M.C. Escher, by Drew Raub

Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in Leeuwarden, the capital of the province of Friesland in the northern part of the Netherlands on June 17, 1898. He was the youngest of three brothers. His mother was Sarah Gleichman Escher, and his father was George Arnold Escher, who worked as a civil engineer for the government. He attended secondary school during his youth in the city of Arnhem. After finishing secondary school, Escher moved to Haarlem to study architecture at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts. Escher would later drop out of the architecture program after discovering that he had a stronger attraction to graphic art. He studied graphic art under his teacher, Samuel Jesserun de Mesquita, an already renowned artist, from 1919 to 1922.

Upon finishing his studies, Escher began to travel, taking many trips that took him all over Europe. In the spring of 1922, Escher traveled from Arnhem with two friends to Italy. His two friends returned home after only a few weeks, while Escher stayed and traveled all over the Italian countryside, sketching plants landscapes and even insects that he would later use in his work. Below are examples of his work that are based on places he visited during his time in Italy.

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Castrovalva, 1930

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Coast of Amalfi, 1931

After returning home, he left again that same year on a ship bound for Spain. On the ship, he first experienced the phosphorescent waves of the sea as they broke during the night. These waves would inspire some of his later work, pictured below.

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Phosphorescent Sea, 1933

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Dolphins in Phosphorescent Sea, 1923

In Spain, he visited Madrid and the Prado, its famous museum. He didn’t care for the museum or its art pieces, and ended up drawing more inspiration from the beautiful vistas that filled the landscape. He then returned again to Italy, having become fascinated by its landscape. He became so captivated by the area, that in 1923 he took up residence in Siena, Italy for several months. During his time spent living in Siena, Escher formed a romantic bond with a young Swiss girl named Jetta Umiker. Later that same year, he decided to ask her to marry him. In 1924 Escher and his wife purchased a small house on the outskirts of Frascati, a town near Rome. After living in Frascati for two years, Escher and his wife moved to a larger house. It turned out to be for good reason. One month after relocating, Jetta gave birth to a baby boy, George, named after Escher’s father. At around this time Escher’s notoriety as an artist began to increase dramatically. So much so, that King Emmanuel of Italy, as well as Benito Mussolini, not-yet dictator, attended his newborn son’s christening. While living with his family in Italy, he saw the rise of fascism in the thirties, which made life more and more unbearable for him. In 1935, in order to escape the growing unrest in the region, Escher moved his family to Chateau d’Oex, Switzerland.

In mid-1937, Escher found himself moving again. This time, his family relocated to the suburb of Ukkel, in Brussels, Belgium. During 1937, Escher’s work underwent a dramatic change. So dramatic was this change that one can distinctly divide his work into two groups: That is, the work he did before 1937 and after 1937. Most of his work that occurred before 1937 was based on things he had seen in real life. Escher’s attention to detail in these early works is particularly striking. All elements of the natural landscape are rendered vividly and precisely, down to the imperfections and subtle details in rocks and clouds. Starting in 1937, Escher began to experiment with distorted perspective, tessellation and optical illusions. His woodcuts Still Life and Street and Metamorphosis I give us a hint at what his work is progressing toward.

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Still Life and Street, 1937

The books in the foreground of the image rest against the buildings behind them, as if the walls of the buildings were the edges of a bookcase. The still life scene in the foreground is rendered in exquisite detail, from the reflection in the pot, whose lid provides the focal point of the image, to the details on the playing cards and matchbox. This image is one of the first of Escher’s that deliberately causes us to question what we are seeing. The table in the foreground, as it recedes, slowly becomes the street behind it, as the books on both sides of the image recede into the buildings behind them. It is also worth noting that the street scene in the background rose from a sketch that Escher made of a real street in Savona, Italy.

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Metamorphosis I, 1937

In Metamorphosis I, Escher demonstrates how gradual changes in a repeated shape can bring about a transformation or metamorphosis in an image, hence the name. The realistic scene of a port city at the right of the woodcut slowly changes as the buildings revert back into the basic shapes they are constructed from, that is, simple cubes. The windows on the buildings disappear, and as we approach the middle of the image, we are presented with plain, uniform cubes arranged in a regular pattern. Moving further toward the right side the cubes slowly morph to take on more angles and slowly we are presented with a tessellated human figure. This process of drastic transformation through subtle changes in line and shape would carry over into much of Escher’s future work.

