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Is the staircase going up or down? Ascending and Descending 1960 Lithograph
More than thirty years after the death of MC Escher (1898-1972) the works of this Dutch graphic artist continue to arouse amazement and admiration all around the world.
Looking at his woodprints and lithographs of powerful black and white landscapes, clever abstracts or series of mind-boggling metamorphoses, it's hard to believe they were made by an artist who claimed he couldn't really draw.
Walk around the museum "Escher at the Palace" in The Hague and it's immediately clear that Escher's art has lost none of its magic. The reptiles crawling in and out of a drawing, the metamorphosis of a Mediterranean village into a little Chinese man, two hands drawing each other, another hand holding a crystal ball with the reflection of the artist in it; they're only a couple of the many famous prints on display at the museum.
Visitors never throw just a perfunctory glance at a print, but can be caught staring at it for minutes, sometimes mimicking the position of the drawing hands (impossible), trying to figure out if a staircase is going up or down (impossible), or looking for hidden meanings of certain objects in a still life (improbable).
Craftsman
"People still love Escher's prints. The only problem is nobody knows they're Escher's," says art historian Mickey Piller, curator at the Escher museum. "The name Van Gogh they know, Rembrandt too, but Escher?" According to Ms Piller, this has to do with the fact that Escher's been labelled a craftsman for so long, "As he once wrote, 'I can't draw'. Looking at his work it sounds too funny to be true. What he meant is, 'I can only draw after I've seen the example in reality.'"
Making woodprints and lithographs is a time-consuming process. A single print would take Escher months to make. He would begin by making drawings before starting to cut or carve out a design in wood or stone. "And don't forget, with prints you always get a mirror image," Mickey Piller adds, "Plus you have to take into account that everything you cut out will stay white, and the rest will be covered in ink and will show up black in the print."
MC Escher fell in love with with the Italian countryside and it was a theme of many of his earlier works as here in Castrovalva, 1930 Lithograph
Traveling
After failing his final high school exams, and disliking his architecture study, Maurits Cornelis Escher went to the graphic arts academy in Haarlem, where he learned the art of wood printing and lithography, printing from a stone. After his studies he travelled around Spain and Italy. There he fell in love with his future wife and the Italian landscape.
In 1924, the Eschers settled in Rome, where he made a large variety of landscape pictures. But, when in the mid-1930s the fascist Mussolini regime increasingly affected life in Rome and his children's health was at risk from the ever-looming threat of typhoid or tuberculosis infection, Escher decided to leave Italy.
"With tears in his heart," says Willem Veldhuysen of the Escher Foundation, which protects the legacy of the artist and owns the copyright. After having lived in Switzerland and Belgium for a short while, the Escher family finally settled in Baarn in the Netherlands.
"But he missed Italy a lot," Mr Veldhuysen continues, "and he never made landscapes anymore, though he would use parts of them in his later work. He was pushed more or less to the abstract and mathematical side."
Mathematics
"Escher was intrigued by the fact that you can depict a three dimensional image on a flat surface," says retired math-teacher Hans de Rijk (1926), who was a friend of Escher's and has published extensively about the artist. "At school, Escher may not have been interested in maths, but his drawings and prints prove he's a very good mathematician."
Most of his life, Escher couldn't make a living of his profession. Though he exhibited frequently from the mid-1920s onward, he received a monthly allowance from his parents and in-laws to complement his income.
"We have records of his sales," says Mr Veldhuysen, "sometimes he made 600 guilders a year, sometimes 1200, peanuts really. Only in 1956 did he start selling enough to live from." And for that, Escher had the Americans to thank. Once he was discovered on the other side of the Atlantic, sales really took off.
© Copyright 2009, Radio Netherlands Worldwide
