Maurits C. Escher (1898-1972) [1-2]
The Dutch artist Maurits C. Escher (1898-1972) was a draftsman, book illustrator, tapestry designer, and muralist, but his primary work was as a printmaker. Born in Leeuwarden, Holland, the son of a civil engineer, Escher spent most of his childhood in Arnhem.
Arnhem is a city and municipality situated in the eastern part of the Netherlands, near the German border. It is the capital of the province of Gelderland.
To his family and childhood friends, Maurits was affectionately known as Mauk. He was born to George and Sara Escher in 1898 in Leeuwarden. The youngest of his civil-engineer father’s five sons (two from a previous marriage), Mauk was a sickly child who was interested in carpentry and took music lessons, but failed his final school exams, except for mathematics. His father noted fondly in his diary that the young man consoled himself “by drawing and making a linocut of a sunflower”.
Aspiring to be an architect, Escher enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. He enrolled on 6 September 1919 and on 17 September 1919 he moved to this city. September 1919 was a life-changing month for Maurits Escher. His first lessons in architecture at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem on 17 September.
It was not until moving here that the artist in him awoke, even if architecture proved to be a false start. His decision to study architecture was mainly inspired by his father, who saw his son as a future architect. His father's plan to have his son study architecture in Delft had failed since Maurits had been rejected for military service on 31 May 1919, and was therefore unable to obtain his high school diploma required for Delft. He had fallen behind due to a serious skin infection, which had kept him out of college for a while in the winter of 1918. Hence, the school in Haarlem was a plan B. That is, a combination of circumstances which later proved to be highly serendipitous. In Haarlem, Maurits got to know his teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. He was alert to the young Escher’s qualities and, after only a week of engineering, Maurits switched to studying graphic arts.
Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (Self portrait, 1900).
While studying there from 1919 to 1922, his emphasis shifted from architecture to drawing and printmaking upon the encouragement of his teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita.
M.C. Escher, Skull, woodcut, second state; counterproof, 1919 or 1920.
After completing his school, Escher travels for a long time through Italy, where he met his wife Jetta Umiker, whom he marries in 1924. They go to Rome, where they stay until 1935.
Escher and Jetta Umiker (her maiden name).
During these 11 years, M.C. Escher travels every year through Italy where he makes drawings and sketches that he later uses in his studio for his lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings.
For example, the background in the lithograph "Waterfall" (1961) (see above) comes from his Italian period.
The trees that are reflected above in the woodcut, Puddle(1952), are also the same trees that he uses in his woodcut Pineta by Calvi, made in 1932.
During the time that he lives and worked in Italy, he made beautiful, also more realistic works such as the Castrovalva litho in which one can see already his fascination for perspective - close, far, high and low.
Castrovalva is a lithograph print by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher, first printed in February 1930. Like many of Escher's early works, it depicts the Abruzzo village of Castrovalva, which lies at the top of a sheer slope. The perspective is toward the northwest, from the narrow trail on the left, which, at the point from which this view is seen, makes a hairpin turn to the right, descending to the valley. In the foreground at the side of the trail, there are several flowering plants, grasses, ferns, a beetle and a snail. In the expansive valley below there are cultivated fields and two more towns, the nearest of which is Anversa degli Abruzzi, with Casale in the distance.
He is most famous for his so-called impossible drawings, such as 'Ascending and Descending and Relativity', but also for his metamorphoses, such as 'Metamorphosis I, II and III,' 'Air and Water I' and 'Reptiles.' He is most famous for his so-called impossible drawings, such as 'Ascending and Descending and Relativity', but also for his metamorphoses, such as 'Metamorphosis I, II and III', 'Air and Water I' and 'Reptiles.'
Ascending and Descending.
Metamorphosis I (1937).
During his lifetime, Escher made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and more than 2,000 drawings and sketches. Just like some of his famous predecessors – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein – Escher was left-handed.
In addition to his work as a graphic artist, he illustrated books, designed carpets, and banknotes, stamps, murals, intarsia panels etc. M.C. Escher was fascinated by the regular geometric figures of the wall and floor mosaics in the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century castle in Granada, Spain, which he visits in 1922 and 1936.
During his years in Switzerland, and throughout the Second World War, he worked with great energy on his hobby. He then made 62 of the 137 symmetrical drawings that bought him fame throughout the world. He played with architecture, perspective and impossible spaces. His art continues to this day to amaze and wonder millions of people around the world. In his work we recognize his excellent observation of the world around us, and the expression of his own fantasy. M.C. Escher showed us that reality is wonderful, understandable as well as fascinating.
