M. C. Escher

Biography

A memorial exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam opened in 1946, and Escher organised it. It was the exhibition of his teacher Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, whom the Nazis had deported to Auschwitz in February 1944. Escher kept for himself one sketch bearing the print of a German boot.

He was born on 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden, in Friesland, the youngest son of the engineer George Arnold Escher and his second wife, Sara Gleichman. The family lived in part of the former Princessehof palace, now a ceramics museum. In 1903 they moved to Arnhem. The boy was often ill and did poorly at school; he even failed drawing, although he had drawn since childhood. In 1916 he made his first linocut, a portrait of his father. He did not obtain a school-leaving certificate, but because of a loophole in the law he won a deferment from military service, went to study architecture at the Technical College in Delft in 1918 and was dismissed because of poor health. In 1919 he entered the School of Architecture and Decorative Arts in Haarlem and graduated in 1922. Mesquita taught him to cut wood.

The choice of printmaking over oil painting was a deliberate one. Hans Locher, a scholar of his work, believes that Escher was drawn to the repetition of an image.

In 1921 he went abroad for the first time, to northern Italy and the Riviera. In April 1922 he set off for Italy again, and in the autumn he travelled to Spain, where in Granada he studied the Moorish ornament of the Alhambra. From November 1923 he lived in Rome, travelled round Italy for at least two months every year and visited Sicily, Corsica, Malta and Tunisia. In March 1923, at Ravello, he met Jetta Umiker, the daughter of a Swiss industrialist, and on 12 May 1924 they were married at Viareggio. They bought an unfinished house in Frascati. A son, George, was born in 1926 and another, Arthur, in 1928; a third son, Jan, was born in 1938. In 1925 his brother Arnold was killed in the mountains of South Tyrol, and Escher travelled there to identify the body. After this he made “The Days of Creation”.

The Italian years were lean. In 1929 newspapers praised his exhibitions in the Netherlands and Switzerland, and his pictures were called “mechanical” and “logical”, but he supported his family on money from his father. From 1931 he worked more and more in wood engraving. In 1933 the print room of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam bought twenty-six of his sheets.

In July 1935 the family left Italy: the political climate under the Fascists had become intolerable, and their son was being made to wear the uniform of the Balilla, the Fascist youth organisation, at school. They settled in Château-d’Œx in Switzerland. Landscapes would not come there, and in 1936 Escher offered the shipping company Adria to draw its ships and ports in exchange for free passage. To his surprise, they agreed. A second visit to the Alhambra, where he spent whole days copying the mosaics, turned into a mania for tessellation. At about this time he made his first picture of an impossible reality, “Still Life and Street”. In 1937, it is held, landscapes gave way to geometric constructions. The family moved to Uccle, near Brussels; his brother Berend, a crystallographer, saw in his work an application of crystallographic ideas. This led to “Day and Night” (the groundwork laid in 1938) and “Metamorphosis”. His father died in June 1939 and his mother in May 1940; Brussels was occupied, and Escher could not attend his mother’s funeral.

In January 1941 the family returned to the Netherlands and settled in Baarn. He lived through the occupation there. Immediately after the war he took part in an exhibition of artists who had refused to collaborate with the Nazis. In 1946 he took up mezzotint, but made only about seven impressions: it took too long.

Worldwide fame came in 1951, when The Studio, Time and Life wrote about him. A year earlier his first solo exhibition in the United States had opened in Washington. In 1954 an exhibition at the Stedelijk was timed to coincide with the International Congress of Mathematicians in Amsterdam. Having come across the work of Donald Coxeter, he began making pieces with figures shrinking toward the edge (“Circle Limit”), and the work of Lionel and Roger Penrose suggested “Ascending and Descending” to him. “Waterfall” (1961) is built on the Penrose triangle. Queen Wilhelmina made him a Knight of the Order of Orange-Nassau on 27 April 1955, and in 1967 he became an Officer of the order.

After operations in 1962 and 1964 his health declined. In 1968 a retrospective for his seventieth birthday was held in The Hague. At the end of the year Jetta went back to Switzerland; they were never formally divorced, but did not live together again. He finished his last woodcut, “Snakes”, in July 1969. From 1970 he lived at the Rosa Spier Huis in Laren, a retirement home for artists, where he had his own studio. He died on 27 March 1972 in a hospital in Hilversum and was buried in Baarn.