M. C. Escher

Dutch artist

• Born: June 17, 1898
• Birthplace: Leeuwarden, Netherlands
• Died: March 27, 1972
• Place of death: Laren, Netherlands

Escher created artistic representations of complex mathematical principles that are strikingly original in their creative use of line, form, and color. Uniquely, his woodcuts, engravings, and other works blended art and science and aesthetics and symmetry.

Early Life

M. C. Escher (EHSH-uhr) was born in Leeuwarden, province of Friesland, the Netherlands, the youngest child of George Arnold Escher (a civil engineer) and Sara Gleichman. In 1903, Escher and his family relocated to Arnhem, where he and his four brothers, Arnold, Johan, Berend, and Edmond, were enrolled in school. Although he was artistically gifted, Escher’s grades were low. His father had hoped that he would train as an architect, but Escher’s numerous failed courses kept him from officially graduating from secondary school. Unwilling to admit defeat, however, the family moved to Oosterbeek so that Escher could attend the Higher Technical School in Delft. From 1918 to late 1919, Escher tried again to master a traditional schedule of course work, but lingering illness took its toll on his spirits and he decided that he was more suited to an artistic career.

In 1920, Escher entered the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. Although he had originally planned to study architecture, Escher spent only one week in the architecture school. Upon showing examples of his woodcuts and relief prints to Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, a graphic-arts instructor in the decorative arts school, he was encouraged to change his course of study to that of graphic arts.

Life’s Work

In 1922, Escher made a trip to Spain and was immediately impressed by the local architecture and design. He found the Alhambra, a Moorish castle located in Granada and dating from the fourteenth century, to be particularly inspiring. The majolica tiles and bright colors were the source material for a number of his graphic works on symmetry, although he bitterly complained that his work took too much time to create and did not satisfy his sense of what he was trying to achieve.

After his sojourn in Spain, Escher toured Italy. Along the way he sketched landscapes. These works include Ravello and the Coast of Amalfi (1931) and Street in Scanno, Abruzzi (1930). In the town of Ravello in 1923 he met and fell in love with Jetta Umiker. They married on June 12, 1924, and settled near Rome in Frascati, where two of their sons, George (1926) and Arthur (1928), were born.

Political turmoil under Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini forced the Escher family to move in 1935 to Château-d’Oex, Switzerland. Although the Eschers embraced their move from fascist Italy, the cost of living was much higher in Switzerland and the cooler temperatures did not suit Jetta. Escher immediately set out to find more agreeable living conditions and brokered a deal with the Adria shipping company to cruise the Mediterranean Sea in exchange for original prints and woodcuts. For two months, the pair happily engaged in sketches of the scenery they loved. A second trip to the Alhambra Palace also was highly enjoyable for the Eschers. These studies of the principle of the division of the plane often consisted of repeating patterns namely, birds, fish, lions, and other regularized polygons.

On a trip to the Netherlands to visit his parents in The Hague in 1936, Escher happened to show some of his work to his brother, Berend (who was then professor of geology at Leiden University). Berend recommended that Escher examine the mathematical concept of plane symmetry as a theoretical basis for more symmetry-inspired prints. Berend recommended to Escher a 1924 article by Hungarian mathematician George Pólya that delineated the seventeen plane groups of plane symmetry. Pólya’s article, most importantly his illustrations, would be critical to the development of Escher’s later work.

Now living in Belgium, Escher began a series of woodcuts and prints between 1937 and 1941 depicting repetitive patterns that would prove to be graphical representations, inspired by Pólya, of mathematical theory. In 1938, the Eschers had another son, Jan, their third.

