The Case for M.C. Escher

0:06I think it is actually quite hard to contextualize artists like this within our understanding of art history So I think that's probably part of the reason why he remains distinct.

0:21I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:29There are only a very few artists from the 20th century who are truly household names. Figures like Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol. The name M.C. Escher is certainly on that short list. Escher's impact on the wider culture may be as big or even bigger than that of those other figures, even as he remains somewhat hard to classify as an artist. Born Moritz Cornelis Escher, the Dutch artist was a highly skilled maker of woodcuts, lithographs, and engravings, bringing a sense of exquisite precision and intricate geometry to his compositions. But, as an artist, Escher is almost synonymous with the idea of visual paradox.

1:10You will know him for works like Drawing Hands from 1953, depicting two hands holding pencils, each seeming to emerge from a piece of paper where they are each being drawn by the other in a magical loop. Or for Ascending and Descending from 1960, showing a palace with a looping set of stairs on its roof, which seem, due to Escher's cleverly realized optical illusion, to be leading tiny pilgrims both upwards and downwards at the same time. So, what do we think? Is Escher one of the greats or is he just a novelty act? My colleague in London, Joe Lawson-Tancred, recently went to see the show currently at Somerset House.

1:50That's called M.C. Escher, the exhibition. It includes 150 of Escher's original works from all the major phases of his career. And I left it the chance to talk to Joe about the show, the artist and the cultural phenomenon that is M.C. Escher. Joe, thank you for talking to me about M.C. Escher. Thank you for having me. Before we talk about this show, I wanted to talk a little bit about our opinions of the artist himself going into the show. Do you have an opinion? Did you have an opinion? What is your relationship to M.C. Escher? I didn't really have a particular interest in his work. I think perhaps of a curiosity.

2:27I think like many people, I knew his most famous works, but I couldn't tell you why or when I saw them. Perhaps I think I remember being explained the notion of paradoxes as a child. And it's perhaps for like for that, he's probably the go to example. But I think you absorb this stuff from the pop cultural realm. I definitely wasn't going to art shows that he was in or when I studied art history. I don't remember him being mentioned at any point. Yeah, you know, I feel like I grew up with M.C. Escher. It might even be like the first art book I remember my mom having an M.C. Escher book. and she said something to me about it recently that I think is really true, that it wasn't even processed to me like an artist in a way.

3:13I didn't think about when it was from. It has a kind of like out-of-time quality. You receive it as just kind of these images. And that, I guess, is a little bit important because there's something about the imagery that is itself a little out of time. It seems like it's not exactly sure when it comes from. I think she said she thought maybe he was a medieval artist or something. Yeah, totally. Like before I saw the show, if you'd asked me to guess at his birth and death dates, I think I would have struggled. So this already gets at the strange status of M.C. Escher as a figure within art. For people listening who may not know, what do you think the art world's or art history's relationship to M.C.

3:57Escher is? He's obviously a very famous artist. Yeah, well, I think it's telling that, as I said, I've never seen him integrated into a broader historical telling of 20th century art. Right. He was just doing his own thing. I think he was an insular person. He clearly had very singular, distinct aims from what we would think of as modern art or what was happening in the 20th century. And thinking about that, I was kind of thinking about other examples of artists that I might say were similar in that respect. And I was thinking of Hilma Afklint, now has been understood as the first abstract painter, but was a kind of great spiritualist who was completely uninterested in abstraction as we know it.

4:40And the Tate Modern did a show where they tried to compare her with Mondria, and it was slated and really badly reviewed because I think it is actually quite hard to contextualize artists like this within our understanding of art history. So I think that's probably part of the reason why he remains distinct. Nonetheless, obviously the art world is happy to profit off anything, whether it's giving it institutional attention or not. So I was seeing like he's got quite a lot of auction activity and his average prices have been going up recently. So I would just say there's interest, but I would guess maybe not from traditional art collectors.

