About Jeff Price & Artists' Market
1968 was a momentous year for M.C. Escher and me. Over in The Netherlands, Escher had his first museum retrospective. My father, Derek de Solla Price, a professor of History of Science at Yale, went to that exhibit and brought back its catalog to North Haven. I had seen Escher’s work in a picture book, but that was the first time I saw his drawings together with his prints. Those drawings showed me that magic of Escher’s creative process. I looked at every image with a magnifying glass, and since the little square book was poorly bound, turning all the pages so many times made the book fall apart. I was hooked for life, and that book is still on my bookshelf almost sixty years later.
I was sixteen and there was a lot going on in the late sixties. In 1967 I had taken a bus to San Francisco to see what the hippie scene was about. Seeing the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin that year changed my musical taste, and looking at art books with unusual artworks became more interesting than most of the stuff they taught in school.
When I discovered one could major in art history in college, I knew that was for me. Four and half years later, I graduated from the University of Connecticut with an honors degree focusing on printmaking and photography.
​I was lucky enough to start working at Artists’ Market right after college. It was a small arts and crafts business at the time, and I was determined to make it into something really special. I wanted to have Escher’s amazing images in my gallery, but they were hard to find.
1968 was a momentous year for M.C. Escher and me. Over in The Netherlands, Escher had his first museum retrospective. My father, Derek de Solla Price, a professor of History of Science at Yale, went to that exhibit and brought back its catalog to North Haven. I had seen Escher’s work in a picture book, but that was the first time I saw his drawings together with his prints. Those drawings showed me that magic of Escher’s creative process. I looked at every image with a magnifying glass, and since the little square book was poorly bound, turning all the pages so many times made the book fall apart. I was hooked for life, and that book is still on my bookshelf almost sixty years later.