M. C. Escher Biography (1898 – 1972)
“Those who wonder,” M. C. Escher once wrote, “discover that this is, in itself a wonder.” And indeed, we are confronted by wonders whenever we enter the world of his extraordinary artwork. His pictures frequently depict things that are at once ordinary and yet impossible to find in our everyday experiences. In Escher’s universe, creatures fit seemlessly together like a puzzle extending into infinity and space itself can be turned inside out to be seen from many directions simultaneously. Today, his artwork is some of the most recognizable in the world, and his original prints are among the most sought-after and valuable treasures in the art world. Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on June 17th, 1898 in Leeuwarden, a small town in the north of the Netherlands. He was the youngest son of George A. Escher, an hydrolic engineer who had worked in Japan in the 1870’s. “Mauk,” as Maurits was known to his friends and family, was an indiferent student who especially disliked mathematics and barely graduated from high school. At the urging of his parents he pursued studies in architecture, but he soon gravitated to the arts and devoted the rest of his life to making lithographs and woodcuts. “I am a printmaker, heart and soul,” he said. Escher moved to Italy as a young man and married Jetta Umiker, the Swiss daughter of an aristocrat. He had his first one-man shows in both Italy and Holland in 1924, and the Gemeentemuseum, the state museum of Holland, purchased 27 of his prints in 1933. The next year Escher won a prize for printmaking in Chicago and the Art institute of Chicago became the first American museum to purchase his work. Escher returned to Holland in 1941 and focused on his passion for creating interlocking patterns of creatures inspired by Islamic tile designs he had seen at the 14th century Alhambra Palace in Spain. In 1961 the magazine Scientific American featured an Escher design on the cover, and that article about his artwork reached a wide audience of scientists, mathematicians, and other academics. A completely different kind of popularity was achieved in the late 1960’s when Escher’s extraordinary images appeared on day-glow posters in the avant-garde community, on posters in college rooms, and even on record album covers. Although for much of his life Escher worked in relative isolation in his home print-making studio, by the end of his life he had achived international fame and prices for his original work sky-rocketed along with sale of books and reproductions of his prints. Escher created his last print, the masterpiece ‘Ringsnakes,’ in 1969, and died on March 27, 1972. After his death Escher’s popularity continued to grow, and in 1998 a museum devoted to his work opened in the Hague. That same year a record-breaking exhibit of Escher’s art was featured at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2003 Artists’ Market was instrumental in acquiring one of the largest collections of Escher’s work for a new museum, ‘Herakleidon: Experience in Visual Arts” in Athens Greece. Artists’ Market gallerist Jeffrey Price explains his own fascination with Escher’s art: “There is always more to Escher’s pictures than first meets the eye. His is an artist’s universe, one where our rational ideas may be suspended and yet logic prevails. Escher's vision enables us to see the invisible patterns of nature and catch a glimpse of wonders that exist just beyond our grasp.” -- Jeffrey Price
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“I think I have never yet done any work with the aim of symbolizing a particular idea, but the fact that a symbol is sometimes discovered or remarked upon is valuable for me because it makes it easier to accept the inexplicable nature of my hobbies, which constantly preoccupy me.” – M. C. Escher To express the deepest mysteries or fundamental truths of creation and consciousness is a quest worthy of the highest arts. To understand even a small piece of the puzzle of perception is a task to fill a lifetime. When we begin to see the patterns that underlie the paradoxes of existence, then we catch a glimpse of revelations we may never fully comprehend. M. C. Escher said little about the meaning of his artwork and the attraction of his images was a great mystery to him. Nevertheless, he was compelled by what he described as ‘a hopeless mania’ to create pictures of objects both perfect and impossible, of scenes quite fantastic and yet completely believable, and to describe in great detail things we might not otherwise be aware of. I believe that Escher’s artwork continues to resonate in the century after it was created because his pictures illustrate themes that are fundamental to our consciousness. This essay will explore several of Escher’s prints that hold keys to understanding why the artist was intrigued by such unusual imagery and why his creations continue to fascinate such a wide audience today. In M. C. Escher’s first great illusionary lithograph, “Cycle” from 1938, we see a boy running from a tower and down some steps. His arms are rather awkwardly waving and he’s smiling, perhaps in secret reverie. Where is he coming from and going to? His journey is short and yet this passage encompasses his entire world. As he descends the stairs a transformation occurs that