NCMA’s fall doubleheader: Escher and Leonardo

Last year, N.C. Museum of Art director Larry Wheeler got an exciting offer: a chance to be one of only three museums in the country to show the “Codex Leicester,” a 500-year-old notebook consisting of writings by the renowned Italian scientist/artist Leonardo da Vinci.

There was, however, just one catch. The available time slot was late fall 2015, when the museum already had a major show scheduled – “The Worlds of M.C. Escher: Nature, Science, and Imagination,” an exhibition that curator of European art David Steel was well into planning.

Steel was concerned that there wasn’t enough time to pull off both exhibits simultaneously and do them justice. Wheeler, however, didn’t give him a choice.

“When I was told we couldn’t take on Leonardo, too, my response was, ‘Oh yes we can,’ ” Wheeler said, laughing at the memory. “I said there was no way we were turning it down because it was a terrific opportunity, and they relate to each other.”

Extra security

The Escher show opened on Oct. 17, while “Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Codex Leicester’ and the Creative Mind” is scheduled to open on Halloween. Both will close in January. Either could have stood alone as this fall’s centerpiece show. But presenting them together like this (a single ticket gets you into both shows), with accompanying outreach events including a public-art murals project, stands as one of the most ambitious projects the N.C. Museum of Art has ever undertaken.

“They’re a very strong museum within the nationwide community of museums,” said Christine Anagnos, executive director of the New York-based Association of Art Museum Directors. “They do a lot of great community programs with teens and youth, and these exhibitions give them the opportunity to reach even further. Larry Wheeler is a great museum professional who cares deeply about his community, and you can tell.”

“Nature, Science, and Imagination” consists of 130 works, mostly borrowed from private collections to put together the largest assemblage of Eschers ever presented in one place. “Codex Leicester,” meanwhile, is shown at the pleasure of its owner, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who bought it at auction in 1994 for more than $30 million.

Raleigh will be the third stop for the Leonardo notebook, after museums in Phoenix and Minneapolis. It’s a fragile document, shown in special display cases custom-built in Milan, Italy, and wired with software to interpret the material on interactive pads for viewers.

Not surprisingly, this will be the N.C. Museum of Art’s first-ever exhibit requiring visitors to go through enhanced, airport-type security with metal detectors. There’s a long list of prohibited items, too: pens, liquids, lotions, food, weapons and anything else that security personnel don’t like the looks of.

“I think that’s kind of sexy because it emphasizes the specialness and rarity of the experience,” said Wheeler. “I think it will be really inspiring and very cool.”

Parallels between artists

Once the agreements were struck for both exhibits to run concurrently, Steel set to work. By this past spring, he was writing the very hefty Escher show catalog while trying to find time to make arrangements for “Codex Leicester.” Eventually, he had to rearrange his schedule to work on each project one week at a time.

“I couldn’t do day-to-day switchbacks, it was just too much,” Steel said. “But it did help me see the parallels between Escher and Leonardo. Of all the artists to have followed, Escher is the most Leonardo-like of all. They both understood that art was a way to bring order to a chaotic world.”

Escher, who lived from 1898 to 1972, is best-known for his “impossible construction” illustrations and riffs on two-dimensional infinity, which landed him on countless dorm-room black-light posters during the 1960s and ’70s. Escher’s pop-culture omnipresence might have something to do with the lack of respect accorded his work in high-art circles.

Steel still bristles when recalling the critical response to a late-1990s Escher show at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. It was the best-attended show the National Gallery ever did – “bigger than (King) Tut,” Steel said – but The New York Times dismissed it as “art for beginners.”

“The attitude that if everybody likes something it can’t be art is so blind and narrow-minded,” Steel said. “Escher didn’t care anything about the art world, but his vision was still way more original than almost anyone else in the 20th century. He could have been Andy Warhol, but he wasn’t interested in celebrity status. There’s more to Escher than initially meets the eye. His work gets better the more you look at it. He’s more substance than flash, and the flash is pretty impressive, too.”

The N.C. Museum of Art will have both shows in place until Jan. 17. Wheeler puts the overall attendance goal at about 100,000, which would make it the museum’s biggest show since “Rembrandt in America” (which drew more than 150,000 people during its run in fall 2011).

“However it does, I don’t care,” Wheeler said. “I think we’ll do well with this just because of who and where we are. It fits our community’s intersection of math and science and creativity, and how art can be integrated into those think processes. We’ve advocated right-brain and left-brain thinking together all along, and this demonstrates it better than anything we could have done.”

This story was originally published October 24, 2015 at 12:00 PM with the headline "NCMA’s fall doubleheader: Escher and Leonardo."