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Development I, 1937

In Development I, Escher demonstrates how he solved a unique problem. Because of the nature of creating a woodcut, Escher couldn’t achieve true “gray” tones in his work. So, to provide definition to his woodcuts, he needed to come up with a way to fool the eye into seeing gray even when it’s not there. He did this by alternating very thin white and black lines. If he needed to gradate from black to white, he would use an alternating series of white and black lines, and slowly increase the thickness of the white lines until he had achieved the effect. Alternately, if he wanted to go from white and darken back to black, he would perform the same process, but slowly increase the thickness of the black lines.

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Day and Night, 1938

In 1938, Escher created Day and Night; a woodcut furthers his journey into tessellation and transformation. The two halves of the print are mirror images of each other. In one half, it is bright daylight, with a series of black birds breaking up the sky over a small riverside town. On the other side of the image, the exact opposite: White birds glide against the black night sky of the same small town. The interesting thing to note is how Escher makes the transition from one side of the print to the other. As we move from left to right, the space between the black birds tightens as the flock moves closer together. These spaces of landscape below the black birds tighten even further until they become individual shapes unto themselves, that is, the shapes of white birds, emerging from the other side of the image. The exact same process takes place if you move in the opposite direction, from right to left. Escher does this by incrementally changing the shape of the birds on both sides toward an intermediate triangular shape, from which either series of birds can be formed. At the bottom of the image, there is yet another transformation going on. The birds nearest the bottom slowly become more and more basic in their construction, slowly morphing into the diamond pattern of the fields below. The fields in the bottom center of the print appear gray, since it is the midpoint between the two halves, day and night. This twilight area is not true gray however, but only another wonderful example of Escher’s use of crosshatched lined to trick the eye into seeing gray.

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Sky and Water I, 1938

Sky and Water I, very similar in composition to Day and Night, again plays around with the ideas of transformation and juxtaposition. However, in this case, as opposed to the identically shaped birds in Day and Night, Escher uses a tessellation made up of two completely different shapes. At the bottom of the print, a fish swims against a black background, symbolizing water. As we move higher in the image, more fish appear, grouping closer together, making the space between them tighter and tighter. The black shapes that begin to appear between the closely grouped fish begin to take on more and more definition as we approach the middle of the print. Emerging into white space, which represents sky, the black shapes become birds, and as we move to the top of the image, they appear to fly away from the surface of the water. In the middle of the image, Escher makes it so that the observer cannot tell which shapes are the subject and which are the background, shifting our awareness of the nature of the fish and bird shapes. This shift is referred to as figure-ground reversal, a technique Escher pioneered with Day and Night, and continued to use in various works during his life.

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Metamorphosis II, 1939-1940

In June of 1939, Escher’s father, George Arnold Escher, died at the house where he lived with his wife in the Hague. Several months later, Escher began to work on a new project. Metamorphosis II, a continuation of the tessellation transformations seen in his previously mentioned Metamorphosis I, consisted of ten such transformations. The work was very large; in fact, it is one of the largest woodcut prints ever produced. It measured roughly 19 centimeters by 390 centimeters. At the leftmost part of the print, the words “METAMORPHOSE” are repeated in a crisscross pattern. The blocky pattern of the words begins to form a checkerboard pattern as we progress right, slowly changing into a repeated pattern of interlocking lizard-shapes. The lizards continue to morph into the hexagonal pattern of a honeycomb, and moving further toward the right, we see honeybees fly out of holes in the comb. The bees pack together more tightly and with a figure-ground reversal, the space between the bees becomes the outlines of fish. Progressing to the right, the spaces between the fish change to become birds flying toward the right half of the print, and the birds slowly transform into a repeating pattern of cubes. The cubes become the buildings of a seaside town, whose outlying tower takes the shape of a chess piece. The adjacent chess pieces lie on a chess board, which reverts back into a flat, checkered pattern seen in the beginning. The checkerboard breaks up into individual crisscrossed instances of the word “METAMORPHOSE” again, as the print terminates.

In 1940, Germany invaded Holland and Belgium. Brussels and its suburbs were occupied by Nazi forces on the 17th of May. At the end of May, Escher’s mother died. Because of the Nazi occupation, he could not travel to the Hague to see her funeral. Escher spent the rest of that year taking care of his mother’s affairs. In February of 1941, Escher and his wife moved to a new house in Baarn, Holland.

The persecution of the Jews by the Nazis affected Escher greatly. In 1944, his old teacher and friend, Samuel de Mesquita, a Jew, was arrested and executed by the Nazis. After the war, Escher helped organize a memorial showing of Mesquita’s salvaged work. Around 1948, Escher became attracted to a new print technique, called mezzotint.