is as miraculous as any myth. In a few steps he metamorphosizes into marble and what was once an actor becomes his stage. Beyond the tower is a serene landscape, perhaps part of the Tuscan countryside or maybe a small portion of paradise. This is the setting for Escher’s story: an extraordinary adventure in a miraculous world. “Cycle” can be seen as an archetypal image of the universe created from our own being. Is everything our imagining? Where does our interior landscape end and the countryside begin? What is the essential difference between body and stone, and why can we find soul in one and not the other? By illustrating such fascinating questions, perhaps Escher proposes that everything from the distant hills to our outstretched hands is a part of a complex, ever-changing and often invisible cycle. One might ask whether Escher actually intended for his pictures to have such plots and for philosophical connections to be drawn from artworks that are complex, often rather technical, and only occasionally overtly picturesque. I propose that such mysteries are the essence of great art, and are inherent in the nature of revelation. The artist can be a messenger bringing each viewer a looking glass through which one may discover things unknown to either the author or his audience. M. C. Escher “Cycle” 1938 Lithograph All M.C. Escher images © Cordon Art B.V. M. C. Escher “Cycle” 1938 Lithograph All M.C. Escher quotations & images © Cordon Art B.V. M. C. Escher created his first print in 1916 while World War I was ravaging and re-ordering Europe, and his final woodcut, “Ringsnakes,” was completed in 1969, in the month of the Apollo moon landing and the summer of Woodstock. It would be hard to underestimate the cultural and sociological changes that occurred during that half century, and while I doubt that it was Escher’s intent to create commentary on these events by making pictures unlike any that had been seen before, it can be said that his images reflect the complexity, ambiguity, and restructuring of twentieth-century society. While philosophers wrote of existentialism and surrealism, printmaking gave Escher a vocabulary that enabled him to express ideas that he could articulate in no other way. Even though Escher did not write extensively about the meanings of his prints, and even though he himself may not have been fully aware of the implications of his imagery, still his prints gain power by having been created during a particularly dramatic era of transition by an exquisitely gifted artist who searched beyond the outward appearance of his subjects in an effort to illustrate the miraculous patterns that unify and bring order to a complex and incomprehensible universe. Just as no single description can fully explain history, no one viewpoint can show the entirety of a subject. Cubist painters combined profiles and perspectives within a single image in order to present a more comprehensive view of their subject, however the result frequently obscured the original portrait. Escher’s visions are grounded in the strict mechanical rules of architecture and engineering, and his fantasies are as real as the world he saw around him while still capturing the unexpected consequences of changing realities. Escher masterfully illustrated these themes in his 1947 woodblock print “Other World,” a triumph of both technical craftsmanship and visionary imagery. Three similar figures perch within three windows. This is a simorgh, a creature that came to us through Middle Eastern mythology as the embodiment of human form within the figure of a bird. The legendary simorgh was believed to be so old that it had seen the destruction of the world three times over. Escher actually owned this figurine; it had been a gift from his father-in-law, who acquired it in Azerbaijan and gave it to his daughter and Escher when the newlyweds lived in Italy. Escher kept this small treasure in his home throughout his life and featured it in several important artworks. In this print we see three views of the same creature within three windows that are reflections of one another, connected within a fantastic room constructed with the lines and grids of a mechanical world drawn on graph paper. This precision reinforces the reality of the scene and sets the stage for our voyage beyond this world and into another. M .C Escher “Other World” 1947 woodcut and engraving in brown, green, and black Through the windows we see three scenes that each makes perfect sense and yet is in disconnected from the others. In mid-century, when Escher created this print, so many cities had been made unrecognizable by war, and so many people looked out their windows and saw once-familiar scenes that had become alien and unknown. Perhaps Escher felt that his world had been transformed into another world, or many worlds only unified by ambiguity. From the top of the picture we can look down on the creature and view a cratered moonscape from above, as if we were floating in the heavens. Gazing straight ahead we can look out toward the horizon over the pockmarked landscape and into the dark sky beyond. A comet flashes across the blackness leaving a spray of stars in its wake. The Earth hovers above the horizon, near the center of the picture, commanding our focus. Our planet is distant, far removed, and the magical creature