The artist, who created some of the most memorable images of the 20th century, was never fully embraced by the art world. There is just one work by Maurits Cornelis Escher in all of Britain’s galleries and museums, and it was not until his 70th birthday, that the first full retrospective exhibition took place in his native country the Netherlands. Escher was admired mainly by mathematicians and scientists, and found global fame only when he came to be considered a pioneer of psychedelic art by the hippy counterculture of the 1960s. His prints, adorn albums by Mott the Hoople and the Scaffold, and he was courted unsuccessfully by Mick Jagger for an album cover and by Stanley Kubrick for help transforming, what became 2001 - A Space Odyssey into a “fourth-dimensional film”.
But Escher did not belong to any movement. In a 1969 letter to a friend, he observed testily that “...the hippies of San Francisco continue to print my work illegally”. Many of his letters are reproduced in the standard reference book, Escher: The Complete Graphic Work, edited by JL Locher, which includes a full biography and analytical essays by Escher and others. He had been sent a catalogue for a California “Free University” that contains “three reproductions of my prints alternating with photographs of seductive naked girls.” This would have seemed distasteful to the rather formal Escher, who bridled when Jagger addressed him by his first name in a fan letter. According to Patrick Elliott’s catalogue essay, “Escher and Britain,” for the new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 'The Amazing World of MC Escher,' the artist replied to the musician’s assistant: 'Please tell Mr. Jagger I am not Maurits to him.'
The grave of M.C Escher in Baarn, the Netherlands. Displaying one of his own works “Freedom”. He was born on 17-06-1898 in Leeuwarden and died because of old age (73) in Hilversum 27-03-1972.
Since Escher’s death in 1972, his most famous images have become ubiquitous. New fuel for his popular cult was provided by Douglas Hofstadter’s interdisciplinary fantasia of a book, 'Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)', which seduced generations of curious students in the following decades. Escher adored Bach. Fittingly, given the artist’s mathematical playfulness, some of the richest tributes to his work in modern times have come in the world of video games. In the beautiful Echochrome (2008), players set out to free an eternally walking human from a succession of Escherian landscapes by rotating the point of view until the 'trick' of perspective locks into place.
In a 1963 lecture on '...the impossible,' Escher declared: 'If you want to express something impossible, you must keep to certain rules. The element of mystery to which you want to draw attention should be surrounded and veiled by a quite obvious, readily recognisable commonness.'
This is arguably as true of fiction, or music, as it is of Escher’s brand of geometric sorcery. And it also, in a way, sums up the genius of Escher himself - an orderly man who made inexhaustibly extraordinary things.
References:
[1] https://mcescher.com/about/biography/
[2] The Amazing World of MC Escher at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
The Dutch artist Maurits C. Escher (1898-1972) was a draftsman, book illustrator, tapestry designer, and muralist, but his primary work was as a printmaker. Born in Leeuwarden, Holland, the son of a civil engineer, Escher spent most of his childhood in Arnhem.
To his family and childhood friends, Maurits was affectionately known as Mauk. He was born to George and Sara Escher in 1898 in Leeuwarden. The youngest of his civil-engineer father’s five sons (two from a previous marriage), Mauk was a sickly child who was interested in carpentry and took music lessons, but failed his final school exams, except for mathematics. His father noted fondly in his diary that the young man consoled himself “by drawing and making a linocut of a sunflower”.
Aspiring to be an architect, Escher enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. He enrolled on 6 September 1919 and on 17 September 1919 he moved to this city. September 1919 was a life-changing month for Maurits Escher. His first lessons in architecture at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem on 17 September.
It was not until moving here that the artist in him awoke, even if architecture proved to be a false start. His decision to study architecture was mainly inspired by his father, who saw his son as a future architect. His father's plan to have his son study architecture in Delft had failed since Maurits had been rejected for military service on 31 May 1919, and was therefore unable to obtain his high school diploma required for Delft. He had fallen behind due to a serious skin infection, which had kept him out of college for a while in the winter of 1918. Hence, the school in Haarlem was a plan B. That is, a combination of circumstances which later proved to be highly serendipitous. In Haarlem, Maurits got to know his teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. He was alert to the young Escher’s qualities and, after only a week of engineering, Maurits switched to studying graphic arts.
