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 M.C. Escher, the creator of instantly recognizable, eerily precise renderings of infinity and logical absurdities, lived a very peaceful life for an artist. The youngest of three sons, he was born Maurits Cornelis Escher (called "Mauk" for short) in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, on June 17, 1898. Mauk’s father was a civil engineer and his mother the daughter of a government minister. When Mauk was five, his family moved to Arnhem, a more centrally located city near the German border. In Arnhem, Mauk did terribly in all his high school classes except for art, where his teacher taught him to make linoleum cuts -- a technique similar to woodcutting but using pliable, carved linoleum sheets as the material from which prints are made. His earliest surviving work from his high school days is a purple linocut of his father, an indication of the linocuts, woodcuts and mezzotints that would later represent the major techniques of Escher’s art.
Although Escher failed his high school final exams and never officially graduated, he pursued further studies at the Technical College in Delft from 1918 to 1922, and then at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. At Haarlem, Escher had an important mentor, the artist S. Jessurun de Mesquita, who encouraged Escher to continue with drawing and woodcutting. At this time, as evidence by illustrations for Easter Flowers (1921), some of Escher’s favorite themes began to emerge: mirrors, crystals, and spheres. From 1921 to 1923, Escher concluded his studies to travel with his family and friends to Italy and Spain. During this visit, Escher paid his first visit to Alhambra, a Moorish palace in Grenada with intricate geometric mosaics that fascinated the young artist. In the spring of 1923, Escher also met a beautiful young woman, Jetta Umiker, during his travels. By August of the same year, when his first one-man show opened in Siena, the two were engaged.
The couple married in 1924 and moved to Rome; they eventually had three sons. Escher’s fame as an artist grew significantly by this time, and during the next 12 years he exhibited all over Italy, Switzerland and Holland, mostly producing woodcuts of conventional landscapes and architectural forms. In 1936, however, a major turning point occurred in Escher’s artwork — an interest in tessellation. During a second visit to Alhambra, Escher spent many days sketching the intricate mosaics that originally fascinating him 14 years prior. These Alhambra tiles are examples of patterns technically known as "tessellations," arrangements of closed shapes completely covering a plane without overlapping and without leaving any gaps. By any combination of reflection (reversal), rotation, or translation (sliding to the right or left), Escher discovered that any shape based on a square, hexagon, or triangle could become tessellated. Escher was especially interested in employing these patterns in the representation of organic forms (like birds, fish, or reptiles) or in depicting metamorphoses from one pattern into another (see his 1937 Metamorphosis series). These themes of tessellation, polyhedra (many-sided shapes), reflections, and perspective would continue to play center stage in Escher’s artwork for the next 30 years.
Equally central to Escher’s work is the influence of mathematics. Discussing this influence, Escher said: "For me it remains an open question whether [this work] pertains to the realm of mathematics or of art." Indeed, the presence of complex mathematical concepts in many of his pieces prompts the viewer to pose the same question. His tessellations were like elegant demonstrations of theorems that geometry and crystallography were just beginning to prove. Likewise, his interest in depicting two-dimensional infinity by shrinking a repeating pattern toward the edges and/or the center of a composition (Circle Limit (1959), Snakes (1969)) pays homage to findings in non-Euclidean geometry. Escher also explored in Mobius Strip II the brand-new field of topology, the study of the properties of shapes that remain the same under deformation. Escher also used concepts published by the mathematician Roger Penrose, including an impossible staircase and triangle, for many of his "impossible architecture" prints (e.g., Ascending and Descending). Using the same concepts from Primrose, he also created his impossible landscapes, such as Other World (1947), which played tricks with the artistic technique of perspective, putting many different, contradictory, and vanishing points in a single composition so that the eye must constantly revise its interpretation of direction.
No matter what theme Escher explored, all of this work — whether in woodcut, lithograph, drawing or mezzotint — shows the technical proficiency honed by years of training. His immense popularity comes in part from an unusual eye for the whimsical details that attract even the naive observer. Escher also stands out for his distinctive use of color, which is used only when necessary to distinguish elements of a pattern. Equally fascinating are the two main categories of his subjects: believable impossibilities and bizarre interpretation of reality. Among the most famous examples of the second type is Escher’s Hand with Reflecting Sphere, done in January 1935.
The 1950s and 1960s became a time of increasing fame and respect for Escher among the general public as well as among mathematicians. In 1951, Escher was the subject of articles in Time and Life magazines. In 1954, he held a large one-man exhibition in Amsterdam during the International Mathematical Conference and met the Canadian professor H.S.M. Coxeter, whose descriptions of hyperbolic or non-Euclidean space were later incorporated into Escher’s own depictions of infinity. In April 1955, Escher received the Knighthood of the Order of Oranje Nassau, the medieval knighthood of the King of the Netherlands. Expressing modest ambivalence about the honor, Escher says in a letter to his son Arthur: "But what on earth can I do about it? Luckily I can swear by God and all his angels that I never moved a finger to get the decoration or licked the boots of any bigwigs."
In 1960, The Graphic Work of M.C. Escher was published, featuring reproductions of 76 prints and a commentary by the artist. Around this time, Escher also embarked for Canada and the U.S., where he lectured to crystallographic societies and visited his infant grandson. During the 1960s, Escher’s prints also gained cult status among lovers of the psychedelic, with the surrational or superrational motifs appearing on posters, album covers, and t-shirts.
In the mid-1960s, Escher’s health, always fragile, began to fail. He collapsed during a second trip to North America in 1964, and he had to undergo surgery in Toronto. For unclear reasons, Escher and his wife separated in 1968, and she moved to Switzerland. Escher completed his final graphic work, Snakes, in 1969. He lived to see the successful 1972 publication and translation of a grand retrospective of his life and work, The World of M.C. Escher, before dying during the spring of that year.
The popularity of Escher’s work continues to the present day, as several websites are dedicated exclusively to selling posters, t-shirts, and information about the artist. Arguably more significantly, new scientific implications of his work are also being found, as in Douglas Hofstader’s 1980 book, Goedel, Escher, Bach. In this work, Hofstader argues that the self-referential or "mirror" motifs in Escher’s art (e.g., in the Drawing Hands lithograph, where each hand seems to draw the other) are a visual symbol of the enigma of consciousness, which artificial intelligence attempts to solve. The mind constructs itself constructing itself, seemingly without a beginning point to the circle. In the same way as artificial intelligence partakes of both philosophy and computer science, Escher’s work itself occupies a gray area between fine art and mathematics, with fascinating results for both fields.
Click to buy Escher posters here!
Click to buy Escher's book, Escher on Escher: Exploring the Infinite
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