Dali House

Some time ago I was admiring one of MC Escher’s prints showing a village perched on a cliffside in Italy and went looking for it on Google Earth. I subsequently discovered that, before Escher started metamorphosising birds into fish and building impossible staircases, he’d spent many years in Italy and came up with amazing pictures of almost everywhere he went. The surprising thing is that so many of these stunning images are true to life.

My further reading about a man who’d first impressed me when I was in high school resulted in a 68-piece Google Earth tour fully illustrated with his drawings. Following is some of the text and images used.

In a way, MC Escher – who died 35 years ago come March 27 – just happened to come along at the right time. When his mesmerising work first became globally known in the 1960s it found admirers it in a generation of young people who, if not actually eyewitness to such constructions in their own minds thanks to hallucinogenic drugs, discovered a contrary art form almost made for them. Stirred by rebelliousness, Alice had made another trip through the looking glass, and this was what she found.

On the other hand, Escher was no hippie. If occasionally playful, he was sobre, conservative, studious, neat, pragmatic, scientific, hard-working, a devoted family man and, because the fascists had made his own life difficult, accepting of the need for war. (Mussolini was at his first child’s christening, but that had to do with local celebrity, not ideology.)

If there was any contradiction in his art, he only saw it in the fact that it was mathemeticians and physicists who recognised his gift, not other artists. In terms of his tesselations, the “periodic” drawings in which interlocked figures recede endlessly into the distance, he agonised at being art’s sole innovator.

“I wander totally alone around the garden of periodic drawings,” he wrote in 1958. “However satisfying it may be to possess one’s own domain, loneliness is not as enjoyable as one might expect … But periodic drawings are not merely a nervous tic, a habit, or a hobby. They are not subjective; they are objective.

“And I cannot accept, with the best will in the world, that something so obvious and ready to hand as the giving of recognisable form, meaning, function and purpose to figures that fill each other out, should never have come into the head of any other man but me.”

A royal start

aurits Cornelis Escher – he soon had the nickname Mauk – was born the youngest of five brothers on June 17, 1898, in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, where his engineer father, George Arnold Escher, was in the branch of the civil service that tended to the canals. Shown here is a 1916 print Maurits made of his father, cut from linoleum.

The family lived for a time here at the Princessehof, the 18th-century mansion of Maria Louise van Hessen-Kassel, princess of Oranje Nassau, which is today the national ceramics museum. As such it has hosted exhibitions of Escher’s work.

First prints

From 1903 to 1917 the Escher family lived in Arnhem. Apart from drawing class, in which his talent was apparent early on, Mauk struggled through primary and secondary school until 1918. His parents hoped he’d go into architecture, but poor grades stopped him short of graduating from high school. In 1916, though, he made his first prints, including “Wild West”, seen here.

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Another factor in Maurits’ dismal showing at school was the poor health that dogged him as a boy, one of the reasons the family spent much time in the seaside town of Zandvoort.

The Escher family moved to Oosterbeek in 1917, Maurits developing an interest in literature and writing poetry and essays of his own. The photo shows the Escher house, which was called Rosande.

The woodcutter

To make up for his scholastic failure, Maurits enrolled at the Higher Technical School here in Delft, where over the course of the 1918-19 academic year he repeated several subjects he’d failed. More pragmatic still was his decision to concentrate on his drawing and newfound skill with woodcuts. Seen above is “Paradise” from 1920.

“Town Hall, Delft”, from 1939.

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Escher arranged a deferment from military service, but the ill health that stymied his education also resulted in his rejection by the army in 1919.

At the same time, however, he was earning more and more acclaim for his drawings and woodcuts. Here is “Oostpoort, Delft” from 1939.

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“Entrance to the Oude Kerk, Delft” from 1939.

The mentor

From 1919 to 1922 Maurits Escher attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, quickly switching his focus from the former to the latter as a student of Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, who became his friend and to whom Escher would always credit for instilling in him a professional respect for drawing and for teaching him the fineries of making woodcuts. This is a self-portrait by Mesquita.

scher and his parents visited the Riviera and Italy in 1921 (he ignored the usual sights and drew detailed studies of cacti and olive trees and sketched from lofty vantage points), but it was in April of the following year that he truly fell in love with the country that would have such an enormous impact on his work.

He and two pals visited Florence and, amid much imbibing ( “Son, don’t smoke too much,” his mother had told him, rather), sketched what they saw.

When his friends left for home, Maurits carried on for another month to San Gimignano (this is “San Gimignano” from 1923), Volterra, Siena and Assisi, all the while gathering material for his woodcuts.

For Maurits the Italian trips began as a graduation gift from his parents, but he loved the country so much that he asked their permission to stay and, well-off enough to grant his wish, they supported him there for the next 10 years.

Here in Volterra, “Self-Portrait” from 1922.

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“Corte, Corsica” from 1929.

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“Turello” from 1932.

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Escher visited Assisi during his 1922-23 stay in Italy. Shown below is, “Tower of Babel”, from 1928.

Glimpses of Moors

From Italy in 1923 Escher took a freighter to Spain with some friends. The woodcut “Phosphorescent Sea”, seen here, recalls the voyage.

In Madrid he was largely unimpressed by the paintings in the Prado and put off by the bullfights, and moved on to Toledo and Granada. This was when he first saw the Alhambra, and took note of the decorative Moorish style, but he would be back much later to fully drink it in.