5:14They're probably people that have a quite special interest in him. Yeah, he's very different than Hilma of Clint in the sense that he's much more interested in science and mathematics and she was interested in spiritualism. But they are the same in the sense that they kind of have a very eccentric relationship to art history. Like a lot of art history is a series of family relations between people who were very directly responding to each other. And there is something about these figures who were often on their own and a constellation of their own. Escher chronologically is a contemporary of René Magritte and Norman Rockwell.

5:50And I would say that his reputation in the art world is really somewhere between those two figures. You know, sort of trippy surrealist, but also kind of people consider him a little lowbrow or something, like kind of more of an illustrator than an artist, I'd say. You went to this show at the Somerset House. How do they present him there? Walk us through that show. What do people see? So it has over 150 works, and they're from between 1918 and 1964. so that's about when he was 20 up into his 60s and he died in 1972 so very much kind of covers his life and I think they do a great job of obviously there's a lot of the big hits you want to see there but there's a lot of work that people won't know or be familiar with and they really paint a picture of how that style developed and it's quite complete but then there's also plenty of instagrammable moments which you know museums increasingly have to do and it's quite glossy in that respect there's immersive rooms sort of reflective surfaces so you can take your own picture that has this sort of infinity aspect that he liked I think his work lends itself to that like it has this world building aspect there's a kind of wackiness to it I don't know like would he have liked to see that happen to his art I think that's a question that's always going to be hard to answer with historical artists my guess is not I mean we'll get into it later but he didn't himself love his own reception as his own legend as master of trippy illusion, right?

7:26I think I saw a version of this show in New York some years ago with some of the same optical illusions. And it really struck me how they were just presenting him as like synonymous with illusions. Because some of I thought some of the illusion rooms didn't have a lot to do with what he actually did in the kind of paradoxes he was interested in, the kind of etchings he did. You know, there are these kind of rooms where it's set up so you can take a photo where it looks like one person's big and one person's small. I just don't know that that really has much to do with his art. But you do see a lot of the art.

8:04I mean, it's a pretty substantial show, right? Yeah, it's certainly substantial in its breadth. It talks a lot about his legacy. You see a lot of the kind of fashion items that he inspired, clips from films. So you got a real sense of him and his impact. And yeah, the immersive elements are fun. That's what museums have to do these days, I think. I suppose. But I think a thing that struck me is that he is an artist with this huge legend who almost has become a meme in pop culture. And it is interesting to see them up close. I guess what I'm saying is his images are so big you almost don't think about him as an artist with a medium.

8:43You know, you think the reproduction is the medium, but he worked in a series of very specific mediums. What were they? He was mainly working in print, but his tessellations, which I think Patzer was really vaguely aware of, but in the 1930s, he went to the Alhambra in southern Spain and saw the tile work and tessellations, if anyone doesn't know, the repetition of one or more geometric shapes so that they can cover a large plane without overlapping or leaving gaps. And I think he took that to places that wouldn't have seemed possible, like tessellating different motifs that represent different animals together and then getting really creative with it where you have scenes.

9:25So you have one where below they look like fish and then above they turn into birds. These kind of gradual metamorphoses that he did. But stuff like that, because obviously he sees the tiles and he's very taken by this idea. but his brother was a professor in Netherlands in crystallography, which is the study of molecular structure. And I think he spent quite a lot of time learning from his brother. I think what they get across quite well on the show is there was a real knowledge and understanding and kind of nerdiness that really allows him to do things that are just fun to look at. Is it important to see them in person?

10:00Do you get anything out of seeing them up close? I don't know. That's a difficult question. I think there's a reproducibility about them, which probably is key to the success. I always love seeing art in person, but I don't know if compared to other artists, it's as necessary. Yeah, I mean, he worked in woodblock and various forms of printmaking. I do think that he was, from my understanding and to my eye, pretty good at it. I mean, he really uses the medium to create very dynamic patterns, even in the early work, because I think it's always worth saying he is another artist who found his signature voice that we know him for relatively late, I think when he was about 40.

