Order and Chaos

1955 · Print

May one see it?

Not receiving at present

National Gallery of Art

Washington, D.C., United States

It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.

Checked: 10 days ago
In this state since: Aug 19, 2026
Source: The museum

On the map Museum page

Particulars

Accession number: 1974.28.60

What it shows

Stars Geometric

In the catalog

Prints Lithograph Post-war art 20th century Dutch

Sources

National Gallery of Art
Image: National Gallery of Art — © the artist or rights holder

Meanwhile, in the life of Maurits Cornelis Escher

The whole life

1954
An exhibition for the Mathematical Congress
In 1954, for the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam, an exhibition of Escher’s work organised by N. G. de Bruijn opened at the Stedelijk Museum; Roger Penrose and H. S. M. Coxeter were deeply impressed by his intuitive grasp of mathematics. The exhibition took up so much time that in 1954 Escher made only two works.
27 April 1955
Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau
On 27 April 1955 Escher was made a Knight (fifth class) of the Order of Orange-Nassau; in 1967 Queen Juliana raised him to the rank of Officer.
1956–1960
The Penroses and “impossible figures”
“House of Stairs” (1951) attracted the interest of the mathematician Roger Penrose and his father, the biologist Lionel Penrose; in 1956 they published a paper on impossible objects and later sent Escher a copy. He replied, admiring their continuously rising flights of steps, and enclosed a print of “Ascending and Descending” (1960); he went on to use the Penrose triangle repeatedly, notably in “Waterfall” (1961).
1957–1959
Coxeter and “Circle Limit”
In 1957 the geometer Donald Coxeter, with Escher’s permission, used two of his drawings in a paper on crystal symmetry and sent him a copy; the figure of a hyperbolic tessellation, with tiles shrinking rapidly towards the edge of a circle, “gave him quite a shock” — here was a way to represent infinity on a plane. He called his experiments “Coxetering”; they gave the series of wood engravings “Circle Limit I–IV”, and in 1959 Coxeter concluded that they were accurate to the millimetre.

All works