Escher’s Mind-Bending, Paradoxical World

M.C. Escher was one of those rare artists to become a pop cultural icon. His most emblematic works are instantly recognizable, and continue to beguile new fans with their startlingly original, paradoxical constructions. It is little wonder that some of Escher’s best-loved optical illusions have been reinvented and referenced countless times, appearing on album covers, inspiring films like The Matrix (1999) and Inception (2010), and even being parodied by Family Guy and The Simpsons.

A spectacular new exhibition at Somerset House in London invites visitors to step into Escher’s wacky world, courtesy of a series of immersive installations where nothing is quite as it seems. Bringing together more than 150 works made between 1918 and 1964, the show also traces the artist’s development, from his early days spent obsessively drawing in obscurity to his ascendance to global stardom.

“Escher was loved by the mathematicians and the hippies,” announced the show’s curator, Federico Giudiceandrea, at the exhibition’s opening this month. Indeed, the artist was widely admired both for his instinctual grasp, and subversion, of geometries, and for the seductively surreal nature of his work, which saw him dubbed “the godfather of psychedelic art” by Rolling Stone magazine.

The Early Years

Born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, in 1898, Maurits Cornelis Escher was obsessive about drawing from childhood. Though he had aspired to study architecture, he eventually studied woodcuts, etching, and linocut under Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita at the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts until 1922. Some of his earliest works were simple animal studies.

In 1921, Escher visited Italy, where he was particularly drawn to the architecture. He would eventually settle in Rome for over a decade, until 1935. On his extensive travels, the artist began recording the country’s characteristic rising townscapes as well as geographical features. One example, of the Collegiate Church of Atrani, was completed in 1931 during a trip to the Amalfi coast, where Escher would also meet his future wife Jetta Umiker.

Works from this period evince an elegance but assurance of line, used to describe the essential nature of form without over-embellishment. They also hint at an interest in the organization of space, and how geometric shapes interact to build up more complex compositions. An early attraction to repetition, too, is clear from works like Procession in a Crypt (1927), in which cloaked figures march among receding arches.

In the years leading up to World War II, Escher opposed the rise of Mussolini. After his son was required to join an Italian fascist youth organization, Escher moved his family to Switzerland and Brussels before permanently resettling in the Netherlands in 1941. It was at this time that he began to make his best-known work.

The Tessellation Breakthrough

One of Escher’s biggest breakthroughs came in 1936, during a trip to the Alhambra in southern Spain. Walking through the majestic Moorish fortress, he felt entranced by patterns in the decorative tile work—in particular inventive tessellations, or the repeated configuration of one or more geometric shapes to cover a vast plane without overlapping or leaving any gaps. When Escher later visited his half-brother Berend, a professor at Leiden University, he was introduced to the theories of crystallography, a branch of science devoted to the study of molecular structure.

Inspired by these studies, Escher began making his own tessellations. He identified a wide range of motifs that could be used to create tessellations, carefully cataloguing these as some 137 watercolors in a series titled “Regular Division of the Plane.”

Geometric shapes would continually morph into stylized motifs, often of reptiles, insects, fish, or birds. One of the most complex examples is Regular Division of the Plane III (1957), in which the figure of a knight on horseback is continually shifted and reflected to fill a plane. In Regular Division of the Plane V (1957), two different motifs are rotated in order to create a tessellation.

As Escher’s tessellations grew in ambition, he began creating “metamorphoses,” or compositions in which one repeated motif would gradually transform into another, often by first being abstracted down to their essential form. In this way, Escher was able to explore otherwise intangible concepts that fascinated him, such as cycles, continuity, and eternity.

Juxtapositions were also deployed, as in the case of Air and Water I (1938), in which the picture plane is divided into two halves representing air and water, with black water morphing into black birds overhead and white air morphing into fish down below. As such, the artist “started using tessellations to tell a story,” said Giudiceandrea.

Escher’s interest in tessellations continued throughout his life. This is evident from the latest work in the London exhibition, Square Limit, from 1964, and his final work, Snakes, which was produced in 1969, shortly before the artist moved into a retirement home in 1970. He died in 1972, at the age of 73.

The Geometric Paradox

Perhaps Escher’s most beloved works are his visual paradoxes, which trick the viewer using perspectival distortions. For example, in Relativity from 1953, how is it that two figures in the upper right-hand corner appear to be ascending and descending the same staircase. To pull of this magical feat, Escher melded together three centers of gravity, so that sections of the composition only make logical sense when the image is rotated a certain way.

“It’s locally precise, but if you look at the whole thing, it is paradoxical,” explained Giudiceandrea. He linked this incoherent relationship between the local and global to the mathematician Kurt Gödel‘s Incompleteness Theorem from 1931.

Many of Escher’s structures might initially seem plausible, but it is upon closer inspection that they start to confound the viewer. In Belvedere (1958), an Italian Renaissance-style architectural construction could actually only exist as a drawing, since we soon learn that the ladder between two floors is somehow rising from inside to outside, despite tilting forwards. The second floor, meanwhile, is at a 90-degree angle to the ground floor.

In 1954, Escher’s geometric paradoxes were exhibited at the International Conference of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. That exposure to the scientific community brought the artist new opportunities to collaborate with mathematicians on the artistic rendering of impossible structures.

One of these was the Möbius Strip, an object that is perceived as having two sides but, in fact, only has one. It was discovered in the 19th century by German mathematicians Johann Benedict Listing and August Ferdinand Möbius. In one image from 1963, ants appear to walk on different sides of a strip; yet if we follow their path, we find that they are all walking along the same surface.

Much of Escher’s work felt both far ahead of its time and deeply rooted in the findings of Renaissance polymaths. So it is that an elegant sketch of three interlaced octahedra in Stars (1948) doubles up as a cage for two chameleons, in a composition that appears to have been inspired by Leonardo da Vinci‘s collaborator Luca Pacioli. He drew similarly multi-dimensional geometric forms in his 1509 treatise De divina proportione.

Eschermania

The final rooms of the London exhibition are dedicated to the phenomenon of “Eschermania” that really gained steam in the 1960s, towards the end of the artist’s life. Though Escher had welcomed the interest in his work from mathematicians in the 1950s, he was less enthused by its embrace by counter-cultures who mass-reproduced them onto posters and t-shirts. In one example from the London exhibition, Stars is reimagined in a psychedelic color scheme.

Famously, Mick Jagger‘s request to use an Escher design on the cover of the Rolling Stones‘s Let It Bleed album in 1969 was dismissed when the singer casually addressed the artist as “Maurits.” Far from being starstruck, Escher had never even heard of Jagger’s band. On other occasions, he was happy to license his art. One beloved image, Reptiles, was reproduced on the cover of a 1969 album by English band Mott the Hoople.

Escher’s art has inspired countless creators across the arts. In the world of fashion, his designs appeared on silk Hermès scarves and the Furla “Metropolis” clutch. In the 1986 film Labyrinth, David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly‘s characters navigate a room modeled on Escher’s Relativity, as was the shifting Grand Staircase at Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001). The artist’s work hangs on the walls of a dance choreographer’s office in Dario Argento‘s cult horror classic Suspiria (1977), and the fictional street on which much of the action takes place is named Escherstrasse.

“M.C. Escher: The Exhibition” is on view at Somerset House, Strand, London, through September 6.