10:45And there's a long period before that, right, where he's not doing trippy optical illusions so much. that was really my favorite part of the whole show i really loved seeing the early work because i suppose as you might expect with an artist as we said has a very singular vision you really see hints of this style emerging so um he moved to italy when he was quite young and he became really obsessed with the architecture he's dutch right yeah he's dutch and actually he spent most of his life in the netherlands he has this big connection to italy i think he lived there for quite a length of time, over a decade, I think.

11:22And he met his wife there and he left because of Mussolini. So yeah, he probably might have wanted to stay there. And he paints a lot of kind of urban scapes. And you can really see this kind of elegant, assured line. My favourite piece is a kind of urban settlement and the coast of Amalfi seen from above. And it's got all these staircases, little figures walking along. You could spend a while looking at it, thinking how all the different houses fit together. And there's sort of like an obvious precursor to things we're going to see from him later. And then not long after that, 1927, for me, a standout work, Procession in a Crypt, a wonderfully spooky print in which cloaked figures are kind of marching around in this underground crypt.

12:04And you see the receding archers going back seemingly endlessly. And it's got so many themes that would come to define his work, like infinity, repetition, interest in the organization of space. So it's all there pretty much from the start is what I saw in the show. It's all there. I mean, there's definitely a moment when it clicks in. And yeah, after visiting the Alhambra, it starts thinking about the relationship of surface to figure as something you can really play with and exploring basically optical illusions. But yeah, I think what you really see in the early one is, yeah, both a set of themes, tiny figures in complex landscapes, but also a mood.

12:43I mean, do you find that they have a mood? I think maybe the reason that art people are sometimes dismissive is because they don't see the emotion in it. They find it a little clinical. Do you find a mood or emotion in that early work? Not a jolly one. Yeah, it's very Dutch in a way. Yeah, yeah, I mean, like a Dutch take on Italy. But one thing I liked was they kind of go into, he was quite obscure for a while and he was commissioned to do various things, including greeting cards, and they have some of his tessellations. But it's not sort of like the jolly image that you might expect to see on a greeting card.

13:20It's very him with these kind of strange motifs. Yeah, strange. You know, that's what I think. There's a sense of strangeness about even the early work. Yeah, these little coastal Italian towns viewed from afar. There's a real sense of unreality to even the most real ones. it's the way he uses the black and white it's this choice of subject matter which is a lot of yeah these churches with mysterious figures in them or empty streets you know kind of maybe classical motifs i find them very purgatorial i guess that's what i wanted to say the emotion in them is not super uh positive or negative but i find even the early stuff and then particularly as you move into the optical illusions like a purgatory like they seem and i i think people sometimes miss that, that there's both something very weird and unreal about all the figures, but also they really capture better than almost anything else.

14:16The sense of being suspended in something, suspended inside of a thought, suspended inside of a mood. Yeah, I agree.

14:36we've touched lightly on his biography but maybe let's just go back and fill it in a little who was mc escher as a person what do we know about him well they don't go into it too much in the show aside from kind of to explain the contexts i think by all accounts he was very introverted he was quite serious. One of the organizers was telling me about how his marriage really suffered from his obsession with his work. I was kind of interested in this, so I was looking into it. And there's one quite famous work he does where it's two heads sort of next to each other, but they're almost made by a ribbon, so they're hollow.

15:11Yeah, yeah. And there's kind of strips. It's this very famous one. It's called Bonds of Union. Two heads is like a surface that's being unspooled or something. Yeah, exactly. It's called Bonds of Union, 1956. And it has been quite frequently, I think, interpreted as a representation of the distance in our relationship. Oh, really? Which I thought was kind of interesting because you don't really imagine that any of his work might relate to his life. And by seemingly all accounts, he was sort of so obsessive, didn't have much for life outside of his work. He separated from his wife in the late 60s.

