M.C. Escher: Drawing Hands

Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972) cultivated contradictions. He said, "I am deliberately inconsistent," and the world of his art was a deliberate violation of reality, logic, and everyday expectations. The firm rationality of Escher's impossible worlds finds its counterpart in the regular, interlocking figures he took to drawing after a seminal encounter with Alhambra's Moorish tiles. There is nothing chaotic about the art of Escher. A fish may mutate into a goose, stairs may climb at angles denounced by gravity, water may run uphill, but the clean, rational lines of these prints transcend the rules of the possible, achieving a logic beyond logic.