976
- 1 2 de Smit, B.; Lenstra, H. W. (2003). "The Mathematical Structure of Escher's Print Gallery". Notices of the American Mathematical Society . 50 (4): 446–451.
- ↑ Cooper, Jonathan (5 September 2007). "Art and Mathematics" . Retrieved 5 September 2015 .
- ↑ Lenstra, Hendrik; De Smit, Bart. "Applying mathematics to Escher's Print Gallery" . Leiden University . Archived from the original on 2018-06-06 . Retrieved 6 June 2018 .
- ↑ Gaggi, Silvio (1989). Modern/Postmodern: A Study in Twentieth-Century Arts and Ideas . University of Pennsylvania Press . pp. 44–45. ISBN 0-8122-8154-3 .
- ↑ Freedman, Barbara (1991). Staging the gaze: postmodernism, psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean comedy . Cornell University Press . pp. 124–126 . ISBN 0-8014-9737-X .
- ↑ Bretzius, Stephen (1997). Shakespeare in theory: the postmodern academy and the early modern theater . University of Michigan Press . p. 57. ISBN 0-472-10853-0 .
- ↑ Ryan, Marie-Laure (2000). Narrative as virtual reality: immersion and interactivity in literature and electronic media . Johns Hopkins University Press . p. 165. ISBN 0-8018-6487-9 .
External links
- HarryCarry5 (Jul 26, 2009). Escher's Print Gallery Explained . YouTube.
- Artful Mathematics: The Heritage of M. C. Escher , by Bart de Smit and Hendrik Lenstra
- Escher's prentententoonstelling (Escher's picture gallery) shows an animation of the mathematical transformations involving a 3-D model of the town and art gallery, complete with source code.
- An Animation of Print Gallery created in Cindy JS