(This, I'll have you know, is
Lucid Frenzy's five hundredth post! Don't you get a telegram from the
Queen for that? Perspective paradoxes may make it appear to go up
after the exhibition has closed)
“I cannot help mocking all
our unwavering certainties... Are you sure that a floor cannot also
be a ceiling? Are you absolutely certain that you go up when you walk
up a staircase. Can you be definite that it is impossible to eat your
cake and have it?”
Compelling impossibility
It may be fitting that the first time I
encountered Dutch artist MC Escher was through a popularised,
bastardised copy. As a child I won a drawing competition in a comic.
And unbeknownst to my young mind the poster prize, which soon adorned
my bedroom wall, ripped off his images wholesale. Their compelling
impossibility fascinated me. If you looked at them hard and long
enough, surely they resolved back again into something resembling the
laws of physics. My unwavering certainties were well and truly
mocked.
But here's the real thing. This being
the first major British exhibition devoted to Escher, its like Lowry all over again. With it's audience-attracting
adjective “amazing” the show sold so well I was lucky to get a
ticket. While the critics proved once more that the corollary of
popularity is critical disdain. In the Telegraph Alistair Smart dismissed him as “the sort
of artist you leave behind in your twenties… offering nothing in
the way of emotion, expression or depth – just little games that
grow tiresome when seen together on a large scale.” While Ben Luke, taking up Brian Sewell’s mantle in the Standard, scoffed “a great illustrator? Perhaps, if you like this kind of
thing. But a great artist? Not on your life.”
You can particularly hear his lofty
disregard in the use of the lowly i-word. In fact Escher may attract
a perfect storm of critical antipathy. He mostly worked with prints,
and while he limited his editions that wasn't enough for an art scene
so fixated upon the original. Plus, as the show states he had “little
to do with the main thrust of Modernism”, which makes him hard to
fit into the neat lineages they so dutifully curate. And like Lowry
the feeling may well have been mutual. Escher's standard response to
critical analysis was to rebuff it. His motifs, he insisted,
contained “no symbolic meaning whatsoever. I put them there only
because I like them”.
Yet if popularity keeps the critics at
bay, it can bring its own problems. Wikipedia has a well-populated page devoted to uses of Escher in popular culture. But these homages often do the opposite of my
bedroom poster, invoking his name but reproducing him in at best a
reduced format. Major elements of his art are often entirely absent,
he becomes simply a shorthand for gravity being applied locally to
different planes. In short Escher means walking the walls, which
confuses him with Spider-Man. We think we get Escher. When the very
point is not to.
He's most often associated with the
Surrealists, who were his contemporaries. Yet like Joseph Cornell
this misunderstands his art. Perhaps even more so for, unlike
Cornell, he didn’t even associate with the group - corresponding
not with British Surrealist Roland Penrose but his mathematician
nephew Roger. In fact he isn’t a Surrealist for reasons very
similar to Cornell. As said of the Cornell show:
“Surrealist
artworks tend to be about bursting the barriers between dream and
wakefulness, between the conscious and the unconscious, so have a
tendency to erupt with lurid and provocative imagery.”
Which
isn't Escher at all. Even 'Dream' (1935, above),
perhaps his most Surrealist work, has arches and avenues which
reflect the moonlight calm of de Chirico rather than the mad mid-day
sun of Dali. (Overall, the nearest Surrealist to him was probably
Magritte. Their work shares a deadpan quality which provides a
pseudo-seamlessness, delivering the impossible as though it was the
everyday. And both men topped that off by cultivating a staid,
anti-bohemian persona. But more of that anon.)
And all that separated him from
Surrealism became twice as true for the later psychedelic generation.
Escher’s reaction to hippie adulation was roughly similar to
Tolkien’s, and went along the lines of “you damn kids get off my
lawn”. In the now much-traded story, he refused the Stones
permission to use his art for an album cover because Mick Jagger's
letter had improperly addressed him by his first name. That may well
have been not just an anecdote but a rescue. His art didn't belong
there, and perhaps when seizing on that surface detail he intuitively
sensed it didn't.
In fact, in one of the biggest
surprises of the show, Escher's nearest relations were the Cubists,
even if he doesn't fully imitate their crazy paving. The early
'Portrait of Pieter Jan Zutphen' (1920, above),
combines the Cubist fracturing of an image into planes with the
poster artist's building of object up from blocks of colour and
shade. 'Other Worlds' (1947) superimposes
different views of a single scene (above, straight on and below) into
one. Much like Cubism, Escher's art is about art,
about how we depict and how we see things.
