With his lean, hawk-nosed profile, piercing eyes, shock of white hair and well-trimmed beard, M.C. Escher looked just like Ezra Pound. And like Pound, there are plenty of classical references to be found beneath the surface of an art that moved inexorably toward modernism and abstraction.
Part puzzle-maker, part fabulist architect, part anatomist of his own imagination, Escher began by looking backward as well as forward in his art. But, as is evident in a retrospective of his work now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, he ended up out of his time, the lithographic equivalent of a Möbius strip — no beginning, no end, just eternity.
Maurits Cornelis Escher — his friends called him “Mauk” — was Dutch. He was born in 1898, died in 1972. One wife, three sons. Outwardly he lived a bourgeois existence, although he was hemmed in by financial pressures until the 1960s, when his work became popular, for, he believed, all the wrong reasons.
For instance: In 1969, Escher received a letter from Mick Jagger that began “Dear Maurits.” Jagger wanted to use an Escher image for the cover of a Rolling Stones album. Escher wrote back refusing to license his work, and closed with, “By the way, please tell Mr. Jagger I am no Maurits to him, but Very Sincerely, M.C. Escher.”
The expansive collection of his work on view at the museum encompasses all phases of Escher’s life, from early Italian landscapes to his somewhat unsettling interest in ominous insects that can’t help but suggest biblical plagues, to the optically complex work of his later years that helped inspire op art, a novelty that happily ran its course.
Cumulatively, they give the viewer a taste of how a serious man does serious work, even if the world doesn’t always take it seriously. (Head shops sold bootlegged blacklight versions of some of Escher’s work, which are showcased in a room at the museum that might have been better left unopened; the lurid colors vulgarize Escher’s finely graded black and white, and inevitably recall bad acid trips.)
What the exhibit shows is that Escher could always draw — forms rather than figures, in which he seems to have had no interest — but his earlier work is stark, stripped down compared with the arabesque flourishes he employed later. Always present is superb craftsmanship; Escher had the craft of the artisan as well as the vision of an artist.
The exhibit begins with works like San Gimagnano and San Pietro, pleasing woodcuts of Italian hill towns with occasional grace notes — the trees in the former piece swirl like van Gogh’s stars. By 1935 and Inside St. Peter’s, Escher has begun his trademark play with perspective, sharpening and foreshortening for vertiginous effect.
Around the same time he did a series of woodcuts titled Nocturnal Rome, where there’s nary a cat on the streets, let alone a person. By studiously removing the human element from nature and buildings, Escher is nudging his way toward stylization.
Surrealism enters the picture with Dream, also from 1935, which unsettlingly depicts a sleeping bishop — it could be a medieval tomb, or it could be an actual person — with a huge locust perched on top of him. You can take it as brutal anti-clericalism, or an image from a very ugly dream.
As Escher aged, he moved steadily from observations of objective reality toward the reproduction of images that existed only in his head. The transition pieces are a series of reversed images, reflections in mirrors or glass balls that are mostly physical impossibilities.
By 1951, Escher was becoming increasingly surreal, as in House of Stairs, which depicts a conglomeration of stairs covered with slug-like newts climbing up and down — a disturbing image out of a latter-day horror film. All of these images are riveting and bizarre, but not particularly self-conscious — more like surreal reportage.
In his later portion of his life, Escher’s work gravitated toward geometric designs that grew out of his fascination with the Moorish art of the Alhambra and Seville. Escher saw that the Spanish designs, which for religious reasons avoided depiction of human or animal forms, could be extended to suggest infinity, and much of his later work was occupied with this obsessively painstaking but slightly dry inquiry.
For me, Escher reaches his height with Drawing Hands from 1948, the famous image of disembodied hands drawing each other. (I wonder if he ever saw the German silent film Hands of Orlac, the story of a pair of severed hands that take on a life of their own, or the American variants Mad Love or The Beast With Five Fingers?) Outside of the purity of the idea of the innate nature of the creative impulse, the hands are rendered with a delicacy that Durer would have envied.
Escher was not a capacious artist, but rather an intensely focused, limited one; nevertheless, in many ways he was prophetic, a Kafka of the image, who foresaw the altered perceptions of the late 20th century. His reality became ours.
