As an adult, he pursued this career – combining travel, when he sketched and came up with ideas for future works (his two visits to the Moorish palace of the Alhambra in Granada were especially important, since they taught him how to work with tessellating patterns), with long stints at home, where he led a remarkably orderly life. His father hoped that he would become an architect, but, influenced by his graphic arts teacher, who had spotted his talent as a printmaker, Escher was determined to become an artist. In 1919, Escher enrolled at the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. The resemblance between the school’s staircase in reality and the structures in Escher’s prints is remarkable. Indeed, decades after “the hell that was Arnhem”, as Escher later described his schooldays, he made a number of works featuring versions of the institution’s dramatic staircase, which he had ascended so frequently as a boy. So who was Escher – and does he deserve the indifferent reputation as a fine artist that fate has dealt him? These are some of the questions posed by The Amazing World of MC Escher, a forthcoming exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, which also happens to be the artist’s first major UK retrospective.īorn in the small city of Leeuwarden in the north of the Netherlands, Maurits Cornelis Escher, who was always known in his family as “Mauk”, grew up in a prosperous household as the fifth son of a civil engineer who was a senior official at the Department of Public Works.Īt secondary school in the city of Arnhem, where his family had moved in 1903, he had an unhappy time – and his miserable memories of this period of his life had a decisive influence upon many of his later prints, including Relativity. Yet, as Patrick Elliott of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art points out, even the print of Day and Night in the collection of the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery “was actually acquired by the Geography Department and was transferred to the Museum at a later date”. Day and Night was Escher’s most popular print: during the course of his lifetime, he made more than 650 copies of it, painstakingly rendering each impression with the help of a small egg spoon made of bone. In Britain, for instance, it appears that only a single work by Escher belongs to a public collection: the woodcut Day and Night, which presents two flocks of birds, one black and one white, flying above a flat Dutch landscape in between a pair of rivers. Moreover, despite the popularity of his fastidious optical illusions, Escher continues to suffer from snobbery within the realm of fine art, where his output is often denigrated as little more than technically accomplished graphic design. Yet, if we’re honest, how much do most of us really know about its creator, the Dutch printmaker MC Escher (1898-1972)? The truth is that outside his homeland Escher remains something of an enigma. Since the original lithograph was produced in the summer of 1953, Relativity – which belongs to a series of five prints by the same artist also featuring impossible constructions and multiple vanishing points – has been reproduced countless times on posters, mugs, T-shirts, items of stationery and even duvet covers. It must be one of the most familiar images in modern art: a space-distorting interior that could never exist in reality, dominated by staircases sprouting surreally in all directions, and filled with expressionless, mannequin-like figures walking up and down like members of a religious order calmly going about their daily business.
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