has turned away and looks at us, the viewer, instead of out towards the planets. This messenger confronts us, and it may be our destiny to make sense of these worlds if we dare venture beyond these walls. M. C. Escher’s Simorgh figurine And now look up from the bottom of this strange and wonderful picture. We are staring out into the infinite cosmos, where we can see the rings of Saturn and the spiral arms of a distant nebula. Just what is out there we don’t know, but we know we are part of this greater universe part of this cosmic adventure. We have come a long way, yet there are deep mysteries before us. Three horns hang in archways, rather like shofars, should we be ready to sound them and go forth. Perhaps the trumpet-player is the simorgh, but there is ambiguity in that since two creatures face towards horns but one – the one nearest earth - faces away. The world might change in the blink of an eye and strange sights might be seen through familiar windows. We envision journeys that fill us with excitement as well as trepidation. We have discovered something that is difficult to know or to express, and I believe we have heard the artist’s voice. The artist can give substance to that which is visible to him alone. To express the complex beauty of a perfect shape might be seen as the function of mathematics more readily than the task of a printmaker. An equation, after all, is a way of understanding the relationship between things, and geometry is the most precise way to describe the fundamental structure of forms. In his 1953 wood engraving “Spirals” Escher has illustrated the evolution of a perfect and complex object, an unwinding banded cone floating against a grey background. M. C. Escher “Spirals” 1953 two-color wood engraving printed in grey and black We see similar shapes within a nautilus shell and in the spirals of distant galaxies, but it is a difficult task indeed to make all of this visible by carving channels in a block of wood. Undoubtedly, these spirals are a somewhat surprising subject for an artwork, requiring months of planning and tedious exacting woodcarving and printing. This is a design intensely challenging in both concept and execution, and it is this complexity which may be at the heart of “Spirals” beauty. Escher’s inspiration may well have been his desire simply to make this difficult object exist, and to undertake the task of actualization with his chisels, ink and paper, guided by his imagination, experience, and craftsmanship. Creating such perfection is a sublime art and understanding it fully challenges our senses and our intellect. Escher’s spiral cornucopia is constructed of four parallel bands, each shaded with a subtle and systematic arrangement of lines and lozenges. Escher’s technique is deceptively simple, since the print is created by pressing two inked woodblocks onto a sheet of paper. How these two blocks create the three shades in the print – black, grey, and white – is a surprisingly complex and highly technical puzzle, as is the precise geometric arrangement of spiraling lines and shapes. Escher’s inks make visible simultaneously the inside and the outside of the bands which lead us toward infinity. If we search for the very beginning of this growing form, we can find the tip of the spiral placed precisely between two bands at the right, its extreme apex exquisitely visible just before our view is blocked by the circling outer rind. The curves both wrap around and spring out of loops which we can imagine having no beginning and no end; this is clearly part of a growing and evolving thing, somehow both organic and mechanical, an illustration of a object as well as of a creative idea. It is as if an ever-evolving spiral has been frozen for a moment so that we may observe it close-up. We witness here a small piece of the infinite created from two blocks of wood, cut with chisels, covered with ink and pressed to paper by Escher in his studio. Lines and spaces of black, grey and white create something impossibly perfect and fantastically dimensioned on a white sheet of paper within a picture frame. M. C. Escher “Crystal” 1947 mezzotint, signed and numbered 4/25 “So it appears that one can even be symbolizing without knowing it,” wrote Escher. We might wonder what Escher’s intentions were in as he worked tirelessly to create a mezzotint print of a crystal floating among rocks in 1947 (the same year as “Other World.”) Mezzotint is an ancient and frustrating technique, perhaps the most technically challenging craft a printmaker might attempt. First a metal plate must be roughened and textured evenly so that one achieves a velvety surface that, if rubbed with ink and pressed to paper, would print the deepest tones imaginable. From this blackness the printmaker must burnish and polish his image, for smoother surfaces will hold less ink and appear lighter in the final printing. To create an image such as Escher’s ‘Crystal,’ is triumph of both vision and technique as well as a complex symbolic act. Escher himself was perhaps unaware of what compelled him to create this image, but considering the effort involved in bringing these shapes out of the inky darkness, he must have felt strong urges to see his vision appear on paper. The central image is a cube-octahedron; that is, a double four faced pyramid perfectly intersecting a