15:49I don't think in a way there wasn't much going on. He had such a singular focus. On his work. Yeah. Yeah, he trained in the Netherlands, moved to Italy for a decade, right? He lived in Rome for a decade and then left in the mid-30s because of the rise of fascism and moved back to the Netherlands ultimately by way of Switzerland. I guess I'm kind of surprised there's not more made about that around his work because I guess he does a lot of the stuff we know in the 40s and 50s, but he really gets going in the 1930s. And there is something about retreating into a mine palace here, I think, that gives it a sort of an energy, right?

16:30Like, I mean, he's doing these naturalistic things and then goes back to the Netherlands and starts making stuff about like some kind of otherworldly space that you're trapped on or where you have perfect control. These tessellated surfaces are like, that's one of the things about them. You're in complete mathematical control of everything. You're seeing how forms, you're in complete control of things. I think it's worth mentioning that his mentor, Samuel Jesseron de Mesquita, who he learned his Kraft from was a Jewish person who was killed by the Nazis, you know, and was sent to Auschwitz and something that Escher had direct knowledge of.

17:12So to me, it's just hard not to read his stuff as, although, yeah, it's not responding to his time in any kind of direct way. I feel like there's an indirect response in the sense of like looking towards a place you can control, but also feeling a little bit trapped in it. But that's not really how he's read. I mean, how did he become famous, I guess? There is a kind of a distinction that you even see in the show between the historical M.C. Escher and the legend of M.C. Escher. Where did that come from? As I said, he was kind of working mainly in obscurity, and that really began to change in the 1950s.

17:49I think it was 1954, his geometric paradoxes were presented at the International Conference of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. And from that point on, I think he made a lot of connections with mathematicians. They became supporters of his work. And I think they basically kind of introduced him to new ideas that he could explore in his art. So like one example that they talk about in the show is the Mobius Strip, which is an object that we perceive as having two sides, but actually it only has one. And it was discovered in the 19th century. So one of several images that he created that are in the show is a 1963 image in which you see ants walking around a kind of what appears to be a kind of figure of eight.

18:32I did really have to follow them how they walk because you really does seem impossible. And yet you're like, it's true. It is one surface. But you follow that path and you'll see that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sometimes people read the works as literally illustrating mathematical concepts or something like that. Yeah, I think at that point more so. So he's introduced to culture kind of through the classroom, like posters people see in their teacher's office or something like that? It's actually, I wasn't around at the time. I don't know. I feel like that's the story that gets told about him. And then the work takes on this whole life that's sort of transcends him in the 1960s.

19:12I mean, tell me about that. When I went to the show, I met with a curator and he said about 10 times, it seems to be his catchphrase, M.C. Escher loved by mathematicians and hippies. And in the 1960s, he became very popular with the hippies, with the counterculture. I think you can see why there's this mind-altering aspect that they clearly resonated with them. It's so funny because it is really rather distinct from his actual motivations, the intellectual grounding, the meticulousness of his approach. They would sort of illegally take his work and they remade it in psychedelic color schemes. and actually I was looking into this because his response to that is kind of interesting.

19:52On the one hand, I think he's kind of horrified, but he doesn't really do anything to stop it. So at one point he's asked to take legal action and he says, why should I be displeased if youngsters are happy with awfully coloured red things on our walls? So he's a bit sort of dismissive of the whole thing. And in 1964, he sends a letter to his son and he says, we will laugh together about the Beatles and other ridiculous circumstances in the strange world around us. He speaks also of something fiercely revolutionary in the air and a world that's liberating itself from old taboos. So he's kind of aware that these changes are happening.

20:30He isn't necessarily against them, but he sort of seems to find them ridiculous. I mean, to be clear, it resonated with the drug culture. I mean, people thought that they were of like psychedelic essentially yeah there's one image of sort of a drawing of alligators where the alligators like emerge and uh walk out into reality then wander back into the um into the drawing and somewhere in the image there are some rolling papers and people like love that they thought that it was like um thought it was like an easter egg suggesting that it was about drugs but it definitely was not, I do not think.

