Birthday and Father’s day

On 15 June 1961, at 18.05, Escher left Baarn together with his wife Jetta. They took the train to Rotterdam where they boarded the night train to Bern at 20.03. The next morning they arrived in Bern at 7.44. There they were picked up by Escher’s friend Paul Keller and his daughter Theresa. Together with Theresa, Jetta left for the Keller home in Münsingen. Maurits and Paul took the train to Venice where they boarded the Cagliari. It was the start of a boat trip that took the two friends to Trieste, Bari, Naples, Salerno, Catania, Messina, Palermo, Algiers, Lisbon, London and Hamburg. We know all this in detail because Escher kept a careful record of the trip in his travel journal.

On 7 June 1968, exactly 50 years ago today, ‘De werelden van Escher‘ (‘The Worlds of M.C. Escher’), the first Dutch retrospective exhibition of M.C. Escher, opened in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. It marked the occasion of Escher’s 70th birthday, on 17 June. It certainly was not his first exhibition but it was the first time an important art museum, of its own accord, was exhibiting a retrospective of his work. Approached both from an art history perspective and from Escher’s personal systematics.

You have 10 more days to view some remarkable Escher prints at Escher in The Palace. On 11 June they will be returned to the archive to be replaced with new graphic treasures. We previously discussed the woodcut The Third Day of the Creation, from a series in which Escher depicted the Creation in a stark contrast of black and white. Today we focus on a woodcut that does not belong to this series, but which does have a biblical theme. The Fall of Man shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden at the moment they have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden.