Het bezwaarde hart - The Burdened Heart

Of all the themes and subjects Escher had tackled during his career, the one he was most drawn to was the regular division of the plane. He engaged in countless experiments to examine the many ways in which a plane could be filled with patterns of geometric shapes. He did so in drawings in notebooks. In the process (and this embodies Escher’s great strength) he managed to bend these geometric shapes into recognisable figures. Crudely at first, but as he got more adept at this, the fish, birds, lizards, beetles, butterflies, horses and other animals and shapes kept getting more refined. The drawings were a form of research, but he also drew from them ideas for new work or for commercial assignments.

The liberation of May 1945 had a redeeming effect on all Dutch people who had suffered under five years of German occupation. The euphoria was enormous, and even Maurits Escher was swept up in it. On 7 May, in strong contrast to his usually reserved character, he stood cheering out loud on the street called Brink, where thousands of other residents of Baarn had gathered. After years of forced abstinence, he and Jetta threw themselves into a buffet of art, going out and enjoying good food. Work was not easy at first. He therefore limited himself to printing old works.

Escher did not fill the page of his diary for the first week of January 1942 with appointments but rather with a list. He was often writing lists in his diary, from shopping lists and train times to lists of work sold and his own weight and that of his family members. But this was a very special list. It contained the names of the artists who had joined the ‘Kultuurkamer’, which was established on 25 November 1941. In Germany itself, the ‘Reichskulturkammer’ was founded on 22 September 1933 by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Its Dutch counterpart was also established to serve the occupying force and its Nazi ideology. Keywords were nationalism, solidarity with the nation and the people, historical awareness, banishing ‘degenerate, unhealthy, unnatural creativity’ and a ‘positive Germanic attitude’. Any artist wishing to exhibit, publish or make music had to be a member. Jews were excluded. By becoming a member, one was formally assenting to the politics of the occupier.