Dali House

This is Fiumara. Throughout the 1930s Escher continued exploring Italy just as he had begun with his adventurous companions years earlier, seeking out the most remote regions of the south on foot and by mule. In Calabria’s endless vistas and clattering towns piled up in the dust of centuries, he found some sort of paradise. Shown below is “Fiumara, Calabria” from 1930.

Escher in San Marco Leone. In 1927 he made his first lithograph. His first wood engraving, which permitted finer lines thanks to harder wood used, would come four years later. He enjoyed early success in both shows and sales, but throughout his life there were periodic slumps in public interest.

In 1932 the director of the Dutch Historical Institute in Rome ended one such dry spell by suggesting ideas for new works that were published as a book titled “Emblemata”, and the following year Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum bought 26 prints.

In 1934 Escher’s “Nonza, Corsica”, shown here, won third prize in the Exhibition of Contemporary Prints at the Art Institute of Chicago, which purchased the print – his first US sale.

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Donkeys and their own feet delivered Maurits and his travelling companions to Pentedattilo, where they stayed several days. The ancient village, founded by Greek Byzantines and named for the five “fingers” of rock that rise above it, is famous for the 17th-century Massacre of the Alberti and for having been ravaged by the 1783 earthquake.

Below, “Pentedattilo (Panorama), Calabria”, from 1931, and a photo of the village.

Escher travelled and sketched in Italy regularly until 1937, taking off each spring by train or boat to discover a new region, sometimes in the islands or in Spain.

Escher twice meandered around Sicily in the 1930s. Seen here is “Mummified Priests in Gangi, Sicily” from 1932. Below, “Caltavuturo in the Madonie Mountains, Sicily”.

Mount Etna

“Lava Flow of 1928 from Etna, Sicily” was made in 1933.

“Sengela, Malta” from 1935. The source of the image may have misspelled the name of the port, Senglea.

Escher’s popular 1930 lithograph “Castrovalva” strays little from the real Abruzzan village, lodged precariously against a sheer slope. The photo below comes from Dave Sag’s website.

Escher sketched facing northwest, toward the reaching, cultivated valley with the towns of Anversa degli Abruzzi and Casale in the distance.

Escher’s view is familiar to fans of the BBC television series “Doctor Who”, a 1982 episode of which was inspired by and named for it. Borrowing Escher’s theme of recursion, the show depicted the inhabitants of a city trapped in their unwieldy, cross-dimensional world.

Escher visited Scanno on his 1930 journey. This is “Street in Scanno, Abruzzi”.

Shown here is “Fara San Martino, Abruzzi” from 1928.

In Spain

Living in Rome may have had its advantages, but the surroundings lacked inspiration for Escher, so he arranged a Mediterranean cruise with the Adria Shipping Company, his art paying for his free passage and meals and a one-way ticket for Jetta.

From April to June 1936 they toured Spanish and Italian sites making numerous sketches, Escher later calling the journey “the richest source of inspiration I have ever tapped”. Among the stops on the voyage were Venice, Ancona, Bari, Catania, Palermo, Genoa and, significantly, La Mezquita Mosque in Cordoba, like Granada’s Alhambra, another glorious holdover from Islamic Spain.

Escher had first visited Granada’s magnicifent Alhambra fortress in 1922 and was immediately struck by the mosaics with which the Moors had sumptuously decorated the walls in mediaeval times. When he revisited the 14th-century palace he was even more intrigued by the repeating patterns, the order and symmetry at last finding a place in his own design ambitions.

Here, for the first time, Escher recognised the possibility of replacing purely geometric forms with more figurative elements. He stopped making prints of Italian landscapes and began to seriously develop articulated motifs that could fill vast planes, possibly without end. This is a photo showing the Moorish decor of the Lions’ Court.

It became, he said, “a real mania to which I have become addicted, and from which I sometimes find it hard to tear myself away”.

In Switzerland

scher and his family left Italy in 1935 to escape the rising tide of fascism. Mussolini wanted all boys in school taught his way, and since his sons were also in delicate health, Maurits wanted to give them a home where the air – and the politics – were more healthful. They moved here to Chateau-d’Oex.

Among the mountains Escher would spend weeks at a time trying to concoct patterns that could flawlessly fill his pages. His son George remembered him struggling mightily with the problem, partially succeeding at times with animal drawings but still coming up short in terms of discovering a rational path.