After sailing back from Spain (playing cards en route with the ship’s officers), Maurits did some more travelling in Italy before coming to rest in “blessed” Siena for a few months.

It was here in August 1923 that Escher had his first one-man show. “Eight Heads”, his first work featuring regular division of the plane, was done in 1922.

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The woman he loved

Maurits was staying here in Ravello in March 1923 when a Swiss family moved into his pension and he fell in love with the daughter, Jetta Umiker, though he didn’t tell her so until her family was about to leave Italy in June.

Two months later he proposed to her and travelled to Zurich to see her parents. The wedding was arranged. Here, “Portrait of Jetta” from 1925, and below, “San Cosimo, Ravello” from 1932.

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Maurits had his first show in Holland in early 1924, then on June 12 married Jetta here in Viareggio. In the photo, her parents on the left and his on the right.

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They honeymooned in Genoa, Annecy and Brussels, in October visited France, and then came back to Italy. Seen here is “Ravello and the Coast of Amalfi”.

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“Farmhouse, Ravello”.

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In late 1924 Maurits and Jetta bought a house in Frascati that was still being built, but didn’t move in until October ‘25. The photo of Maurits and Jetta was taken about this time.

Soon after, Escher had to go to Switzerland to identify the body of his brother, killed in a mountaineering accident. The experience resulted in the woodcut series “Days of Creation”, one part seen here.

The couple had three sons: George was born in 1926, Arthur in ‘28 and Jan in ‘38. When George was on his way, Maurits and Jetta moved into larger accommodations here in Rome, and by the time of their first son’s christening, Escher’s fame was such that King Emmanuel and Mussolini were in attendance.

By 1929 Escher’s prints had become so popular that he had five shows in Holland and Switzerland. The photo shows Jetta in her husband’s Rome studio in 1931.

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“Rome”, from 1927.

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In December 1934 Escher had an exhibition at the Dutch Historical Institute in Rome. Here, “Inside St Peter’s” from 1935. Escher also did a series called “Nocturnal Rome”, filled with interesting light and shadow effects.

This is “San Michele dei Frisone, Rome” from 1932. Rome “seemed appropriate” as a place to live, George Escher told the National Gallery of Canada when he donated his personal collection of his father’s works.

In 1932 it wasn’t a house but a third-floor apartment with Maurits’ studio above it, the floors of both tiled in one of his own zigzag patterns. At lunchtime Jetta or one of the boys would summon him from his studio by blowing into a whistle tube.

Views of Cimino

“Vitorchiano nel Cimino” from 1925.

“Barbarano, Cimino” from 1929.

In Atrani on his 1989 “Escher tour”, author Mark Veldhuysen noted that the “streets look like dead-end streets but continue, when climbing some stairs, at a completely different level. The roof of one house is the first floor of the next. What looks like someone’s front door can actually be the entrance to a square with various side streets.” This is “Atrani, Coast of Amalfi”, 1931.

Atrani is “a gigantic maze”, Veldhuysen wrote in his 1994 book “MC Escher in Italy: The Trail Back”. The comparitive photo below with “Covered Alley in Atrani” comes from there. At right is “Coast of Amalfi”, also from 1931.

Escher was here in Morano on his 1930 journey. Below is his well-known print “Balcony”.

From Escher’s 1930 journey, “Cloister near Rocca Imperiale, Calabria”.

Escher discovered for himself why the views of Italian cities and landscape had been luring travellers from everywhere else in Europe since the 1700s, when peacetime and affluence opened the gates for the “Grand Tour”.

Here too were the artistic and architectural treasures of antiquity, though Maurits was always happiest sketching the rustic villages and roiling panoramas.

Every spring and sometimes in the autumn the Escher family travelled south from Rome, often to villages only accessibly by foot or donkey, Maurits making hundreds of drawings that would be transposed to woodcuts and lithographs during the winters.

In May 1930 he rode the train round Italy’s toe from Pizzo to Melito, then plied the mule tracks to Tropea, Scilla and on.

Here is “Still Life and Street” from 1936, his first print of an impossible reality.

In 1989 Mark Veldhuysen went hunting for Escher influences in Calabria, and found Tropea barely changed. “Its houses are built on top of and into a huge rock, and over the centuries a huge maze of little streets has been created, he wrote in his “MC Escher in Italy: The Trail Back”, from which the comparitive photo below originates.

“Since the houses on his litho are so distinct, we had no trouble finding the location … Even the old Roman aqueduct can still be seen in the distance!”

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The views Escher imbibed of the hillside towns would remain with him long after he left Italy for good. Although many of his landscapes faithfully depict the real places he saw – Italian architecture is prominent in his work – most leap straight from his imagination or are memories based on his sketches that he imbued with fantasy.

At left is “The Bridge” from 1930, and below, a Google Earth view of San Severina. There are more magnificent Italian vistas in Part 2.

All works by MC Escher are copyrighted by Cordon Art of Baarn, the Netherlands. Excellent background information and/or image reproductions can be found at the official Escher website as well as here and here and here.

The National Gallery of Canada has not only terrific images from its large collection of Escher works and an overview of his techniques, but a biography based on the recollections of Escher’s eldest son, who donated the prints.