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On 31 May 1919 M.C. Escher was determined unfit for military service. As a result, his plan to finish his secondary school exams, which he had failed the year before, could not be executed. While in service he would start his engineering studies in Delft, but due to this rejection, he would never be able to take exams there.
M.C. Escher, Holunderbaum, houtsnede, 1919
Since he lacked the interest to become an architect, this didn't bother him too much. He was an artist, that became increasingly clear to him. Escher switched to the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. Within a week, he met the graphic artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, under whose influence his artistic future would truly begin. Tree is a woodcut from this period. The print shows that the young printmaker was searching for his own style. Struggling with the material, just like the branches from the tree.
'Out from a grey surface of a back wall there develops a complicated pattern of white and black humanoid figures. And since people who desire to live need at least a floor to walk on, a floor has been designed for them, with a circular gap in the middle so that as much as possible can still be seen on the back wall. In this way they are forced not only to walk in a ring, but also to meet each other in the foreground: a white optimist and a black pessimist shaking hands with one another.'
