Master Drawings New York (MDNY) is an art fair dedicated to works on paper and is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. Hearing the words “master drawings” brings to mind old master works on yellowed paper in darkened museum rooms. Master Drawings New York has some of that, but also so much more. The fair includes works ranging from 16th century drawings to Polaroids from the 1970s, from a large double portrait by contemporary artist Kiki Smith to drawings created by a British soldier imprisoned in Dachau during World War Two. MDNY is held in galleries throughout the city, mostly concentrated on the Upper East Side. The fair is complemented by a program of talks, tours, and workshops organized in partnership with The Drawing Foundation.
Between Order and Chaos features instantly recognizable works by Escher, including Day and Night, Bond of Union, and experiments with distortion such as Print Gallery. Escher’s prints are juxtaposed with photographs by André Kertész. Some of the pairings are so strikingly similar that it almost feels as though the two artists were working side by side, much like Picasso and Braque during the development of Analytical Cubism. Born just four years apart, Kertész and Escher appear to have influenced one another or to have independently investigated the same visual and perceptual concerns. For example, Kertész’s photograph Fortune Teller (1930), which depicts a figure distorted through a mirrored ball, closely parallels Escher’s Self-Portrait in Spherical Mirror (1935). Escher’s woodcut Puddle (1952) also finds a clear counterpart in Kertész’s photograph Puddle, Empire State Building (1967), in which the iconic structure appears inverted in a puddle, destabilizing spatial perception. Kertész’s photographs of Manhattan buildings, such as Chimney, MacDougal Alley, April 1, 1965 and 23rd Street, New York, September 11, 1970, reduce the cityscape to abstract arrangements of geometric forms that echo Escher’s earlier architectural constructions like Convex and Concave and Up and Down.