cube. It is a wonderfully complex structure, difficult to realize in its solid form and almost impossible to create with transparency in mezzotint the way Escher has done. Cube Octahedron Where do we find such perfect crystal forms? One answer lies in the background of this print, in the smooth and irregular rocks that are strewn at random as if they were washed up on some imaginary shore by the tide. If we were to look closely at these rocks, perhaps examine them with a high-powered microscope, we would indeed see atoms and molecules arranged with the complexity of a cube-octahedron and more. These miraculous forms are hidden from our sight, yet always present if only we can look closely enough. There are wonderful contrasts here as well as harmonies: the crystal is translucent, reflective, and made up of perfect lines and planes; the rocks behind are solid opaque, irregular lumps that hide their inner structures. The fact that crystalline perfection is part of the rocks is as much a mystery as the fact that fish can sometimes fit together with birds, a boy can become a building, and three worlds can be made visible within a single room. Escher wrote of this: “The laws of the phenomena around us – order, regularity, cyclical repetitions and renewals – have assumed greater and greater importance for me. The awareness of their presence gives me peace and provides me with support. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, and not in a formless chaos, as it sometimes seems.” So there we have it: the essence of Escher’s philosophy in his own words. Fundamental forms such as crystals and atoms are known to us and yet often lie beyond our sight. The search for harmony, logic, and the universal rules of order is both alluring and terrifying. As Faust found, there are some secrets that are better left unknown, and some mysteries best left behind the shadows. And so we find serpents weaving through perfect interlocking rings in Escher’s final creation, his 1969 woodcut “Ringsnakes.” After a lifetime spent making things visible that we see with our minds as well as our eyes, Escher faced a monumental struggle to bring his last artwork to completion. His health failing, he feared he would not live long enough to carve and print the three woodblocks that were required to create this masterpiece. “Ringsnakes” is complex in structure, execution, and meaning; expressing the duality of natural and perfect forms, the unity of all creation, and a sublime realization of the infinite. Escher frequently expressed the infinite in his art. His woodcut ‘Smaller and Smaller,’ for example, presents us with ever-diminishing lizards as we approach the center of the design. Traveling in the other direction, the figures in Escher’s series of ‘Circle Limit’ woodcuts reduce in size towards their edges. “Ringsnakes” combines and completes these transformations, creating a cycle that is unified and universal. Whether we begin at the center of the figure or approach from its outer edge, first we find the smallest rings. These may be seen as the seeds of creation. Escher, empowered with the wisdom of experience, did not have to carve impossibly tiny rings to give us the sense of the infinite; the smallest circles serve as symbolic links of a never-ending chain. Each ring intertwines with others, both larger and smaller. It is the nature of many things to be both growing and shrinking simultaneously. As we advance in wisdom and age, so also we may decline in innocence and lose the possibilities of youth. Mists rise from the seas and fall as rain. In mythology, a phoenix can be reborn from its ashes and a serpent might swallow its own tail and regenerate. In the universe of rings that Escher creates we can watch evolution unfold. We might see this as an allegory of creation from the first dust of atoms at the edge of space to the complexities of a living planet. As it happens, only where Escher’s rings reach their largest size can they be inhabited by living creatures. And so, when the world is ripe, when nature’s web is fully grown, there we find snakes. M. C. Escher “Ringsnakes” 1969 three-color woodcut From the serpent in the Garden of Eden to the cobra on Cleopatra’s crown, the snake has always been a powerful symbol of temptation, wisdom and duality. It is said that Moses turned his staff into a snake to overpower Pharaoh, and the Egyptian replicated his magic, producing snakes on both sides of their epic struggle. Snakes can have wondrous powers. Related to the phoenix, the mythological ouroboros was a serpent that swallowed its tail to be continually re-born from its own essence. The shape of the ouroboros is closely related to the never ending patterns Escher describes in many of his prints. Escher’s snakes circle endlessly, seeming to carry with them the gift and burden of wisdom as well as the contradictory powers of our desires. If the snake can be seen as a symbol for all that is conscious and alive, both wonderful and terrifying, then it is appropriate that in this print they weave in and out of such perfect and conceptualized rings. We can see the universe as composed of both the essential formulas that govern molecules and of our cryptic consciousness that struggles to understand itself. We are rather chaotic humans within a universe where perfection is invisible yet