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WI think we know Maurits Cornelis Escher’s world of spiral staircases and buildings that revolve around themselves. Yet a surprising glimpse of reality creeps into Somerset House’s fascinating journey through its path. In 1945, Escher designed a diploma for students at a school in Eindhoven, which had recently been liberated from Nazi rule. Behind the wise old owl in the foreground, black smoke billows from the riverside town, their sinister evil reflected in the water. The message of this war painting is not that Escher was a civilized man who survived in a brutal age but that the things he enjoyed were not just fantasy. Even his dangerous ideas reveal the workings of the real world, based as they are in what Galileo called “the language of mathematics” in which “the book of nature was written”.
You don’t have to be fluent in the language to lose yourself in Escher’s art. You just have to look, and this exhibition allows you to look deeper and deeper than you can in books and paintings and imitate his work. Sometimes you feel like you are in his strange place. I laughed for many years before 1958 lithograph Belvedere how the king and queen look at the mountain landscape from different angles from the two floors of the Renaissance building, but wait, they don’t just face different directions, their positions are different and inconsistent, the king is pointing sideways while the queen is looking at the picture in a 90-degree turn: the columns in front of the building and the palace behind the building. two different parts of living in two truths at the same time. No wonder the architects dress like fools while the architect is studying geometry.
By the time Escher made this comic about the house he was loved by scientists and almost spread to pop culture. A young British scientist Roger Penrose he saw him as a geometrical visionary and soon the psychedelic period will find its manifestations shown in the art of Escher; are included here and Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma handsit’s a group living as seemingly infinite as Escher, shrinking to the point of being invisible.
Hitting London as part of the world tour of the rockstar, this show does not let you forget that it is fun: it has videos, installations, large metal squares and a chessboard floor if you are turned off by black and white boards and lithographs. A guest complained to me about “bad” music: “But it’s Bach,” I said. It seems that his fugues are very popular with others. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be shy about showing this exhibition because that would prevent you from enjoying the wonderful, rich, visual journey of Escher’s work as a printmaker.
He quickly shows that he is very patient and humble. In the first design showing a frog on a lily bed at night, he already sees how nature creates strange geometries: round leaves return to the surface of the water while the moon appears as a white disc on the water. Such a precise eye places him in a long line of Netherlandish painters: when he shows himself in a round mirror, his room distorted like a covered rubber ball, he must be thinking of a transparent mirror. Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait.
Living in an era of technological revolution, Escher was a classical artist with no interest in the avant garde. We can’t help but call him “surreal”, but he wasn’t a surrealist. Born in 1898, he was trained by the Jewish publisher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita before embarking on a major tour of southern Europe. His stay in Italy ignited his love of architecture and landscape, providing the templates he later set. In one photo he looks down on Atrani, a town perched among the cliffs above the sea on the Amalfi coast, its interlocking buildings growing larger and more abstract as they creep up.
Cubic – was he a cubist? As tempting as it may be to lump Escher into modern history by comparing him to Cézanne or Braque, his cubes are not their cubes. He studies places in the traditions of the Italian Renaissance, painting line by line, until he sees the Alhambra in Granada and it changes him completely. A tessellated beauty is born. This ancient Islamic palace changed the way he saw the world, because its bright tiles join together to create a shape that your mind immediately understands is infinite: it continues as if the building had no walls.
So Escher got into the fun of tessellation, not with abstract shapes but with cartoons, geese, sea creatures. He likes to transform them into each other, to lower the three-dimensional characters in a flat plane and then take them out, and then come back, leading your eyes and mind on a visual, interesting journey that the writer Douglas Hofstadter rightly called “strange braids”.
These loops lead to the magic houses he created at the height of his art. His 1961 publishing Waterfall it shows another building with Renaissance bars, this time the water flows in an ascending canal until it falls into a large waterfall that drives a windmill but then continues to flow at the same height until it falls again. Pictorial illusion becomes a philosophical paradox.
Escher, a very old artist, makes you see that we are walking in a world that we do not understand. We are his funny little children, going up and down the stairs, thinking we are going up or down when we are in a broken place, we are raising our daily life with good thoughts to hide from the infinite, the impossible reality.
