ARTnews
APRIL 2004
The Magic Mirror of M.C. Escher PLUS:
Picasso’s Heirs * Russia’s
Amber Room * Western Art *
The Lost Worlds of Dali
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The Magic Mirror
M.C. Escher’s Mysterious Art, and mind brought us all on a mystical journey through depth, and deception.
By Hugh Eakin
M
aurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972) is
one of the world's most famous graphic
artists. His art is enjoyed by millions of
people all over the world, as can be seen on the
many web sites on the internet.
He is most famous for his so-called impossible
structures, such as Ascending and Descending,
Relativity, his Transformation Prints, such as
Metamorphosis I, Metamorphosis II and
Metamorphosis III, Sky & Water I or Reptiles.
But he also made some
wonderful, more realistic work
during the time he lived and
traveled in Italy.
Castrovalva for example, where
one already can see Escher's
fascination for high and low,
close by and far away. The
lithograph Atrani, a small town
on the Amalfi Coast was made
in 1931, but comes back for
example, in his masterpiece
Metamorphosis I and II.
Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, as the fourth and
youngest son of a civil engineer. After 5 years
the family moved to Arnhem where Escher
spent most of his youth. After failing his high
school exams, Maurits ultimately was enrolled in
the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts
in Haarlem.
After only one week, he informed his father that
he would rather study graphic art instead of
architecture, as he had shown his drawings and
linoleum cuts to his graphic teacher
Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita,
who encouraged him to continue
with graphic arts.
After finishing school, he traveled
extensively through Italy, where
he met his wife Jetta Umiker,
whom he married in 1924. They
settled in Rome, where they
stayed until 1935. During these
11 years, Escher would travel
each year throughout Italy,
drawing and sketching for the
various prints he would make
when he returned home.
M.C. Escher, during his lifetime,
Many of these sketches he would
made 448 lithographs,
later use for various other
woodcuts and wood engravings
Dragon, wood engraving, 1952
lithographs and/or woodcuts and
and over 2000 drawings and
wood engravings, for example the background
sketches. Like some of his famous
in the lithograph Waterfall stems from his Italian
predecessors, - Michelangelo, Leonardo da
period, or the trees reflecting in the woodcut
Vinci, Dürer and Holbein-, M.C. Escher was leftPuddle, which are the same trees Escher used
handed.
in his woodcut "Pineta of Calvi", which he made
in 1932.
Apart from being a graphic artist, M.C. Escher
illustrated books, designed tapestries, postage
stamps and murals. He was born in
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M.C. Escher became fascinated by the regular
Division of the Plane, when he first visited the
Alhambra, a fourteen century Moorish castle in
Granada, Spain in 1922.
During the years in Switzerland and throughout
the Second World War, he vigorously pursued
his hobby, by drawing 62 of the total of 137
Regular Division Drawings he would make in
his lifetime.
He would extend his passion for the Regular
Division of the Plane, by using some of his
drawings as the basis for yet another hobby,
carving beech wood spheres.
He played with architecture, perspective and
impossible spaces. His art continues to amaze
and wonder millions of people all over the world.
In his work we recognize his keen observation
of the world around us and the expressions of
his own fantasies. M.C. Escher shows us that
reality is wondrous, comprehensible
and fascinating.
In 1922, an important
year of his life, Escher
traveled through Italy
(Florence, San
Gimignano, Volterra,
Siena) and Spain
(Madrid, Toledo,
Granada). He was
impressed by the Italian
countryside and by the
Alhambra, a fourteenth-century Moorish castle
in Granada, Spain. He came back to Italy
regularly in the following years. In Italy he met
Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924. The
young couple settled down in Rome and stayed
there until 1935, when the political climate under
Mussolini became unbearable. Their son,
Giorgio Arnaldo Escher, named after his
grandfather, was born in Rome. The family next
moved to Château-d'Œx, Switzerland where
they remained for two years.
M.C. Escher working on mural for cemetery.
Escher, who had been very fond of and inspired
by the landscapes in Italy, was decidedly
unhappy in Switzerland, so in 1937, the family
moved again, to Ukkel, a small town near
Brussels, Belgium. World War II forced them to
move in January 1941, this time to Baarn, the
Netherlands, where Escher lived until 1970.
Most of Escher's better-known pictures date
from this period. The sometimes cloudy, cold,
wet weather of the Netherlands allowed him to
focus intently on his works, and only during
1962, when he underwent surgery, was there a
time when no new images were created.
Escher moved to the Rosa-Spier house in Laren
in 1970, a retirement home for artists where he
had his own studio. He died at the home on 27
March 1972, at 73 years of age.
Escher's first print of an impossible reality was
Still Life and Street, 1937. His artistic
expression was created from images in his
mind, rather than directly from observations and
travels to other countries. Well known examples
of his work also include Drawing Hands, a work
in which two hands are shown, each drawing
the other; Sky and Water, in which light plays on
shadow to morph the water background behind
fish figures into bird figures on a sky
background; Ascending and Descending, in
which lines of people ascend and descend
stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which
is impossible to build and possible to draw only
by taking advantage of quirks of perception and
perspective.
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Snakes, woodcut, 1969
He worked primarily in the media of lithographs
and woodcuts, though the few mezzotints he
made are considered to be masterpieces of the
technique. In his graphic art, he portrayed
mathematical relationships among shapes,
figures and space. Additionally, he explored
interlocking figures using black and white to
enhance different dimensions. Integrated into
his prints were mirror images of cones, spheres,
cubes, rings and spirals.
In addition to sketching landscape and nature in
his early years, he also sketched insects, which
frequently appeared in his later work. His first
artistic work was completed in 1922, which
featured eight human heads divided in different
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Development II, woodcut, 1939
planes. Later around 1924, he lost interest in
"regular division" of planes, and turned to
sketching landscapes in Italy with irregular
perspectives that are impossible in natural form.
Although Escher did not have a mathematical
training—his understanding of mathematics was
largely visual and intuitive—Escher's work had a
strong mathematical component, and more than
a few of the worlds which he drew are built
around impossible objects such as the Necker
cube and the Penrose triangle. Many of
Escher's works employed repeated tilings called
tessellations. Escher's artwork is especially wellliked by mathematicians and scientists, who
enjoy his use of polyhedra and geometric
distortions. For example, in Gravity, multicolored turtles poke their heads out of a
stellated dodecahedron.
The mathematical influence in his work emerged
around 1936, when he was journeying the
Mediterranean with the Adria Shipping
Company. Specifically, he became interested in
order and symmetry. Escher described his
journey through the Mediterranean as "the
richest source of inspiration I have ever tapped."
Depth, wood engraving, 1955
After his journey to the Alhambra, Escher tried
to improve upon the art works of the Moors
using geometric grids as the basis for his
sketches, which he then overlaid with additional
designs, mainly animals such as birds and lions.
His first study of mathematics, which would later
lead to its incorporation into his art works,
began with George Pólya's academic paper on
plane symmetry groups sent to him by his
brother Berend. This paper inspired him to learn
the concept of the 17 wallpaper groups (plane
symmetry groups). Utilizing this mathematical
concept, Escher created periodic tilings with 43
colored drawings of different types of symmetry.
From this point on he developed a mathematical
approach to expressions of symmetry in his art
works. Starting in 1937, he created woodcuts
using the concept of the 17 plane
symmetry groups.
In 1941, Escher wrote his first paper, now
publicly recognized, called Regular Division of
the Plane with Asymmetric Congruent Polygons,
which detailed his mathematical approach to
artwork creation.
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