Escher Today

The weather in the Netherlands is not really cooperating, but it is true: today is the start of spring!

A common feature in Escher’s work is birds. He created hundreds of them. In his woodcuts, wood engravings and occasionally in a lithograph. Sometimes by themselves, but usually in a group. But most often he used them in his tessellations, which are heavily populated by birds.

On 18 March 1960 Escher finished one of his most iconic works: the lithograph Ascending and Descending. The print was the result of a remarkable exchange of ideas between the graphic artist and the British mathematician Roger Penrose. The latter first came into contact with M.C. Escher at his solo exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1954, which was held during the International Congress of Mathematicians of that year.

Today is the start of ‘Boekenweek’ (Book Week), a nice occasion to highlight an artwork that is increasingly rare: a bookplate. Escher created several of them, mostly for friends. The first one when he was only 17, for his own library.
The one you see here, from 1946, was for his opposite neighbour in Baarn, engineer Albert Ernst Bosman. He must have been a bookworm, looking at the one Escher pictured in this bookplate. He did not know it yet but this neighbour would be of great significance to him. Bosman was the one to bring him in contact with Hans de Rijk, the man of many pseudonyms.

On 5 March 1965 Escher received the culture prize of the city of Hilversum. He gave a lecture in which he demonstrated once again how funny he could be. For many people the name Escher calls to mind an image of a bearded, strict, precise man labouring away on mind-boggling prints in the isolation of his study.
This image existed in his own time too and is one that Escher initially endorses in his lecture:

'By nature I am not spontaneous. Creating a graphic print demands patience and deliberateness and the ideas that I want to express in it usually come to life after careful consideration. Therefore, I mostly spend my time in a quiet studio and, however beneficial it might be to practicing my profession, it does not foster eloquence.'

Despite the atrocities of war, some kind of optimism took hold of Escher at the end of February 1943. It was fuelled by nature. On 20 February he writes in his diary: ‘two butterflies and lots of snowdrops around farmers gardens’. And on the 22 February: ‘first song of the blackbird’. On 3 March 1943 he even starts working on a new print. For this lithograph, Reptiles, he does have to borrow a stone. That is why only 30 copies were printed.

In a letter to his son Arthur from 27 February 1955 Escher writes about Light in August, a 1932 novel by William Faulkner, which Escher had read it in translation.

'... for — Christ! — that gentleman’s English is so damned difficult. Thanks to the good English lessons you had at secondary school you may well understand the original. I have not read a modern novel that had such an effect on me for many years, probably not since The Plague by Camus. It is partly that the psychological treatment of the murderer, comparable to Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, though completely different, is unusually gripping. He is one of those rare writers with whom one dare not find fault as a layman and who towers over most of their contemporaries.'

Convex and Concave is one of Escher’s best-known works, a narrative print brimming with elements that can be interpreted in two ways. Nigh on two years later, in February 1957, he created a lithograph on the same subject, albeit with an image that is a lot more concise.

You have just a few more weeks to see some remarkable wood engravings and woodcuts by Escher up close in The Palace. On 12 March they will be returned to the archive to be replaced by new graphic treasures. Earlier we discussed Grasshopper, Tournai Cathedral and Scarabs. Today we will focus on St. Vincent, martyr.

These photos from Maurits’s private album exude happiness. He and Jetta got to know each other in the spring of 1923. They met in a guest house in Ravenna and their love grew over the next few months.

In the years after the war Escher used to take walks after supper in the woods surrounding his house in Baarn. He spent many hours there, both to clear his head but also to fill it with new ideas for graphic work. From 1951 onwards he started to write them down in his diary. One of these notes from that year goes like this:

'Traces of car and bicycle tires, perspectively seen, diagonally; Sloping recess filled with water: puddle. In it, the moon is reflected.'

He would go on to develop this idea into the woodcut Puddle, from February 1952. He subsequently described this print as follows:

'The cloudless evening sky is reflected in a puddle which a recent shower has left in a woodland path. The tracks of two motor cars, two bicycles and two pedestrians are impressed in the boggy ground.'