?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 40,000 - $ 60,000
MAURITS C. ESCHER Relativity.
Lithograph, 1953. 276x292 mm; 11x11 1/2 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered "No. 2/20" in pencil, lower left. A superb impression of this extremely scarce lithograph.
We have found only eight other impressions at auction in the past 30 years.
According to Bool, "In a few astonishing prints Escher showed that zenith, nadir and distance points are only relative concepts." The lithograph Relativity is one such image in which these concepts prove to be interchangeable. Relativity also depicts a world in which the normal laws of gravity do not apply. The architectural structure seems to be the center of an idyllic community, with most of its inhabitants casually going about their ordinary business, such as dining. There are windows and doorways leading to park-like outdoor settings. All of the figures are dressed in identical attire and have featureless bulb-shaped heads. In the world of Relativity, there are three sources of gravity, each being orthogonal to the two others. Each inhabitant lives in one of the gravity wells, where normal physical laws apply. There are sixteen characters, spread between each gravity source, six in one and five each in the other two. The apparent confusion of the lithograph comes from the fact that the three gravity sources are depicted in the same space. Bool 389.
