When Mick Jagger wrote a letter to Maurits Cornelis Escher asking to use his artwork on a Rolling Stones LP, the rock star’s request was answered with a brusque lesson in etiquette. “Please tell Mr. Jagger I am not Maurits to him,” Escher instructed Mick’s assistant. Adding insult to injury, the printmaker said he was too busy to “spend any time on publicity.”
A vast retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston shows that Escher really was tied up. In addition to the few dozen works for which he’s now famous, Escher created hundreds of lithographs, linocuts, and wood etchings that have seldom been seen. The linos and etchings were meticulously cut and inked by hand in his small-town Dutch studio, manifesting a level of craftsmanship that few modern printmakers have mastered. The lithographs are equally accomplished, displaying the fluidity of his ambidextrous drawing.
M.C. Escher, Reptiles, March 1943, lithograph. Courtesy of Michael S. Sachs. All M.C. Escher works © ... [+]
Of course Escher’s popularity with the ‘60s counterculture had less to do with his formal skills than with the trippy content of his art. Hippies and beatniks responded to his visions of endless staircases, dragons emerging from drawings, and hands sketching themselves into reality.
Although some of these motifs resemble Surrealist experiments in optical illusion by Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí, and even resonate with René Magritte’s painterly interrogation of depiction, Escher had no formal connection to Surrealism and was never included in the artistic mainstream. Whereas the trippiness of Surrealism emerged from literary theory and previous art movements, Escher’s otherworldly imagery had little outside context. Inspirations such as the tessellated tilework of Moorish Spain, the fugues of Johann Sabastian Bach, and advances in x-ray crystallography were not directly referenced or discussed. Uninterested in craft, and unable to add to his optical effects with their words, art historians had nothing to say. Escher’s art was as unpretentiously mind-bending as LSD.
Given the art world’s rejection of Escher and his rejection of the counterculture – and given the self-sufficiency with which he worked – Escher was unusually free to chart his own course. He did so by obsessively exploring the potential of tessellation and mutation, methods by which he made new patterns defying conventional distinctions between positive and negative space, modulating those patterns in ways that made figures appear and disappear like magic.
No less beguiling was Escher’s play with illusionistic space. A favorite trick, exemplified by his self-drawing hands, was to make a drawing veer between two and three dimensions with selective shading, implicitly asking how much of our reality is really an illusion. Perspective provided him with another powerful technique, exemplified by his eternally ascending staircases. By seamlessly combining different points of view in incongruous ways, he could deceive the viewer’s eyes and mind, questioning the reliability of perception.
M.C. Escher, Relativity, July 1953, lithograph. Courtesy of Michael S. Sachs. All M.C. Escher works ... [+]
To assert his independence from artistic currents, Escher insisted that he was a mathematician, not an artist. The admiration of world-class mathematicians such as Roger Penrose lends credibility to this claim, as does the observation that his tessellations anticipated some of Benoit Mandelbrot’s mathematical fractals. Escher’s work contains the rigor of math or formal logic. The prints illustrate systems he invented and carry his geometrical premises to their lavishly graphical conclusion. By designing systems to generate absurdities as a matter of inevitability, he made a mockery of reason: a nerdy 20th century update on what Goya’s Caprichos sought to show about human psychology.
However, unlike Goya’s insights, Escher’s ideas were seldom truly original. The notion that reality might be an illusion was thoroughly covered by Plato. The deceptiveness of perspective and the unreliability of perception were brilliantly shown by earlier masters such as Piranesi. Escher created an extraordinary number of permutations on these ideas, and his renditions are highly accomplished in visual and technical terms, but he didn’t really imbue the philosophical themes he took up with new meaning.
What stands the test of time is the work in its own right: the visual imagination underlying his patterns and pictures, and their stunning execution. Escher’s work is not “merely decorative,” as many have snidely claimed. His MFA Houston retrospective is richly deserved. Whether he was a mathematician or an artist or a drug, his work exposes the eye to worlds nowhere else seen. It was an all-consuming vision. No wonder he saw Mick Jagger as a distraction.
