Here we tap into dates from M.C. Eschers life and work, jumping through time but always in the now. All year round you can enjoy background stories, anecdotes and trivia about this fascinating artist.
This week we had a slight change in terms of the works being exhibited. Some were returned to the archive and were replaced by a series of other works by Escher. One of these is Grasshopper, a wood engraving from March 1935. In very fine detail Escher shows a specimen of this winged insect with its powerful hind legs, compound eyes, antennae and folded wings.
Studying concepts like eternity and infinity in his work was definitely an obsession for Escher. He explored countless ways of suggesting boundlessness within the limited frame of his woodblock or his lithography stone. One of the ways he approached this was playing with depth and perspective. By varying the thickness of lines, sizes of shapes and foreground versus background, he achieved this sense of infinite space in a number of works.
Although he was fascinated by the concept of the regular division of the plane even early on in his career, it was not until 1936 that Escher tackled it in earnest. A period ensued in which he performed countless experiments with ways of filling a plane with patterns of geometric shapes. He did this in the form of drawings which he did in a notebook with a view to mastering the research process.
On 16 November 1953 Escher gave a lecture to the Friends of the Stedelijk Museum in Alkmaar, on the occasion of an exhibition of his work. During those years Escher had frequent opportunities to exhibit in museums, art galleries and universities, often together with two or more fellow members of the Association of Dutch Graphic Artists. He would usually accompany these exhibitions with a lecture on his own work.
At the end of 1933, Escher started to explore the possibilities of applying his work to commercial assignments. The first attempt was a design for wrapping paper. He hoped to sell it to a number of large department stores: de Bijenkorf, Gerzon, Zingone and Korall. Using their logos as motifs, he created several patterns that could be printed on wrapping paper. He also experimented with the names by making them interlock in playful ways.
Early November 1957 Escher finished his woodcut and wood engraving Whirlpools. He used a new printing technique for it, cutting one block which he printed on the same piece of paper in two colours.
Partly because of his friendship with Bas Kist, Mauk (as he was called in his younger days) Escher started to focus more on his drawing in 1917-18. In Bas he found an equal who took to drawing as much as he did. Together they also went looking for the secrets of the linocut and woodcut. Drawing and graphic arts became more important to them than school.
In October 1939, while Europe stood on the brink of World War II, Escher started working on his big Metamorphosis II (19.5 x 400 cm). He worked on it continuously for nearly six months. During these months he wrote several letters to his friend Hein ’s-Gravezande that make manifest his obsession with this woodcut. He wrote detailed accounts of his intentions and working methods and he extemporised on the possible meaning of the colours, the fish, the bees, the birds and the (Saracen?) tower.
In 1951 the magazines Time and Life published interviews with M.C. Escher, both done by journalist Israel Shenker. These publications fuelled international interest in his work, but in 1954 things really got out of hand. In September Escher had a successful International Congress of Mathematicians 1954 in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, followed by another one in the Whyte Gallery in Washington D.C. He sold 86 out of 114 prints (for over 13,000 guilders), a result never before achieved by a Dutch graphic artist in the US.