M., C. Escher; His Life and Complete Graphic Work With a Fully Illustrated Catalogue

New York: Abradale Press, Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1982. English Language Reprint Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Fair. The format is approximately 9.75 inches by 12 inches. 349, [3] pages. Illustrations (606, including 36 plates in full color). DJ is worn, torn, soiled and chipped. This is a large and very heavy book and if sent outside of the United States will require additional shipping charges. All of the more than four hundred and fifty prints made by the popular graphic artist are reproduced and thoroughly discussed in an annotated study of Escher's unique visual exploration of time and space. Contents include Biographical Chronology, Escher Senior, Early Life, Italy and Spain, Rome, Switzerland and Belgium, Back in Holland, Letter to Arthur, Crystallographers' Recognition, Voyage to Canada, The Final Years, The Vision of a Mathematician, The Regular Division of the Plane, Catalogue, Notes on the Illustrations. Concordance List of Colour Plates, Selected Bibliography, Index of Works Illustrated, and Index of Names. Maurits Cornelis Escher (17 June 1898 - 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics. Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world. His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose and Harold Coxeter and crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation. Early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks. He traveled in Italy and Spain, sketching buildings, townscapes, architecture and the tilings of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Cordoba, and became steadily more interested in their mathematical structure. Escher's art became well known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Apart from being used in a variety of technical papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books and albums. He was one of the major inspirations of Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach. In July 1969 he finished his last work, a large woodcut with threefold rotational symmetry called Snakes, in which snakes wind through a pattern of linked rings. These shrink to infinity toward both the center and the edge of a circle. It was exceptionally elaborate, being printed using three blocks, each rotated three times about the center of the image and precisely aligned to avoid gaps and overlaps, for a total of nine print operations for each finished print. The image encapsulates Escher's love of symmetry; of interlocking patterns; and, at the end of his life, of his approach to infinity. The care that Escher took in creating and printing this woodcut can be seen in a video recording.