?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
MAURITS C. ESCHER Belvedere.
Lithograph, 1958. 460x295 mm; 18x11 3/4 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered "No. 75/107 IV" in pencil, lower left. A brilliant, evenly-printed impression.
Like Waterfall (1961), this lithograph captures an impossible shape, in this instance the view of a cube from below held by the seated man in the foreground. It has been suggested that Escher (1898-1972) was influenced by Giovanni B. Piranesi's (1720-1778) Carceri d'Invenzione series of etchings of fantastic, otherworldly prison scenes from the mid-1700s.
Bool notes, "It looks as though the top floor of the belvedere is straight on top of the floor below. This impression is reinforced by the woman and the man on the right. They are exactly one above the other, but they are looking in different directions, at right angles to each other. There is something strange about the eight pillars joining the floors. Only those at the extreme right and the extreme left behave in a normal fashion; the other six join the front to the back and must therefore run diagonally across the middle story . . . If we cut the print horizontally across where the pillars seem to cross over, the two halves would be perfectly normal: it is a matter of making impossible connections, as in the case of the cuboid which the young man is holding in his hands contemplatively." Bool 426.
