The Impossible Worlds Of M.C. Escher

Best known for his iconic optical illusions, impossible constructions defying logic and his prints playing with patterns and symmetry, Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher’s lithographs, mezzotints, woodcuts and wood engravings express a high level of technical expertise and meticulous attention to detail. His images of upside-down staircases and infinite structures appear on posters, album covers and sci-fi books, although people most likely do not know their origin. Escher remained a relatively unknown figure in the art world and students of geometry and crystallography are more likely to have encountered him than students of art history.

Maurits Cornelis Escher was never an outstanding student and his formal mathematical knowledge was limited to what he received in secondary school. However, his father George, who was a civil engineer, instilled in him a lifelong interest in mathematics and science. Born in the Netherlands in 1898, Escher spent most of his childhood in Arnhem. Aspiring to be an architect, Escher enrolled in the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. 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. He began his professional life as a graphic artist, making woodcuts and lithographs.

in 1922, during a visit to the Alhambra, a fourteenth-century castle in Granada, Spain, Escher became fascinated by the geometric decorations of Moorish tiles, and was intrigued by the repeat patterns that exemplify Islamic art, and how repeated designs created visual puzzles. In the meantime, his half-brother Berend, professor of geology and soon-yo-be rector of the University of Leiden, kept him informed about the latest scientific literature in the field of crystallography. Several of Escher’s most known prints were inspired by these visual and theoretical insights as geometry and mathematics slowly became key elements of his work.

In 1924, Escher married Jetta Umiker, and the couple settled in Rome to raise a family. They resided in Italy until 1935, when growing political turmoil forced them to move first to Switzerland, then to Belgium. In 1941, with World War II under way and German troops occupying Brussels, Escher returned to Holland and settled in Baarn, where he lived and worked until shortly before his death. However, throughout his career, the main subjects of Escher’s early drawings and prints would be Rome and the Italian countryside where he used to spend the spring and summer months during his Italian stay.

After leaving Italy, Escher’s interest shifted from landscape to something he described as “mental imagery,” often based on theoretical premises. He developed his practice into creating “invented places” which presented physical impossibility but followed the principles of perception Still Life with Mirror (1934) is one of Escher’s earliest prints to explore different levels of reality.