pervasive. The linked chains of “Ringsnakes” illustrate a pathway to and from infinity, interwoven with serpentine creatures whose writhing undulations unite them as they circumnavigate the cosmos and weave together perfection with the ever-changing power of life. The Ourorobos The 120osegment of M. C. Escher’s woodcut ‘Ringsnakes’ which he printed three times around to create the final image To create this circular woodcut with maximum symmetry and a minimum of woodcarving, Escher carved wedge shaped printing blocks that completed the print with three impressions. Since “Ringsnakes” is printed with three colors, each color required three printings covering one-third of the image at a time. The edges of each block were fashioned irregularly so that their seams are hidden by the image’s borderlines. Escher pressed three impressions from each wood block – three times around this wheel of creation – printing nine inked segments making three layers of color into one unified picture telling a story that Escher worked a lifetime to create. We can never know how much of this message Escher consciously intended, but we do know that this final woodcut inspired him to continue work as the frailties of age crept over him. “Ringsnakes” stands as the triumphant legacy of an artist who labored tirelessly in solitude and with endless diligence to express the wonders our eyes perceive and our mind struggles to comprehend. The patterns Escher composed give us paths along which we can discover even more than the artist himself may have been aware of, for the doors he opened ultimately reveal what we find reflected in the mirrors of our own perception. This essay is dedicated to Hans deRijk, who has shared Escher’s magic with the world through his prose and has shared his friendship so very generously with me. Special thanks always to my wife, Esta, who stayed awake while I wrote the first draft of this essay and has been my constant companion on this journey.
-Jeffrey Price M. C. Escher wrote “I am a printmaker, heart and soul.’ His unique visions were generally not expressed in paintings or drawings – these were but his working models, used to develop ideas which he would then bring to life using the traditional printmaking techniques of woodcut, mezzotint, and lithography. It is critical to understand the difference between an original print and a reproduction if one is to understand why original Escher prints are so rare and so treasured today. It is relatively easy to understand the nature of a reproduction: it is a copy made by photographing an original artwork and reproducing its image in a book or as a poster. But what is an original? That requires a longer answer. The defining characteristic of an original print is that it must be printed directly from the artist’s hand-made printing block or plate. There are many techniques in printmaking, but in every case an original must be printed directly from the block or plate that the artists themselves create. If the artist makes the printing plate, be it by drawing an image on a lithographic stone, cutting into a woodblock, or working directly with a metal plate; and if that plate is then printed, the result is an original print which can have aesthetic and historic significance as well as real value among collectors and in the international art market. A reproduction, no matter how attractive it may be, has no such value, just as a reproduction of currency has no monetary value. To create a woodblock print Escher carved a smoothed slab of wood with chisels or engraving tools with infinite patience and skills honed over a lifetime of printmaking. Escher’s preferred woodblocks were of cherry, pear, or other dense fruitwood, since these could be carved with the detail and precision the artist desired. Once the block was carved, it could then be carefully inked and pressed against special paper, printing it in somewhat the same way one might print with a rubberstamp. To get the ink rich and even is an art in itself: apply too little ink with the ink roller and you will get unevenly printed areas, too much ink will fill in fine lines. Escher placed a sheet of printing paper on a large flat board and pressed his inked woodblock onto the paper. If multiple blocks were being used to create a multi-color print, there were always places at the edge of the design where Escher could align the inked block with a previously-printed woodblock’s impression. Once the inked block was in place on the paper, a second flat board was placed on top of the paper and woodblock, creating a kind of sandwich. Escher would then carefully flip the boards with his block and paper upside down and remove the top board so that the paper was now on top of his inked block. He would then rub the back of the paper either with a roller or an ivory spoon (intended for eating soft-boiled eggs) in order to transfer the ink from the block to the final print. Each example of every M. C. Escher print required separate careful inking, printing and drying before it was ready to be exhibited or sold. Escher would hand-print a small number of prints from his blocks and keep them in his studio for collectors and exhibitions. If an edition sold out (and if he felt so inclined) he might then print a few more examples of this woodcut. Escher continued to print some of his woodblocks until 1970 when his health deteriorated. This explains why woodcuts were not numbered editions, since Escher could not predict how many examples he would create in the future. Early prints that were very popular such as ‘Day and Night’ and ‘Sky and Water I’ would therefore have larger editions than a later more esoteric woodcut such as ‘Circle Limit II’ Some editions by Escher, such as his 1932 portfolio ‘XXIV Emblemata,’ were printed in a woodcut press, as were his woodcuts in the books ’Flor de Pascua,’ ‘The Terrifying Adventures of Scholastica’ and ‘The Regular Division of the Plane.’ The woodcuts ‘Grasshopper,’ ‘Scarabs,’ ‘The Spinner’ and ‘Vaulted Stairway’ were also printed in this way for a portfolio included within the art journal ‘Halcyon’ in 1940. Escher remarked of this printing, “how excellent the prints are: I never succeeded to handprint that print so deep black while retaining the very thin white stripes.” Lithography is a more mysterious technique, but there are similarities to woodblock printing. Escher drew his designs onto specially prepared blocks of German limestone using artist’s lithographic pencils which are somewhat waxy. Printing these blocks required the assistance of a master lithographer who first wet the stone evenly, then applied ink, and finally printed it slowly under tremendous pressure of a large printmaker’s press. The finished lithographs were inspected by Escher, who destroyed any print not meeting his standards. Each successful print would be signed by Escher and the edition number noted. Escher would decide on the number of prints to create with his lithographer, and it is my belief that since some defective prints were destroyed the editions are often odd numbers (for example, “Print Gallery” has an edition of 43 instead of perhaps fifty examples). All except ten of his lithographic stones were destroyed following printing, most likely they were resurfaced and ‘erased’ in order to create new prints in the lithographer’s workshop. If a print was in great demand and the stone had not been destroyed, Escher would sometimes print additional small editions, usually differentiated by a roman numeral following the edition number. Escher also created just eight mezzotints, and this complex technique requires a lengthy explanation to fully understand its challenges. Suffice to say that Escher laboriously crafted a copper plate incised with his image and then inked this plate and printed it in his studio on a small roller press. The technique to create and print a mezzotint was extraordinarily demanding, unimaginably tedious, and somewhat magical. Escher’s final frustration was that very few prints could be created before the mezzotint plate degraded and could no longer be printed with the shading and details his meticulous images demanded. Escher's general method was to seldom sign smaller and medium-format woodcuts and to almost always sign larger major prints. Lithographs and mezzotints were usually, but not always, signed and numbered, whereas major woodcuts were generally signed but never numbered. Larger woodcut prints frequently bear Escher's notation 'eigen druk,' which roughly translates as ‘printed by myself,’ or ‘self-printed' though the wording is infinitely more elegant in the original Dutch. Virtually all of Escher’s prints have his MCE monogram and the date of the print’s completion in Roman numerals drawn within the image. Every example of an original print is necessarily identical in size to every other print created from the same block, stone, or plate. These originals have frequently been photographed and reproduced in books and posters, just as painters’ canvases have been photographically reproduced. As we have seen, in Escher’s work only the woodblock prints, lithographs, and mezzotints created directly from the artist’s blocks, stones, and plates are considered original prints and of value. Originality has nothing to do with the size of an edition nor whether each print is autographed by the artist. It is the conceptualizing, crafting and printing of a graphic image that is the heart and soul of the creative process, and indeed there is a long history of printmakers creating their works without autographing them. This was certainly the case with the classic prints of Rembrandt and Dürer, and often with modern printmakers such as Picasso as well. The practice of artists signing and numbering their editions was virtually unknown before the twentieth century. The creation of signed and numbered graphics sometimes had as much to do with marketing as it did with printmaking, and editions were often produced at the request of galleries and dealers to increase the sales of the work of their favorite artists. Many artists, including Chagall, Dalí, and Picasso also signed and numbered photographic reproductions of their drawings and paintings. These reproductions are clearly not original prints, and Escher never signed reproductions of his work. Escher held tenaciously to his roots as a traditional printmaker in technique and temperament, though certainly not stylistically. He was the antithesis of a commercial artist and worked for most of his life without a wide audience or gallery network. The marketing of his work was far less important than its creation. Escher preferred to work alone in his studio and generally