But the show makes a convincing
argument that his chief influence was not an art school but a place -
the landscape and architecture of the Mediterranean world. First
visiting there at the turn of the Twenties and living in Italy from
'23 he at first faithfully delineated the views he found, fully
obedient to all known laws of physics and gravity. Some works from
this era even stray into folk art, for example 'Corte,
Corsica' (1928) with it's vertical arrangement of fields in
the background.
Despite the critics, like many of his
prints Escher was multi-faceted, and to see him you need to take in
them all. His art, so much about metamorphosis, metamorphoses itself
between various themes, and looks at things from different angles
without ever finally settling on anything. Trying to capture him
isn't really so different from trying to resolve one of his warped
perspectives, and as you struggle with it you can hear his mockingly
straight-faced insistence there's nothing to see. I'm going to say
here he had five faces, in increasing order of importance, but as
everything shifts and overlaps in practice you might see more or even
less.
The Great Architect
With the well-known 'Tower of
Babel' (1928, above) Escher took what he called a “bird's eye view”
of the subject. However in an old post I saw a different set of eyes at work:
“The crest of the Tower is
looked down upon, an impossible angle for any human which suggests
God’s perspective. God is not just the only named character in the
Genesis passage, there’s even the suggestion he one day comes
across the Tower. (‘Then the Lord came down to see the city and
tower which mortal men had built.’) …Escher’s etching could
therefore be of the moment in Genesis where God spies the Tower and,
in a mixture of outrage and alarm, sabotages its builders by tying
their tongues.
”
In short, Escher is seeing things from
God's perspective. And when he draws himself he dominates his
environments, while almost all his other figures are diminutively
placed in a habitat. For 'Self Portrait' (1923,
above) he was still a young man but a combination of style and medium
make him look older, more authoritative. It could almost be a Bible
illo of Abraham or Moses. Those staring eyes, which the radiating
linework emphasises, often recur in his owls - another frequent motif
of his.
We should notice how recurrent the
paraphernalia of religion is in his work, how often we come across
monks and temples. And we should remember that Escher originally
studied to be an architect, while God is often referred to as “the Great Architect”. He
often puts himself into what are virtually creator poses. 'Hand
With Reflecting Sphere' (1935, used as the poster image of
the show, seen up top), can be read both as the Earth in the
creator's hand and Escher at home in his study. He holds the world up
while he's at the centre of it. It reflects chiefly his face -
monarch of all he surveys. After those early years the only fully
realised figures in his work are himself and, occasionally, his wife.
The others are little more than ciphers, a depersonalised populace
for his environments.
This of course risks banality. All
artists make stuff, and they frequently depict themselves at work as
artists. But its not just the frequency of the images. This combines
with the way he isn't arranging scenes but constructing worlds. The
word “world” is almost as important in the show's title as
“amazing”. He builds as much as he delineates.
These works have their own reality, even down to their own rules of
geometry. Escher is creating his own reality systems. If he is to be
a deranged God of his private realm, one who cries “let vanishing
points be bendy” then so be it. It's his world and anything he says
goes.
The Escape Artist
Though apolitical by nature Escher came
to distrust the increasing conformity of fascism and in 1935 he left
Mussolini's Italy. From there, deprived of the Mediterranean scenes
from which he drew inspiration, he started to invent his own - in his
words - “mental imagery”. He was, in short, thrown back on his
mind's eye. (Though he did produce fantastical images before then,
the show suggests this as a spur which pushed him further in that
direction.) And what better way to elude your enemies than tangle the
rules of perspective after you? Perhaps his insoluble puzzles were
his priest holes and escape hatches.
While this might seem to contradict
Escher as the Great Architect, in many ways the two fit together
neatly. It's often being out of place in this world that leads an
artist to create their own. Escher was even less of an outsider
artist than Cornell or Edward Burra, a tag which fits neither of them to start with. In a
career sense, he was a successful commercial artist. But he kept at a
remove from the art world, rigorously ploughing his furrow with total
disregard for its fads and fashions. He meticulously built up his
works, and pursued a private image repository over many years. That
hermeticism makes him something like an outsider artist with a bank
account.
Yet taken too far, this might suggest
someone pushed out of the world, an exile from reality. It doesn't
explain why, after the War, he didn't return to the Med or at least
resume his travels. More importantly, despite their undoubted
otherwordliness its inadequate to see his works purely in terms of
escapism. For all his feigned innocence and deflection of attempts to
analyse him, he said this quite explicitly:
“The primary purpose of all
art forms… is to say something to the outside world; in other
words, to make a personal thought, a striking idea, an inner emotion
perceptible to other people’s senses in such a way that there is no
uncertainty about the maker's intentions.”
The Cartographer of
Transformation
Even if they don't make his greatest
hits, Escher's works frequently featured tessellating forms. These
forms by their nature made up each other’s outlines, like countries
sharing borders. Breaking from the art convention that objects are
discrete from one another, from the “my outline belongs to me”
rule which can feel a basic presumption of art. (Portraiture, for
example, is dependent upon it.)
