M.C. Escher, the artist who lived from 1898 to 1972, suffers from horrible overexposure. Who hasn't seen the college dorm room posters, postcards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs of such well-worn images as a hand drawing another hand or gothic buildings with never-ending staircases? The mass reproduction of these images has carved a firm place in our popular culture, yet made the work dismissible as modern art. Beyond the familiar images, though, is an immense body of work. The Magic of M.C. Escher covers in depth the graphic illustrations, woodcuts, and lithographs of Escher's career. The artist has always attracted the attention of scientists, mathematicians, and teenage boys everywhere; the popular 1980s game Dungeons & Dragons seems to borrow heavily from the systematic yet mystical quality of his drawing style. With his amazingly repetitive graphic illustration and unflinchingly control of size, shape, and shading, Escher draws like a human computer. One can only wonder what he might have done with today's graphic tools.

The book itself is creatively put together, with foldouts, seemingly endless images, and a loving introduction by the director of the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague. The minimal text selections that appear throughout are quotes from Escher himself, many taken from letters to family members. These personal musings give candid insight into what he thought about his peers, his career, and his work: "I really do feel these days like a kind of 'specialist,' and I don't want to 'depend' on my specialty alone, but I also feel it to be my duty to devote myself to that as much as possible." This remarkable book is a wonderful opportunity to enjoy the astounding work of the man who could create two-dimensional origami with a pencil. --J.P. Cohen


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-This marvelous book is a must for any collection containing works about art and artistic temperament. Not only does it present the wonderfully visionary drawings, paintings, and woodcuts for which Escher is so widely known, but it also includes excerpts from his writings. J. L. Locher, director of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, provides the overview for the volume. Beautiful, full-color foldout copies exhibit some of Escher's most mesmerizing and intriguing works: Metamorphosis II, Day and Night, Up and Down, and Magic Mirror, to name a few. Many of the studies for these works are also included and demonstrate the planned, logical, and mathematical plane upon which Escher's fascinating conundrums are based. The two-page displays for Spirals and Mobius Strip II (Red Ants) are excellent cases in point. The book is filled with magical drawings created throughout the artist's career. Letters to family and friends and parts of lectures given by Escher describe the way he saw the world, his life, and his body of works. He "wandered in enigmas"; was bored by the right-angled boxes forced on mankind by gravity, "our tyrant"; and felt unsure of the "existence of a real, objective space." Even those who claim disinterest in art will find themselves drawn into Escher's exciting, inexplicable, virtual world.-Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VACopyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The adroit and magical mind-bending drawings of the Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), especially his elegant animal metamorphoses and dreamy architectural illusions, fascinate viewers. Tremendously popular during the psychedelic era, his work now delights Internet enthusiasts, attracting 30,000 visitors a month to a Web site called World of Escher far more meditative gaze, and this large-scale, beautifully produced volume of 380 meticulously reproduced illustrations is the ideal showcase for Escher's timeless creations. His mesmerizing drawings, enthrallingly rich in texture and detail, are accompanied by well-chosen excerpts from his diaries and letters, musings that reveal his wit and poetic sensibility. "Perhaps all I pursue is astonishment, and so I try to awaken only astonishment in my viewers," Escher writes in a self-critical mood; but elsewhere he expresses the true nature of his quest: "I try to bear witness that we are living in a beautiful, ordered world, and not in a chaos without standards, as it sometimes seems." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

Bookseller's Report
Mauritis C. Escher (1898-1972) was a Dutch artist whose mind meandered from architecture to landscape to a more theoretical terrain that he described as "mental imagery." In an almost logical way, his studies of buildings evolved into explorations of changing planes and interlocking surfaces; his architectural mazes twisting on on themselves in majestic acts of perspectival manipulation. This unprecedented book presents this literally mesmerizing artist through unpublished drawings and ten dynamic, never-before-unfurled gatefolds. One to watch.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

M.C. Escher's mesmerizing artworks create a realm of enchantment and illusion, and tens of thousands of people everywhere have fallen under his spell. This exciting new book deepens our understanding of this artist, who has been the subject of some of the most successful books Abrams has published over the past half century.

Brilliantly interweaving well-known prints with numerous unpublished drawings, incredible details, the artist's eloquent words, and observations by Escher expert J.L. Locher, this fresh presentation—which includes 10 dynamic full-color gatefolds—reveals Escher's tireless quest for new visual concepts of space and time. Here at least is a book what does justice to Escher's invention, which is, if anything, increasingly relevant in today's sophisticated world of 3-D computer graphics.

FROM THE CRITICS

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-This marvelous book is a must for any collection containing works about art and artistic temperament. Not only does it present the wonderfully visionary drawings, paintings, and woodcuts for which Escher is so widely known, but it also includes excerpts from his writings. J. L. Locher, director of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, provides the overview for the volume. Beautiful, full-color foldout copies exhibit some of Escher's most mesmerizing and intriguing works: Metamorphosis II, Day and Night, Up and Down, and Magic Mirror, to name a few. Many of the studies for these works are also included and demonstrate the planned, logical, and mathematical plane upon which Escher's fascinating conundrums are based. The two-page displays for Spirals and Mobius Strip II (Red Ants) are excellent cases in point. The book is filled with magical drawings created throughout the artist's career. Letters to family and friends and parts of lectures given by Escher describe the way he saw the world, his life, and his body of works. He "wandered in enigmas"; was bored by the right-angled boxes forced on mankind by gravity, "our tyrant"; and felt unsure of the "existence of a real, objective space." Even those who claim disinterest in art will find themselves drawn into Escher's exciting, inexplicable, virtual world.-Carol DeAngelo, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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