sold his work directly to the scholars and collectors who discovered his unique creations. For Escher, it was the concept and creation of his images that was of the utmost importance whereas selling his prints could be a unwelcome distraction from his work as an artist. Escher kept close control over his printmaking materials and created comparatively few original prints during his lifetime, a mere fraction of the output of other famous twentieth-century printmakers such as Mirò, Picasso, and Chagall. Virtually all of Escher's printing blocks, lithograph stones, and mezzotint plates were cancelled with a small hole and thus made non-reprintable at The Hague Gemeentemuseum pursuant to M. C. Escher's instructions at the end of his life, so we know with certainty that all original Escher prints are from his small authentic vintage lifetime editions. It was extraordinarily challenging for Escher to translate his visions into graphic art. During his sixty years of printmaking he created just 448 different prints, each one a part of the interwoven fabric of images which stands as his life’s work. Each and every original print that came from his exquisitely-crafted blocks and plates tells part of an extraordinary story that unfolds within the many layers of our consciousness. As Escher himself once wrote, the story he told is “something that no other graphic artist on earth could tell you. It doesn’t sound very modest, but what can I do? That is simply the way it is.” I’d like to offer my special thanks to George Escher for his comments on this essay that gave me first-hand insights into his father’s work. And thank you to all the lovers and collectors of Escher’s work who have made the past forty five years an extraordinarily rewarding art adventure for me with so many delightfully unexpected discoveries along the way.
- Jeffrey Price “Those who wonder,” M. C. Escher once wrote, “discover that this is, in itself a wonder.” And indeed, we are confronted by wonders whenever we enter the world of his extraordinary artwork. His pictures frequently depict things that are at once ordinary and yet impossible to find in our everyday experiences. In Escher’s universe, creatures fit seemlessly together like a puzzle extending into infinity and space itself can be turned inside out to be seen from many directions simultaneously. Today, his artwork is some of the most recognizable in the world, and his original prints are among the most sought-after and valuable treasures in the art world.
Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in The Netherlands in 1898, the youngest son of an engineer. He was an indiferent student who especially disliked mathematics and barely graduated from high school. At the urging of his parents he pursued studies in architecture, but he soon gravitated to the arts and devoted the rest of his life to making lithographs and woodcuts. “I am a printmaker, heart and soul,” he said. Escher moved to Italy as a young man and married Jetta Umiker, the Swiss daughter of an aristocrat. He had his first one-man shows in both Italy and Holland in 1924, and the Gemeentemuseum, the state museum of Holland, purchased 27 of his prints in 1933. The next year Escher won a prize for printmaking in Chicago and the Art institute of Chicago became the first American museum to purchase his work. Escher returned to Holland in 1941 and focused on his passion for creating interlocking patterns of creatures inspired by Islamic tile designs he had seen at the 14th century Alhambra Palace in Spain. In 1961 the magazine Scientific American featured an Escher design on the cover, and that article about his artwork reached a wide audience of scientists, mathematicians, and other academics. A completely different kind of popularity was achieved in the late 1960’s when Escher’s extraordinary images appeared on day-glow posters in the avant-garde community, on posters in college rooms, and even on record album covers. Although for much of his life Escher worked in relative isolation in his home print-making studio, by the end of his life he had achived international fame and prices for his original work sky-rocketed along with sale of books and reproductions of his prints. Escher created his last print, the masterpiece ‘Ringsnakes,’ in 1969, and died on March 27, 1972. After his death Escher’s popularity continued to grow, and in 1998 a museum devoted to his work opened in the Hague. That same year a record-breaking exhibit of Escher’s art was featured at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In 2003 Artists’ Market was instrumental in acquiring one of the largest collections of Escher’s work for a new museum, ‘Herakleidon: Experience in Visual Arts” in Athens Greece. Artists’ Market gallerist Jeffrey Price explains his own fascination with Escher’s art: “There is always more to Escher’s pictures than first meets the eye. His is an artist’s universe, one where our rational ideas may be suspended and yet logic prevails. Escher's vision enables us to see the invisible patterns of nature and catch a glimpse of wonders that exist just beyond our grasp.” |
AuthorJeff Price has been the face of Artists' Market for over 45 years, and his admiration for the works of M.C. Escher stretch back ever farther. Archives
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