While he often made repeating
tessellations such as 'Regular Division of the Plane With
Reptiles' (1942), let's focus here on those that morphed.
Let’s remember that Cubism was the sole Modernist movement to catch
Escher’s attention, and that Cubism associated itself with
Relativity and other scientific developments. (Even if the
connections they made were more poetic than actual.) Similarly there
may be a general association between Escher and the less solid, more
uncertain world being discovered by developments in physics. (He even
called a print 'Relativity', one we'll look at in
more detail later.) But in particular, he became more and more
interested in morphology. (Chameleons became a common motif.)
'Encounter' (1944,
above) is almost the opposite of of the dumbstruck workmen in
'Tower of Babel' - here two figures come to life
and meet. The black figure in particular rises progressively from all
fours with each iteration, like the famous evolution diagram of a
monkey becoming a man.
And evolution became a recurrent theme.
Evolution is often popularly supposed to be teleological, like a
gradualist method of assembly. And as in the example above Escher can
conforms to this. It's also true of 'Development II'
(1939, above) which uses abstraction as a kind of primordial soup
from which form emerges, the fully realised lizards seemingly walking
off the edge of the print. But its a reversal of this which wins out,
such as the 'Circle Limit' series of the late
Fifties and early Sixties, where the realised figure is at the cente
of the image and shrinks in size towards the edge, like a pattern on
a ball.
And with this his streets became two
way. Or in the case of 'Verbum (Earth, Sky and Water)'
(1942), three-way. In a composition almost like a chart or table, you
can read outwards, the rays of creation building for example into a
frog. Yet you can as easily read sideways, so that frog might morph
into a fish or bird. While 'Metamorphosis II'
(1939/40), were it not more than four metres long, could be displayed
in a loop.
Escher articulated this cross traffic:
“We can think in terms of an interplay between the stiff,
crystallised two-dimensional figures of a regular pattern and
the individual freedom of three-dimensional creatures capable of
moving about in space without hindrance. On the one hand,
the members of planes of collectivity come to life in space; on
the other, the free individuals sink back and lose themselves in
the community.”
The Cartographer of Cosmic
Balance
Alistair Smart sees Escher as “unquestionably pessimistic – or, if you
prefer, absurdist – his figures not so much individuals as clones,
usually trapped in nightmarish scenarios.” And it’s true that
there's little to distinguish the faceless drones
of'Relativity' (1953) from the centipede creatures
of 'House of Stairs' (1951), displayed adjacently
in the show (and here, as above). The moss garden of
'Waterfall' (1961) suggests diminutive
micro-worlds, adding to insect associations.
And with that comes a definite ordering
to things. As said of Lowry, he “painted environments then placed his
figures within them… like animals in a habitat, like flocks of
birds in trees”. And this makes his creatures inscrutable. He
wrote that the figures in 'Ascending and Descending'
(1960) “appear to be monks, adherents of some unknown sect” - as
if he has no more clue than the rest of us. When his work is
duplicated in film, animation or computer games, when characters or
game-players have to be beamed from our world into one of his
environments, this distancing is shattered and something vital is
lost. We need to stand outside his prints, looking across an
uncrossable threshold, as much as we did Cornell's shadow boxes.
Plus, Smart's does seem to be a common
reaction. I overheard one attendee confessing she found Escher
nightmarish as a child. And yet many others had purposefully brought
their children, and were exultantly pointing out the logic puzzles to
them. Perhaps Escher is simply Marimitey. And perhaps my reaction was
set at an early age, by that poster on my bedroom wall. But while, as
with any artist everyone has their right to their own Escher, I claim
my Escher to be closer to Escher’s Escher.
For those figures never seem lost
inside their environments, like Harry Potter befuddled on the stairs
on his first day at Hogwarts. Instead they belong in them, are able
to navigate them. It's our separation from them which makes the
experience absurd, the way our perplexity contrasts with their ease.
Our world makes sense to us, and theirs to them. How can this be
reconciled?
If absurdism is at root the denial of
inherent meaning in the universe, Escher could by contrast sound very
much the optimist. He said “the desire for simplicity and order
helps us to endure and inspire us in the midst of chaos. Chaos is the
beginning, order is the conclusion.” Or, perhaps less certainly
“Chaos is present everywhere in countless shapes and forms, while
Order remains an impossible ideal, the exceptionally beautiful fusion
of cube and octahedron doesn't exist. Nevertheless, we can always
hope.”