The Eschers lived a fairly busy life of work and study, but again they were forced to move because of rising political turmoil. The invasion of Belgium by the German army during the early years of World War II forced the family to relocate to Baarn in the Netherlands. Despite the difficulties the war imposed on his creative work, Escher was able to compose his first paper, “Regular Division of the Plane with Asymmetric Congruent Polygons,” in 1941 (published in 1958). Crystallography, the study of regular natural forms, had led the mathematically insecure Escher to become a mathematician. Regular division of the plane, a relatively neglected field, became his playground. As his fame grew, his graphic work attracted the attention of political dignitaries. and he was awarded the Knighthood of the Order of Orange-Nassau in 1955.

Escher’s fascination with fixed fields over time began to expand into the study of infinite fields. Impossible objects (optical illusions) like the Penrose triangle (Waterfall, first printed in 1961) and the Necker cube (Belvedere, printed in 1958) were compelling subjects for his artwork. He had previously demonstrated the concept of a closed loop as an expression of infinity in Waterfall and Up and Down (1947) as well as having created a series of “impossible” landscapes such as Still Life and Street (1937), but he was still seeking creative sources for new works. H. S. M. Coxeter, a mathematician and friend of Escher, introduced the graphic artist to the idea of hyperbolic tessellations. Escher’s Circle Limit I (1958), Circle Limit II (1958), Circle Limit III (1958), and Circle Limit IV (1960) were popularly regarded by mathematics scholars as the best demonstrations of the principles of hyperbolic tessellations.

Escher’s health failed in 1969, leading to a number of unsuccessful surgeries. After completing Snakes that same year, Escher moved to the Rosa Spier house, a retirement home for artists in Laren, the Netherlands. He died there on March 27, 1972.

Significance

There is little doubt that Escher, the creator of 448 prints (woodcuts, engravings, mezzotints, and lithographs), as well as more than 2,000 sketches and studies, remains one of the most well-known and prolific twentieth century artists. The strong appeal of his prints can be attributed, in part, to his evoking both the artistic elements of color, shape, and balance and also the rigorous scientific study of form, pattern, and line. His work combined the seemingly separate realms of art and science. His impossible buildings, swirling geometric patterns, and infinity studies are compelling and pleasing to the eye of the most casual viewer, yet they also demonstrate mathematical principles that leave scholars in many scientific disciplines, including mathematics, in awe.

Given the tendency of most artists to eschew science in favor of aesthetics (a tendency Escher himself displayed in early life because of his difficulty with many scholastic topics), it is both amusing and enlightening to see an individual artist combine elements of art and science in his or her own work and for an artist to create work that contributes to both art and science as a field of study. It is also, perhaps, revealing of how the traditional methodologies behind the teaching of such “difficult” subjects as mathematics and physics may be misguided. One wonders how many other gifted minds have abandoned a scholastic topic simply because they were instructed to use traditional methods of study.

Bibliography

Ernst, Bruno, and M. C. Escher. The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher. Translated by John F. Brigham. Los Angeles: Taschen, 2007. This volume is a good beginner’s guide to the works of Escher. A study of the most prominent aspects of Escher’s work (impossible realities, perspective, infinite fields, and division of the plane) and also a concise biography.

Escher, M. C. Escher on Escher. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989. A small volume containing some of Escher’s published papers and lectures. It is interesting to read his perspectives on his own works, particularly as they apply to mathematical theory. In these writings Escher makes conceptually difficult theorems understandable to the layperson.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books, 1999. Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize, this work compares the similar theories behind the vastly different media of music, art, and mathematics. Hofstadter broke new ground studying the works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist Escher and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, and argues that the three individuals approached the same basic principles from varied perspectives.

Locher, J. L. The Magic of M. C. Escher. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000. Locher, director of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, provides a thorough overview of Escher’s body of work. Particularly nice is the inclusion of fold-out pages, which allow a better sense of scale for some of the more complex prints.

Schattschneider, Doris. M. C. Escher: Visions of Symmetry. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. Schattschneider does a detailed study of the 137 symmetry drawings and watercolors that Escher printed between the years of 1926 and 1971. This is a fascinating book not only for general readers but also for scholars of crystallography and mathematics.