21:10He had a pretty direct encounter with the rock and roll culture, with the Rolling Stones, right? Yeah, a very famous anecdote, which kind of reveals how old school he was, perhaps even baffled by how fast a culture was changing around him. So Mick Jagger wrote to M.C. Escher, addressing him on a first-name basis, Mr. Moritz asking him if he could use one of his images on an album cover for the Rolling Stones. And Escher turned down the offer. It said by some accounts he hadn't even heard of the band. But what sort of infuriated him was the informality of the request. So he added when he was sending his rejection, by the way, please tell Mr.

21:56Jagger I am not Moritz to him, but very sincerely, MC Escher. Love it. Gotta love it. Gotta love it. Really reminds me of J.R.R. Tolkien, actually, who also was a figure who was discovered by the counterculture. The Beatles wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie that he was totally perplexed by. He'd be like getting calls in the middle of the night from hippies and be like, just leave me alone. Leave me alone. Didn't get it at all. But also we owe a lot of the continuing fame of that work to 1960s cachet. And I think that's also true of M.C. Escher. Is that element of the Escher mania, I guess, represented in the show?

22:38Yeah, there's whole rooms dedicated to it. You get, as I was saying, the reproducibility of his work that has found itself on many surfaces, many high fashion items, but also referenced in many films from Harry Potter, Inception. There's things in The Matrix that are inspired by it. It's been made fun of in The Simpsons, an important sign of pop cultural relevance. Yeah, and I guess I was thinking about it because I do think that sometimes people think about it as purely illustrating mathematical paradox and so on and miss the emotion of it. And I was just thinking that it's important that in most of those examples from pop culture, they end up illustrating some kind of prison or being lost in some way or coming up against the limits of being confronted with an obstacle.

23:43I think that maybe the film that gets him best is the Jim Henson movie Labyrinth, where you have David Bowie trapping Jennifer Connelly in an M.C. Escher-esque world, like very directly inspired by his stuff. But I think that really gets something about the playful but purgatorial aspect of the work. I guess to your point about thinking about it as a kind of indirect response to the 20th century, I mean, often life does feel like that. It's like a kind of bad dream. You're constantly climbing some stairs and never getting anywhere or something like that. I think it probably resonates on that level quite easily.

24:26There's something about life that is captured by it. Yeah, yeah. Maybe on an unconscious level, but I do think that's in there. I think that's in there in the alienness of the imagery, the medievalness of the imagery, this kind of sense of being very small in relationship to very much bigger forces. You know, sort of a light version of the Kafkaesque. So M.C. Escher has this very specific legacy in pop culture, which lives on today, as you said. The whole series of Escher shows touring the world. Who is in control of the M.C. Escher legacy now? Well, with an artist, especially an artist of that status, I think you would normally expect their estate to be represented by a gallery, or maybe they have very dedicated children who take it over.

25:15I think perhaps reflective of the unusual nature of M.C. Escher's appeal, his legacy is actually sort of being stewarded by a Californian doctor and an Italian engineer now called Salvatore Iacrinta, and Federico Giudice Andrea. So they own the MC Escher company as of, I think, about three years now. They own a copyright to his work. And they've made it their mission, despite coming from a scientific background, they made it their mission to promote him to put on these big international shows. And actually, I think Federico Giudice Andrea is the curator of the show. So despite not coming from an art background, they are really deeply involved in crafting the story around him.

26:01And so far, from what I see, that's been a success. I think it will be interesting to see where they go with that. There's also quite a lot of merch you can get. They've worked on catalogues, facilitated loans. So yeah, it's in the hands of the fans. It's to them that we owe this forum that contemporary Eshermania is taking, which is this Somerset House show and the show that I saw, which are something like half or a third art history show, a third science museum and a third carnival attraction. Yeah, I think that's probably quite an apt description. Well, I'll be interested to see where Escher travels next.

26:44Jo, Lawson Tankard, thank you very much for talking to me about all this. Thank you so much for having me on. That's it for this week's episode. The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from Ben Davis and Caroline Goldstein. Thanks for listening and see you next week.