As ever in art, order is associated
with symmetry. And there's a kind of thwarted symmetry to 'Tower
of Babel' with the two matching black-and-white harbours in
the upper background, which then triumphs in the handshake of
'Encounter'. (Which Escher described as “a black
pessimist and white optimist shaking hands with one another”.) And
this yin/yang of black and white recurs quite frequently, for example
in 'Day and Night' (1938, below.)
And this is visible in some of his more
cosmological prints, for example 'Double Planetoid'
(1949, below) which shown the human and animal worlds co-existing,
towers and dinosaurs side by side. 'Circle Limit IV (Heaven
and Hell)' (1960) is perhaps the pinnacle of this tendency,
showing an angel and devil perpetually interlocked.
And in his art the “exceptionally
beautiful fusion of cube and octahedron” did exist. This seems to
have been a totem of Order for him, the hexagon and square polyhedral
presented as a kind of ur-shape, a universal template out of which
all else can emerge. It's visible in 'Crystal'
(1947, below) or topping the towers in 'Waterfall'
(1961). In the last example he specifically warned the viewer against
any attaching any significance to them, surely enough to pique
interest in itself.
The Slayer of Perspective
With really effective art it's often
impossible to separate form and content – and Escher confirms this.
His prints look 'clean', like architects' plans. His preparatory
sketches were often made on graph paper, while his favoured
print-making method was lithography - allowing for greater detail.
The accumulation of this detail reassures the eye, lulls it. This is
the solid, dependable stuff we rely on, that places the floor at our
feet and keeps the ceiling up. It's like a joke told deadpan. It all
looks so plausible you take a while to notice the impossibility, and
even afterwards you still strain to reconcile the two.
'Belvedere' (1958,
above) looks like an instructive diagram, detailed enough in its
workings to be used as a plan. It even contains a diagrammatic map
analogous to its main tower, then a man grasping a model frame
beneath the finished thing. Yet it also has enough incidental detail
to feel like a real place. And it's significant that among this
detail Escher drapes his figures in Renaissance costumes.
There was no particular geographic
reason why perspective was first devised in Italy, Florence did not
contain more vanishing points than other places in the world. It came
about for social reasons, in effect 'bundled in' with other Renaissance developments. Nevertheless the effect was
to create an association. In the same back-of-the-brain way we assume
the Thirties happened in black-and-white, we imagine the Renaissance
was the time spatial depth first opened up. And with his Renaissance
imagery Escher is exploiting this, in a way which wouldn't work had
he used contemporary dress.
We've all become used to Post-Modern
art, which displays the tropes of Modernism while denying them their
meaning. In a similar way Escher is Post-Renaissance, pulling the rug
from under conventions so long taken for granted they seemed a kind
of natural law. “Surely its a bit absurd”, he wrote, “to draw a
few lines and then claim it is a house.” Modernism, inasmuch as it
had a relationship with the Renaissance, was anti-Renaissance,
aiming to supplant it by replacing its pictorial devices, or to look
back to times before it, or quite often both at the same time. But it
didn't subvert it from within in the same way as Escher.
This isn't just true of his warped
perspectives. Staircases and ladders, frequent images, are associated
with hierarchy and with it order. A phrase such as “upstairs
downstairs” suggests everything being in its place in the world.
Escher's impossible staircases screw with this notion.
A similar thing could be said of his
play with levels of reality, such as 'Reptiles'
(1943, above) is which modelling is used to make the reptiles appear
in relief then revert to two dimensions. Or his breaking down of
inside/outside distinctions, such as in 'Print Gallery'
(1956). And yet his warped perspectives seem to have hit home
the hardest. As the most counter-Renaissance bow in his quiver, they
became his twisted Rosebud.
And Escher had one final twist to play
on perspective – he bent it back into shape. There are more
'straight' prints than you'd expect, but when he returns to them late
in his career it still pulls almost the same trick in reverse. In for
example 'Three Worlds' (1956, below), you can take
a while to realise its actually entirely possible. By the end the
presence of genuine perspective and actual levels seems as strange as
their absence. Even normal has stopped looking normal. Who could ask
for anything more than that?
Now the alert
reader has probably spotted what's going to be said next. Escher's
fascination with transformation and systematic distorting of standard
pictorial devices are undermining of the Renaissance. They cause
attention to and thereby question those devices, like a magic trick
being exposed by being done wrong. Yet his attempt to achieve order
and cosmic balance through art, his evoking of some kind of supreme
geometry could not be closer to a Renaissance mindset. Da Vinci for
example often made geometric sketches (compare this to 'Crystal'), and used geometric
forms in his compositions. Escher is the renaissance's successor and
its saboteur. These two things do not fit together. Just like one of
Escher's works, they make less sense the more you look at them. But
the paradox you get when you put them together – that's Escher.
That's who he is. Compellingly impossible.
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