Kyle Erickson 11-18-2013 ART 1020 M.C.

Escher Maurits Cornelis Escher was born June 17, 1898 in the Dutch province of Friesland. (2) His parents were George Arnold Escher and Sarah Gleichman Escher. George and Sarah Escher had 5 children, all boys. Maurits, or Mauk as his family called him, was the youngest. His father was a civil engineer. Maurits upbringing around engineering and architecture instilled a methodological approach to life in him, which is clearly evident in his works. Maurits failed at school in everything but art. He showed interest only in the subjects of music and carpentry. Due to his failure in every other subject, he never officially graduated from secondary school. At high school in Arnhem, I was extremely poor at arithmetic and algebra because I had, and still have, great difficulty with the abstractions of numbers and letters. When, later, in stereometry [solid geometry], an appeal was made to my imagination, it went a bit better, but in school I never excelled in that subject. But our path through life can take strange turns. M. C. Escher (1) Despite this, he attended the Higher Technical School in Delft from 1918-1919. (2) Held back in his studies by poor health, Maurits concentrated on drawing and woodcut techniques. He moved to Haarlem in1920 in a final attempt to follow his fathers wish that he study architecture. There he enrolled at the School for Architecture and Decorative Arts. Samuel Jesserum de Mesquita, a graphic arts teacher at the school,

noticed his talent and encouraged him to pursue graphic arts as his career. Escher regularly complained about his lack of natural drawing ability, but continued to pursue graphic arts regardless. Many of his pieces took a long time to finish and required numerous revisions. In his early years, he concentrated on landscapes many of which were drawn from unusual perspectives. Plants and animals also found their way into his drawings, and would continue to appear in his later works. As a young adult, Escher spent a lot of his time travelling. In 1922, Maurits took a trip with friends to Florence. While there, he spent his time drawing and drinking. When his friends returned home, Escher stayed in Italy and spent a month travelling alone. During this time in Italy, he created his first work featuring regular division of the plane called Eight Heads, completed in 1922. (2) Spain was the next stop in his travels. It was there at the Alhambra Palace that Escher was

Figure 1 Eight Heads (3)

introduced to his greatest influence. The intricate Moorish tilings in the palace fascinated him. He made many attempts to incorporate the style of the tilings with recognizable objects, but became discourage at the amount of time it took and the lower quality of the finished pieces. Further works featuring regular division were set-aside for many years.

... for the first time I printed on a cloth a single animal motif cut out of wood which repeats itself according to a certain system, thereby adhering to the principle that no blank spaces may occur. I needed at least three colours; with each in turn I rolled my stamping block in order to contrast one motif with its adjoining congruent repetitions. I exhibited this cloth together with my other work, but I did not have any success with it. M. C. Escher, 1924 (1) After returning from Spain, Maurits made Italy his home. There he met his future wife, Jetta Umiker in 1923 while in Ravello. They married on 12 June 1924 and moved to Frascati, just outside of Rome. (2) Overall, the couple had 3 children, George, Arthur, and Jan. The Escher family took frequent vacations around Italy. During these holidays, Maurits drew many landscapes often using impossible perspectives. Escher and his Family were forced to leave Italy after the Fascist political uprising in 1935. They found a new home in Chateu-dOex, Switzerland. The higher cost of living in Switzerland forced Escher to sell more prints of his work to get by. Maurits and Jetta Travelled the Mediterranean for inspiration. Maurits worked out a deal with the Adria Shipping Company for free passage and meals for himself and a one-way ticket for Jetta. The couple made payments with prints completed on the journey. Their journey began on 26 April 1936 and lasted for 2 months. (2) During the trip, the two created volumes of sketches for future use. A fascination with order and symmetry took over following the Mediterranean trip. Maurits and Jetta visited the Alhambra Palace again in 1936. They spent days sketching at the Alhambra surrounded by the ornate tilings.

Maurits became obsessed with the concept of regular division of the plane, and began experimenting with different motifs like birds and cartoonish human figures. Maurits showed some of his new works to his brother Berend, a professor of Geology, in 1937. Berend noticed the connection between Maurits woodcuts and crystallography. He sent Maurits a list of articles, which would introduce him to mathematics. Escher read mathematician George Polyas paper on plane symmetry groups. Although he did not understand the abstract concepts, he did understand the 17 plane symmetry groups described. This prompted him to begin teaching himself the related mathematics. Between 1937 and 1941, Escher produced 43 color drawings using a wide variety of symmetry types. (2) He had adopted a highly mathematical approach to his works. The Escher family moved to Belgium in 1937 and lived there until 1941 when the invading Nazi army forced them to flee to Baarn, Holland. Maurits did not concentrate on his work during World War II due to emotional distress the war causes him. After the war, he continued with studies of symmetry. His skills improved greatly with more practice and he could complete each piece much more quickly. Maurits had a regular routine where he would work in his study between 8 AM and 4 PM every day. (2) The end of the cycle, making the first print, gave father a mixture of joy and sadness. It was exciting and satisfying to lift the paper from the inked wood for the first time, 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. After all his efforts, how far short of the originally so lucid and misleading simple idea did this result fall! (1) After 1941, he kept personal notebooks on his studies of mathematics. By 1956, his interests changed again, this time to the development of advanced regular division. He began to attempt representing infinity on a fixed 2-dimensional plane. In the 1940s, he again attempted to show endless perspectives in his work. Much of these works incorporated the concept of similarities. He used identical motifs of diminishing size arranged in concentric circles to show endless perspective. Like his previous studies, he was unhappy with the final quality. In 1954 Escher met Harold Coxeter, a mathematician who focused on geometry. (2) The two men became life-long friends. Some time later, Escher came across an article of Coxeters and determined the rules regarding hyperbolic tessellations using only the diagrams in the text. This newfound knowledge allowed him to produce many more works using circles and squares as frames. I discovered once again that the human hand is capable of executing small and yet completely controlled movements, on the condition that the eye sees sufficiently clearly what the hand is doing. M. C. Escher (1)
Figure 2 Circle Limit III (3)

To show the genius of Escher, Harold Coxeter published a paper in 1995 proving that Escher had achieved mathematical perfection in his etching, Circle Limit III. (2)

Escher unintentionally became a research mathematician of the highest order. He unknowingly studied areas of crystallography years in advance of any professional mathematician working in the field. Others acknowledged his genius and often asked him to give lectures all over the world. He had achieved high fame by 1958. Escher continued to give lectures and teach and was featured in Time magazine. Eschers mathematical studies led him to a fascination with topology, which had only begun to be studied during his lifetime. He used his acquired knowledge of topology to produce many impossible etchings like Waterfall, and Up and Down. Escher fell terribly ill in 1964 while delivering a series of lectures in North America. He would continue to fall ill periodically after this, greatly hindering his

Figure 3 Waterfall (3)

ability to work. Eschers final work, Snakes, was unveiled in July 1969. He died 3 years later on 27 March 1972. (2)

Figure 4 Snakes (3)

Resources (1) S Strauss, M C Escher (The Globe and Mail, 9 May 1996). (2) http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Escher.html (3) http://www.mcescher.com