While studying there from 1919 to 1922, his emphasis shifted from architecture to drawing and printmaking upon the encouragement of his teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita.
After completing his school, Escher travels for a long time through Italy, where he met his wife Jetta Umiker, whom he marries in 1924. They go to Rome, where they stay until 1935.
During these 11 years, M.C. Escher travels every year through Italy where he makes drawings and sketches that he later uses in his studio for his lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings.
During the time that he lives and worked in Italy, he made beautiful, also more realistic works such as the Castrovalva litho in which one can see already his fascination for perspective - close, far, high and low.
He is most famous for his so-called impossible drawings, such as 'Ascending and Descending and Relativity', but also for his metamorphoses, such as 'Metamorphosis I, II and III,' 'Air and Water I' and 'Reptiles.' He is most famous for his so-called impossible drawings, such as 'Ascending and Descending and Relativity', but also for his metamorphoses, such as 'Metamorphosis I, II and III', 'Air and Water I' and 'Reptiles.'
During his lifetime, Escher made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and more than 2,000 drawings and sketches. Just like some of his famous predecessors – Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein – Escher was left-handed.
In addition to his work as a graphic artist, he illustrated books, designed carpets, and banknotes, stamps, murals, intarsia panels etc. M.C. Escher was fascinated by the regular geometric figures of the wall and floor mosaics in the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century castle in Granada, Spain, which he visits in 1922 and 1936.
During his years in Switzerland, and throughout the Second World War, he worked with great energy on his hobby. He then made 62 of the 137 symmetrical drawings that bought him fame throughout the world. He played with architecture, perspective and impossible spaces. His art continues to this day to amaze and wonder millions of people around the world. In his work we recognize his excellent observation of the world around us, and the expression of his own fantasy. M.C. Escher showed us that reality is wonderful, understandable as well as fascinating.
The artist, who created some of the most memorable images of the 20th century, was never fully embraced by the art world. There is just one work by Maurits Cornelis Escher in all of Britain’s galleries and museums, and it was not until his 70th birthday, that the first full retrospective exhibition took place in his native country the Netherlands. Escher was admired mainly by mathematicians and scientists, and found global fame only when he came to be considered a pioneer of psychedelic art by the hippy counterculture of the 1960s. His prints, adorn albums by Mott the Hoople and the Scaffold, and he was courted unsuccessfully by Mick Jagger for an album cover and by Stanley Kubrick for help transforming, what became 2001 - A Space Odyssey into a “fourth-dimensional film”.
But Escher did not belong to any movement. In a 1969 letter to a friend, he observed testily that “...the hippies of San Francisco continue to print my work illegally”. Many of his letters are reproduced in the standard reference book, Escher: The Complete Graphic Work, edited by JL Locher, which includes a full biography and analytical essays by Escher and others. He had been sent a catalogue for a California “Free University” that contains “three reproductions of my prints alternating with photographs of seductive naked girls.” This would have seemed distasteful to the rather formal Escher, who bridled when Jagger addressed him by his first name in a fan letter. According to Patrick Elliott’s catalogue essay, “Escher and Britain,” for the new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 'The Amazing World of MC Escher,' the artist replied to the musician’s assistant: 'Please tell Mr. Jagger I am not Maurits to him.'
Since Escher’s death in 1972, his most famous images have become ubiquitous. New fuel for his popular cult was provided by Douglas Hofstadter’s interdisciplinary fantasia of a book, 'Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979)', which seduced generations of curious students in the following decades. Escher adored Bach. Fittingly, given the artist’s mathematical playfulness, some of the richest tributes to his work in modern times have come in the world of video games. In the beautiful Echochrome (2008), players set out to free an eternally walking human from a succession of Escherian landscapes by rotating the point of view until the 'trick' of perspective locks into place.
In a 1963 lecture on '...the impossible,' Escher declared: 'If you want to express something impossible, you must keep to certain rules. The element of mystery to which you want to draw attention should be surrounded and veiled by a quite obvious, readily recognisable commonness.'
This is arguably as true of fiction, or music, as it is of Escher’s brand of geometric sorcery. And it also, in a way, sums up the genius of Escher himself - an orderly man who made inexhaustibly extraordinary things.
References:
[1] https://mcescher.com/about/biography/
[2] The Amazing World of MC Escher at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.
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