Have you just discovered Escher’s incredible works? Did you spend hours staring at his impossible drawings and now want to know more about this very particular artist?
Well, you’re in the right place!
As you’ll have noticed, Escher’s art is closely tied to impossible constructions. His lithographs, mezzotints and woodcuts very often depict geometric figures that could never exist in reality.
Have you ever looked at “Waterfall”?
This work, seemingly simple, is in fact completely surreal: the waterfall seems to feed itself in an infinite loop, where the water never finds rest. A physically impossible structure, because neither the architecture nor the flow of the water could be reproduced in real space.
If you looked at it closely, I’m sure it fascinated you.
Just as it happened to you, in the past Escher’s works appealed above all to scientists and mathematicians, who saw in his art a real flash of genius.
Want to know more?
Right, below I’ll tell you about Escher’s art and the story of this astonishing artist.
Let’s go!
1 – Escher’s life: a Dutchman in love with Italy
Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden, in the Netherlands, into a well-off family (his father George Arnold was an engineer). He was a sickly child and a disastrous student: he failed several times, and did well only in drawing. He later studied at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, where his teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita taught him the woodcut techniques that would become his signature.
In 1922 Escher visited Italy (and Spain) for the first time and fell in love with it. He settled in Rome, where he lived from 1923 to 1935. It was during a trip along the Amalfi Coast, in Ravello, that he met the great love of his life, Jetta Umiker, whom he married in 1924.
From Rome he kept travelling all over the peninsula, drawn by his love of the sea and the Italian landscapes: Abruzzo, Sicily, Calabria, the Amalfi Coast. But he decided to leave the country when, in 1935, his son Giorgio came home wearing a Balilla uniform: those were the years of Fascism, and Escher did not want his children enlisted by the regime.
Want to hear a curiosity about Escher’s life?
During one of his trips in Abruzzo he was woken at five in the morning and taken to a police station, accused of taking part in a failed attack on King Victor Emmanuel III. The tip-off had come from a woman suspicious of the “wicked look of the engraver”, but above all of the fact that, that evening, Escher had not joined the Corpus Christi procession. Of course the artist proved he had nothing to do with it and was released.
2 – Escher around Europe
Having left his beloved Italy for good, Escher began to roam Europe. He lived first in Switzerland (Château-d’Œx, 1935-37), then in Belgium (Uccle, near Brussels, 1937-41) and finally, with the outbreak of the Second World War, returned to the Netherlands, to Baarn, to be near his family.
His art was deeply marked by his travels: he produced many works depicting landscapes, and his geometric tessellations were inspired above all by the Moorish patterns of the Alhambra in Granada, in Spain, which he studied and copied with enormous patience.
3 – Escher’s art: infinite and impossible
Escher’s art became famous for its impossible geometries.
For most of his works he used the technique of engraving, an ancient method by then considered outdated. He drew on Piranesi and other engravers of the past, but also on artists like Van Eyck or Parmigianino in the use of convex mirrors.
The figures he depicts always have multiple, often paradoxical, readings.
For example?
In his works you find hands that draw themselves, lizards that step out of and back into a drawing, black and white birds that merge with the background. Staircases, architecture and geometries are shown at once from several viewpoints. The result is often an infinite cycle, a loop that ends by beginning again, a mirror reflecting a mirror on a potentially endless scale.
4 – Escher and mathematics
Escher once said: “I often feel closer to mathematicians than to my fellow artists.”
It was precisely his ability to turn abstract, paradoxical concepts into images that made him a source of inspiration for scientists. It is a fascinating short circuit: it was Escher’s art that intrigued the mathematician Roger Penrose and his father Lionel, who from his prints (such as House of Stairs) drew the famous “impossible figures” published in 1958, including the impossible triangle and the endless staircase.
Escher, in turn, took up those inventions: the Penrose staircase became the work “Ascending and Descending” (1960), in which rows of men climb and descend forever without getting anywhere, while the impossible triangle is the heart of “Waterfall” (1961). One artist and two mathematicians inspiring each other: this is why Escher is still adored by the scientific world.
5 – Escher and pop culture
A shy, reserved man, Escher became an icon in spite of himself: his hypnotic images were embraced by the psychedelic culture of the 1960s.
There is a delightful anecdote. In 1969 Mick Jagger wrote to him asking for an image to use on the cover of a Rolling Stones compilation (Through the Past, Darkly), addressing him familiarly as “dear Maurits”. Escher politely declined and let it be known that he was by no means “Maurits” to Mr Jagger, but M. C. Escher. The cover eventually went to Andy Warhol.
6 – Solitude
Despite his fame, Escher always remained somewhat isolated. Other artists saw him more as a graphic designer than a genius; mathematicians admired his works, yet he stayed an outsider to their world.
If the uniqueness of Escher’s art condemned him in a way to solitude, his research made him a forerunner of mathematical ideas recognised only years later. Like Georges Seurat, another artist who said he saw “only science” in his own paintings, Escher lived halfway between art and reason.
He died on 27 March 1972 in Hilversum: in his last years he had retired to the Rosa Spier Huis in Laren, a home for elderly artists. His works are still among the most reproduced in the world.
Where to see Escher’s works
Escher’s prints are kept mostly in the Netherlands:
- the museum Escher in Het Paleis, in The Hague, is entirely devoted to him: it is housed in the former Winter Palace of the Queen Mother and gathers over 130 works, including the seven-metre-long Metamorphosis III;
- the Kunstmuseum of The Hague holds other works of his;
- his works often tour the world in major travelling exhibitions (in Italy they have been shown in Rome, Milan, Bologna and Trieste).
If you pass through the Netherlands, booking a ticket for Escher in Het Paleis is the best way to get lost in his impossible geometries without queuing at the ticket desk.
And you, faced with a staircase rising to infinity or a waterfall feeding itself, can you still trust your own eyes?