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Dewdrop, 1948

In one of his most striking examples of mezzotint, Dewdrop demonstrates the huge leap forward in detail that can be achieved with mezzotint as opposed to the relatively limited line-based woodcut method. Mezzotint is comparable to modern printing, in that, instead of broad cuts being made to the printing block, small, individual dots make up the printing surface. Made with a small pointed tool, the dots provided the artist with much more definition in the final print. In Dewdrop, Escher shows his mastery of mezzotint. The image approaches photo-realism, from the subtle halo of light around the edges of the leaf, to the light from an overhead window being perfectly reflected in the dewdrop. With mezzotint, Escher was able to much more successfully achieve subtle transitions from white to black, as a print made of small dots of ink made it much easier to achieve the illusion of gray.

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Relativity, 1953

In one of his most famous prints, the 1953 lithograph entitled Relativity, Escher presents us with a supremely distorted perspective, one which seems to invite the viewer to question: “Which way is up?” In the print, human figures ascend and descend the staircases presented in the image. The three sets of stairs form a triangle in the center of the work, and our eye is drawn to the center of it. The orientation of the figures seems to imply that the world depicted has multiple sources of gravity, each affecting a different staircase and attached floor. Based on the way in which the doors, railings and figures are laid out in the image, it appears that every floor is also a wall, and also a ceiling, depending on where in the image it appears.

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Belvedere, 1958

In Belvedere, Escher again presents us with another example of an “impossible” building. The building, at first glance, appears normal, but upon closer inspection we find that it would be impossible to build in reality. The balcony suspended on pillars is actually twisted 90 degrees in relation to the floor below it. The reason it looks correct at first glance, is the way Escher lines up the tops of the columns with their bases on the opposite side. The theory behind such a building is the so-called “Necker cube” in which opposite supports on a hollow cube cross the center and connect, making an impossible shape. Interestingly, the man seated on the bench at the bottom left of the print is holding an example of a “Necker cube”, hinting at the inspiration behind the “impossible” structure behind him.

In the later months of 1960, took a trip to the U.S. and Canada, where he gave lectures in Boston and Ottowa.

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Waterfall, 1961

The 1961 lithograph entitled Waterfall gives us yet another “impossible” building. Water falls onto a waterwheel, propelling the water down a channel that zigzags back and forth. As the channel progresses, it begins to somehow rise above itself, and columns similar to those seen in Belvedere support the rising channel above its lower parts. At the end of the channel, the water tumbles over the edge of a drop-off, and falls back onto the same waterwheel to start the cycle over again. The supports that connect the different sections of channel, and the arches that rise above them form two distinct towers that dominate both halves of the print. Several visual oddities occur when you examine the towers by themselves. First, the bases of both towers begin on the same level, where the waterwheel sits. The tops of both towers, capped by elaborate crystal shapes, are also on the same level, as they appear right next to each other, connected by the final piece of channel. However, when we compare the two towers, we see that the right one is a floor shorter than the left one. So, even though they have bases and tops at the same elevation, the two towers are not the same height. Truly, this is an “impossible” building.

In 1964, Escher again traveled to North America to deliver a series of lectures. Soon after arriving, he took seriously ill and underwent surgery in Toronto. He and his wife returned to Holland, and the undelivered lectures he had written were later published in the book Escher on Escher. Escher’s wife eventually moved back to Switzerland, where she was born, while her husband continued to live and work in Holland. With his health beginning to fail, Escher continued to make prints in Baarn, Holland during the final years of his life. In 1970, after undergoing more surgery, Escher moved once again to the Netherlands. In March of 1972, Escher’s health deteriorated further. His family took turns sitting with him by his hospital bed. On March, 1972, Maurits Cornelis Escher died.

M.C. Escher’s contributions to the world of art go far beyond his development of tessellation techniques, or the designs of his “impossible” buildings. During his lifetime he creatively expanded the possibilities of woodcut prints, and can be considered one of the earliest pioneers of Op-art (optical art). His work is known worldwide, and has inspired countless other artists. He successfully bridged the worlds of science and art, with many of his works taking advantage of fractal geometry, visual paradoxes and other scientific phenomena. His legacy is ongoing, with many people today still drawing inspiration from his many works.

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M.C. Escher (Self-Portrait), 1948

Bibliography

1. Frank, Patrick. Prebles’ Artforms: Eighth Edition. Pearson & Prentice Hall

2. Locher, J.L, and M.C. Escher. The World of M.C. Escher. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York

3. M.C. Escher Foundation, The. “M.C. Escher: The Official Website” http://www.mcescher.com/

4. Ziring, Neal. “M.C. Escher Brief Biography”
http://users.erols.com/ziring/escher_bio.htm