The path, he learned during the two years the family remained in Switzerland, led through the kingdom of mathematicians.

“The ideas that are basic to them,” Escher wrote, “often bear witness to my amazement and wonder at the laws of nature which operate in the world around us. He who wonders discovers that this is in itself a wonder … Although I am absolutely without training or knowledge in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow-artists.” Shown here is “Horsemen” from 1946.

To Belgium

MC Escher had two homes in Brussels, one here in the outlying town of Ukkel. Living in Switzerland for two years he’d been unhappy, with the mountains effectively closing off the kind of horizon he had so loved in Italy. In Chateau-d’Oex his metamorphosis had begun, and here it continued. The 1938 photo shows one of Escher’s Belgian homes, with sons George and Arthur in the bedroom window.

This is “Magic Mirror” from 1946.

“The fact that, from 1938 onwards, I concentrated more on the interpretation of personal ideas was primarily the result of my departure from Italy,” he wrote in 1960. “In Switzerland, Belgium and Holland where I successivly established myself, I found the outward appearance of landscapes and architecture to be less striking than those which are particularly to be seen in the southern part of Italy. Thus I felt compelled to withdraw from the more or less direct and true-to-life illustrating of my surroundings.”

After several intuitive starts, Escher began in October 1937 to embrace mathematical theory, aided along when his brother Berend sent him George Pólya’s essays in plane symmetry groups.

From this base, Maurits was able to create 43 coloured drawings of different types of symmetry, then woodcuts, among them the sprawling “Metamorphosis”, which came not longer after the death of his father in The Hague. Shown here is his 1935 “Portrait of GA Escher”.

Meanwhile he and British mathematician Roger Penrose, who was toying with the Möbius strip in his efforts at topology, developed a mutual admiration. The first fruits of this alliance were Escher’s “Waterfall” and “Up and Down”.

When the Nazi army invaded Belgium in early 1941, the Escher family moved to Baarn in Holland, and here Escher would remain until 1970. Their original home in Baarn was was appropriated by German army officers, so they moved to large house belonging to a friend, along with five other families. Being close to farms, they weren’t starving, merely hungry.

Maurits’ old teacher Samuel de Mesquita, a Jew, was taken to Auschwitz and killed by the Nazis in 1944, along with his wife and son. Escher helped moved Mesquita’s artwork at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum to safety, keeping for himself a sketch that bore the imprint of a German boot.

During the war Maurits gave financial support to the Dutch resistance, but his artistic production slowed, and it was naturally with great relief that he and his countrymen greeted the liberating Canadian army, which based itself in Baarn. Dutch affection for the Canadian heroes prompted many citizens to emigrate to Canada after the war, and Escher’s son George was among them. He ultimately settled in Nova Scotia and donated his entire collection of his father’s prints to the National Gallery of Canada.

Most of MC Escher’s better-known images date from his years in Baarn. He did “Rippled Surface”, shown here, after a moonlit walk, his first mezzotint in 1946 and his many tessellations from 1946 to ‘54. Only while he was undergoing surgery and recuperating in 1962 did he fail to create any new prints.

At the end of May, not long after his father died, Escher’s mother also passed away, but he was unable to attend her funeral in The Hague. Maurits spent the rest of 1940 settling her affairs and working on five intarsia panels for installation in the 16th-century Leiden city hall, all but the facade of which was destroyed in a 1929 fire. The photo shows his clock design for the mayor’s office.

New concepts could take months or even years to come to fruition before the finished work was presented to the family. The first print, one of the children recalled, “gave Father a mixture of joy and sadness. It was exciting and satisfying to … see the finished print, crisp and immaculate, gradually appearing around the edge of the paper as it was carefully raised. But Father had always a feeling of disappointment, of not having been able to depict adequately his thoughts.” Shown here is a detail from “Three Worlds”.

His talent becoming world-renowned, MC Escher had a major exhibition here at the Stedelijk Museum in 1954 which happily coincided with the International Congress of Mathematicians in the same city, placing the artist among many of his admirers from the world of science.

It’s been suggested that Escher became “trapped” by popular demand about this time, forced to focus on the vagaries of the printing business to meet public expectations. But the 1954 convergence in Amsterdam also opened new doors for him. He met the Canadian mathematician HSM Coxeter and Britain’s Roger Penrose and began productive collaborations with both.

Shown here is “Evolution”.

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.