The Cultural Tutor

@culturaltutor

25 Tweets • 2024-02-02 •  See on

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A little tour through the impossible and mind-bending

worlds of M.C. Escher...
Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in the Netherlands
in 1898 and wanted to be an architect — a recurring
theme of his art.

And that's what he studied before transferring to the

decorative arts.

He moved to Rome but left in 1935 and returned home

via Switzerland and Belgium.
Escher was a prolific artist and though he produced
thousands of fabulous prints most of his career was
spent in relative obscurity.

He is often described as a "graphic artist", which

sounds rather modern, but Escher's medium was, in
truth, an old one...
Escher's main medium was the woodcut — whereby a
picture is engraved into a wooden block which is then
covered with ink and used to make prints.

Woodcuts had been popular in Europe since the

1400s, and Albrecht Dürer was one of the early
masters of this form:
Woodcuts are better suited to minute detailing than
painting — they have a high level of precision which
paint struggles to match, what with them being made
up of lines rather than colours.

Gustave Doré, a 19th century illustrator, was another

master of the medium:
But perhaps Escher's most direct ancestor was the
Italian artist Giambattista Piranesi, who created a
series of etchings called "Imaginary Prisons" in the
1740s.

These dark architectural fantasies bear more than a

passing resemblance to Escher's work.
You can see how the woodcut was perfect for
Escher's style — it permitted exquisitely precise,
smooth, and highly geometric detail.

In other words, Escher's fantastical fascinations had

found their perfect outlet.

Consider Metamorphosis III, from 1968:

Escher also produced lithographs and mezzotints,
each of which have their own rich heritage and both
suited to the types of imagery and visuals Escher so
loved to create.

In this 1827 mezzotint by John Martin we see that

same illustrative depth, detail, and precision:
So those were the artistic traditions from which M.C.
Escher drew... but what about the things he chose to
depict?

He was fascinated by perspective and by

mathematics, by the very laws of reality and the way
art could let us break them, let us imagine and see the
impossible:
Mathematical curiosity in art was not new.

Ever since Giotto in the 1300s and all throughout the

Renaissance, artist-scientist-mathematicians like
Leonardo and Alberti dedicated themselves to
understanding the rules of perspective.

They believed maths was necessary for art.

The painter Paolo Uccello was famously obsessed by
the vanishing point — he stayed awake for nights on
end, refusing to work on anything else or leave his
house until he had discovered its rules.

The Hunt in the Forest (1470) is a perspectival

experiment as much as a painting:
It was such experimentation that led to those murals in
Renaissance and Baroque churches where flat
surfaces were given believable depth.

Any impression of depth on a flat surface is technically

an optical illusion, and in this way Escher doesn't
seem so unusual.
Escher's fascination with spherical mirrors was not
without precedent either.

Parmigianino made his own self-portrait in a convex

mirror in 1524, and Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait
from 1436 features the most famous convex mirror in
art history.
But those artists' experiments with perspective were
about capturing reality as we perceive it, according to
its observable rules.

Escher lived in a different age, culturally and

artistically and scientifically, and it shows in his art.

He was trying to do something else...

Art changed and so did the world: electricity, cars,
nuclear bombs... little wonder movements like Cubism
and Abstract Art emerged.

And Surrealism.

Painters like Dali, Kahlo, de Chirico and Magritte

weren't interested in the world as we "see" it — they
played with its rules:
This was the broad context Escher worked in, and he
seemed to follow the Surrealist route by creating
pictures which lay in the uncanny valley of portraying
our reality... but different.

A familiar world, but one with alternative laws of

physics:
Escher's art was, like much of the 20th century, mainly
intellectual — it provokes the mind rather than stirring
the heart.

And yet Relativity, from 1953, fires up the imagination

with its striking, almost unnerving reworking of the
reality we think we know.
And there's a certain joy in the precision of Escher's
strange realities, like Waterfall, a delight in exploring
his bizarre and impossible architecture.

Not to forget his technical skill; Escher was a master

of the medium who deserves to be ranked alongside
Duerer and co.
The spirit of postwar Europe, devastated by the
darkness of war and the catastrophes of
totalitarianism, is reflected in his work.

Escher had left Italy because of the rise of Fascism,

and in Ascending and Descending (1960) the identical
hooded figures speak to such anxieties.
In Another World (1947) we see Escher again playing
with the laws of physics and of gravity.

This is a thoroughly 20th century work of art, as

human science and technology achieved things that
were previously unimaginable and challenged
everything we thought we knew.
Though, that being said, one of Escher's biggest
inspirations came from a trip to Spain in the 1920s.

There the abstract, purely geometric art of Medieval

Moorish architecture — particularly in the Alhambra —
helped him realise the possibilities of mathematics in
art.
And yet some of Escher's greatest work is neither his
impossible visions nor abstract geometric
experiments.

In Puddle (1952) and Rippled Surface (1950) Escher

creates scenes which are more contemplative,
atmospheric, and mysterious.

Windows to other worlds.

And in Three Worlds (1955) Escher explores how
different planes of reality seem to exist in water: the
reflection, the surface, and the depths.

Again, it is beautifully realised — Escher's style, ever

balancing simplicity of form with complexity of
concept, exceeds all context.
In Three Spheres (II) there are multiple realities at play
again.

The three orbs are like three different worlds, and

reflected in the central one we see the other two,
along with Escher himself, making this very image we
are looking at, recurring infinitely...

Extraordinary.
And here is M.C. Escher himself, in what is surely one
of the greatest ever self-portraits.

It both captures his personal fascinations and speaks

to the long tradition of graphic design in which he has
now taken his place as one of the most brilliant minds
of all.
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