Left-handedness

Today is International Left-handers’ Day. A day on which M.C. Escher, as a left-hander, cannot go unmentioned. This event was created to draw attention to the inconveniences that left-handed people encounter. It was first held on 13 August 1976. On a Friday, which was a conscious choice.

Escher’s left-handedness was dealt with heavy-handedly at school. He was forced to write and draw right-handed. This was standard practice at the time. Although those corrections hardly had any effect, he later learnt to use his right hand just as well as his left one. Being ambidextrous brought him an advantage in his artistry.

Escher saw his left-handedness mainly as a fascinating phenomenon rather than as something problematic. Not so much because of famous predecessors such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Holbein, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and Rubens, but because of the theories surrounding it. For example, the left hand was supposedly better suited to sensory work. It was also thought that using that hand attracted people. For example, in 1952 he wrote to his former art teacher in Arnhem, F.W. van der Haagen:

In the letter he responded to an article on left-handedness that Van der Haagen had sent him:

Escher was forced to become ‘double-handed’, something that is of great value to a graphic artist (who always has to deal with both image and mirror image). He modelled himself in this respect on his teacher, Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, who also learnt to become ambidextrous. In his lithographs Hand with Reflecting Sphere and Drawing Hands two repeated hands can be seen—in the first the repetition being created by mirroring, in the second the hands drawing each other. In a sense, Escher is visually representing his double-handedness in these works, even if that is not his intention.

In 1953, Escher produced an extensive excerpt from a dissertation by A. van Straaten on left-handedness (published in Leiden in 1950). Van Straaten did not pay any attention to artists in it. A big oversight, Escher thought. In particular, he had wanted to know much more about the ‘black and white image artists’, the graphic artists to which he himself also belonged. He resolved to undertake that research himself and to this end he single-handedly drew up a ‘left-handedness survey among draftsmen and graphic artists’, featuring questions such as:

Ultimately nothing came of the survey, but the plan in itself is a striking illustration of his fascination.